[First posted February 4, 2007. If I could restart this blog all over again, I would reconceptualize it as a travel agency blog advertorializing its packaged tactical tours. I'll even have postcards to sell!]
About three hours northwest of Mexico City, in the Parque EcoAlberto, a reporter from The New York Times got to experience “one of Mexico’s more bizarre tourist attractions: a make-believe trip illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.”
For about $18, you get to cross deserts, hills, brambles and riverbeds, and have men playing Border Patrol guards chase after you and taunt you from somewhere in the dark: “Ya sé que están escondidos. We know you’re hiding. We’re going to send you back to Mexico.”
Interestingly, the organizers received financial help from the Mexican government.
The article also tells us that “the idea of tourists’ aping immigrants can seem crass, like Marie Antoinette playing peasant on the grounds of Versailles. But the guides describe the caminata as an homage to the path immigrants have beaten across the border. And the park’s approach to consciousness-raising is novel, but not completely unique. In 2000, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders set up a camp of tents, medical stations and latrines in Central Park to recreate the setting of a refugee camp. Last year, the refugee-camp project returned to New York and also traveled to Atlanta and Nashville.”
What the organizers should do next is join forces with these Latvian hoteliers, and develop a whole series of packaged reality tours, recreating death marches, diasporas, and other mass displacements of people.
For instance, rather than experiencing the Cold War holed up inside a building, you set out on a gulag-bound train, inside a boxcar packed with fifty other adventurers, and with only an inch or two opening between the wooden panels through which you can view the passing beauty of the Russian steppes. You try reading Solzhenitsyn, of course, but there aren't nearly enough light, and the sound of metal grating on metal and that smell — what is that smell! — make it difficult to concentrate.
If warm weather is to your liking, there's the Bataan Death Tour. Searing temperatures. Humid air — thick, gelatinous, in your crotch. Sun beating down heavily on your head. The din of the forest. The specter of cholera. Hired Filipinos as Japanese soldiers barking orders.
Also on offer is the Armenian Death Tour. But as this would be impossible to recreate in Turkey, a substitute for the desert of Deir ez-Zor will have to be found in France.
This is one of the more interesting photos we've come across in recent weeks. It shows South Korean soldiers searching for North Korean landmines that may have been dislodged from the Korean Demilitarized Zone by last month's devastating floods and landslides. This is a familiar drill, as heavy rains often carry mines across the border. In fact, dozens of them washed up in South Korea last year, killing one and injuring another.
What we like about the photo is that it runs counter to our mental picture of a DMZ that's sharply defined by clipped vegetation, chain-link fences and concrete barriers. Instead, it conjures up an image of a no-man's-land pulsating on the margins. During periods of geologic and hydrological excess, it expands and bulges, then contract when soldiers have comb through the hazardous aggregate of earth and explosives with their metal detectors. You see a crisp line on the map, but it actually sprouts invisible, lobate foliation.
About three hours northwest of Mexico City, in the Parque EcoAlberto, a reporter from The New York Times got to experience “one of Mexico’s more bizarre tourist attractions: a make-believe trip illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States.”
For about $18, you get to cross deserts, hills, brambles and riverbeds, and have men playing Border Patrol guards chase after you and taunt you from somewhere in the dark: “Ya sé que están escondidos. We know you’re hiding. We’re going to send you back to Mexico.”
Interestingly, the organizers received financial help from the Mexican government.
The article also tells us that “the idea of tourists’ aping illegal immigrants can seem crass, like Marie Antoinette playing peasant on the grounds of Versailles. But the guides describe the caminata as an homage to the path immigrants have beaten across the border. And the park’s approach to consciousness-raising is novel, but not completely unique. In 2000, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders set up a camp of tents, medical stations and latrines in Central Park to recreate the setting of a refugee camp. Last year, the refugee-camp project returned to New York and also traveled to Atlanta and Nashville.”
What the organizers should do next is join forces with these Latvian hoteliers, and develop a whole series of packaged reality tours, recreating death marches, diasporas, and other mass displacements of people.
For instance, rather than experiencing the Cold War holed up inside a building, you set out on a gulag-bound train, inside a boxcar packed with fifty other adventurers, and with only an inch or two opening between the wooden panels through which you can view the passing beauty of the Russian steppes. You try reading Solzhenitsyn, of course, but there aren't nearly enough light, and the sound of metal grating on metal and that smell — what is that smell! — make it difficult to concentrate.
If warm weather is to your liking, there's the Bataan Death Tour. Searing temperatures. Humid air — thick, gelatinous, in your crotch. Sun beating down heavily on your head. The din of the forest. The specter of cholera. Hired Filipinos as Japanese soldiers barking orders.
Also on offer is the Armenian Death Tour. But as this would be impossible to recreate in Turkey, a substitute for the desert of Deir ez-Zor will have to be found in France.
In his novel, The Songlines, the peripatetic Bruce Chatwin tries “to get to grips with the concept of the Dreamtime,” and learns, in somewhat rudimentary terms, that one “had to understand it as an Aboriginal equivalent of the first two chapters of Genesis — with one significant difference.”
“In Genesis,” Chatwin explains, “God first created the 'living things' and then fashioned Father Adam from clay. Here in Australia, the Ancestors created themselves from clay, hundreds and thousands of them, one for each totemic species.”
And “each totemic ancestor, while traveling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreaming-tracks lay over the land as 'ways' of communication between the most far-flung tribes.”
Furthermore, “a song can be thought of as both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.”
So, “in theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score. There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung. One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Illiads and Odyssey, writhing this way and that, in which every episode was readable in terms of geology.”
Illegal immigrants planning to cross the desert and enter the US on foot are to be given hand-held satellite devices by the Mexican authorities to ensure they arrive safely.
Those who get lost or fall sick during the dangerous four-day crossing will be able to activate the device, to alert frontier police on both sides of the border.
The satellite tracking service will require would-be illegals to register their intentions before setting off — a paradoxical move, given that secrecy is necessary for success — but Mexican authorities are predicting that about 200,000 devices will be handed out when the project is launched formally in the coming year.
I once thought - in fact, I still think - that it'd be interesting to grow a garden using only seeds and plants seized at the Customs office.
A garden of seized plants. Captured flowers. Find out what weird, hybridized landscape results. Take pictures of it and submit the film for an ASLA award. Write a new Pamphlet Architecture book about it.
Grow more of the things. Seize whole landscapes coming over the border. An 18-wheeler hauling an open truck bed gets stopped at the gate - because the bed is planted with seeds seized at Customs a year earlier. A small, somewhat disorganized garden grows. So of course, you let it through... It's going back to where it came from...
But you don't. You re-seize it. The loop starts all over again.
You take a dozen or two prospective immigrants. So as to minimize controversy, let's identify them as French.
Through an unimaginably improbable series of events — including years despairing about their country's economic model; being inexplicably listed on the FAA's no-fly list; and a Congress growing increasingly impotent when dealing with immigration reform — they find themselves outside the border of the US, looking in. Just beyond that grove of trees is Arizona.
And they've just eaten some fruits, you see, or brushed up against a pollen-field plant, indigenous to Mexico but not the desert Southwest — or, since this is a design project after all, you, the designer, have them swallow the seeds and lodge a few more on their persons, in their hairy chests, lanky arms, and perfumed armpits. And for good measure, you surreptitiously stuff their pockets with ones you've gathered from other exotic locales.
Then off they go.
Unfortunately, most of them will die. Without a map, they will get lost, and dehydration will come long before they reach Tucson. That or they get accidentally killed by members of the border militia or by wildlife, if distinguishable. But where they stumble and fall, a garden grows.
These gardens would then act like vegetated outposts, a constellation of caravansaries which subsequent border crossers can follow or add to. Wave after wave, and tragedy after tragedy, this new underground railroad would become as well-established and well-marked as elephant jungle tracks, and as easily traceable as a Songline.
A hundred years later, they'll become the de facto national memorial park for immigrant America, a landscape record for the migrant experience.
The Ellis Island of the Southwest.
To follow a trail there is to embark on a pilgrimage, a sacred reenactment of collective memory and a paean to the soul of the country.
VII.
Can you connect the dots?
Below is a map showing the locations of migrant deaths in 2003, as compiled from maps available on the website of Humane Borders. Red dots are deaths due to heat; yellow dots, unknown causes; and light blue, vehicles. In areas beyond the map, deaths have occurred due to exposure to cold temperatures, homicide, drowning, existing medical condition and train accidents.
The built-up area at the top is Phoenix, Arizona. The white line at the bottom is the US-Mexico border.
Taryn Simon will be taking us on a tour through the “weirdness hidden in plain sight — on our sidewalks, along our roadsides and in our public rituals and spectacles” next March in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in a volume available later that summer.
If you can't make it to the exhibition or can't wait for the book, The New York Times Magazine has published some of Simon's photographs, including the one above taken at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Contraband Room at the Kennedy International Airport: “Among the items seized from passengers in the 48 hours before the photograph was taken: African cane rats infested with maggots, Andean potatoes, Bangladeshi cucurbit plants, a pig’s head from South America.”
One wonders if these detention rooms might just be some of the most biologically diverse places in the lower 48 states.
Another photo takes a look inside the Avian Quarantine Facility New York Animal Import Center in Newburgh, New York. What we see caged are “African gray parrots and European finches, seized upon illegal importation into the U.S., in quarantine. Imported birds must undergo a 30-day mandatory quarantine in a U.S. Department of Agriculture animal-import facility. Before release, each bird is tested for avian influenza and exotic Newcastle disease.”
Again, seeing how empty the sky above Chicago is at the moment, one wonders if it's an ecological wasteland compared to these secret aviaries.
“THE MOUSE-EAR HAWKWEED tolerates soil that is nutrient-poor and is drought tolerant. It is very good at stacking its own territory by creating a dense mat that other plants can't penerate: Travel light. It can be found to habitat, carparks and other low-level urban sites (crossing borders in such places can be fairly simple and risk free); railway sides (Passing an active rail tunnel on foot requires the careful observation of traffic for safe passage); urban wastelands, poor meadows and open woodlands.
“NOTE: borders become more defined by the economic movement than that of the movement of persons.”
