4/12 Michelle Garcia Lecture

Michelle Garcia gave a lecture and showed some video clips about her work on the U.S. Mexico Border in South Texas. She talked about how there is an idea about what the border should be like, and that the “wild west” is a big part of the American Identity, which started around the time of Fredrick Jackson Turner writing about the frontier. Michelle Garcia was interested in going to the border to learn about discovering who the presumed “we” is that is included in the American Identity of the West, and in contrast who the others are. She went to the border to look into her own family history and also into border wall activism. Through her research she concluded that the creation of the border wall is just the next step in an ongoing saga of the border.

Her work was focused on the differences between the border in Texas and other parts of the U.S. Unlike in Arizona and California, the Texas land on which the border was built is privately owned. The government confiscates the land from landowners, many of whose family's have owned the land for many generations. These landowners have no recourse. It seems unfair and perhaps not worth it, when it is shown that no one believes the wall actually stops illegal immigration, but rather slows it down, and hardly even does that. She discussed how the border wall, while it may not be effective at curbing illegal immigration, is necessary for economic and political reasons. It opens up jobs in border patrol and construction of the wall and also serves to obfuscate other political problems and focus attention to the border. She then showed us a video she shot of ranchers whose lands were confiscated by the government, and the history behind the land. The border wall goes through ranchers land, but stops at golf courses and gated communities. They built the wall in places where undocumented migrants might “blend” with the rest of the population, meaning essentially the wall was built through places where people are “brown”, not places where the people are rich and white. We then discussed the No More Deaths Trips to Arizona and the ways that the Arizona border differs from the border in Texas.