Skidmore Q&A: Diana Barnes, border activist

U.S. immigration policy is not her academic specialty?Diana Barnes teaches Spanish literature. But Barnes, an assistant visiting professor in the College's Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, is becoming an expert on the vibrant community activists?unsung heroes, as she thinks of them?who are emerging along the nearly 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, where a combustible mix of U.S. immigration policy, poverty, and global economics has turned Mexican border cities into dangerous places to live and work.

In October, Barnes spent five days exploring the human side of the hot-button immigration issue, visiting towns on both sides of the border: El Paso, Texas, and Columbus, New Mexico, and their partner cities of Ciudad Ju rez and Palomas in Mexico. In a related effort, Barnes also works for the well-being of Latino workers at the Saratoga Race Course.

What draws you to explore this situation?   

I was born in southern California in 1960. I lived in Chula Vista and then in Escondido. We often crossed into Mexico from San Ysidro, which is just south of San Diego. We would load up our red VW bus and fill it with kids and sleeping bags and head south for an extended stay with my grandfather, who lived in Sonora, or go for a day of bike racing with my dad. It was an adventure, hot and sticky with strawberry pop and oranges, no air conditioning or seat belts, just lots of noise and a certain welcome familiarity with a culture that I have attached myself to like a stepsister; not a blood relationship, but one with unshakable intimacy.

But crossing any United States/Mexican border today, I see things differently than I did in the 1960s. Today, more than 100,000 people cross the Tijuana border daily. It has become the busiest border crossing the world, with longer waits, higher walls, and more commotion. At any United States/Mexican border today, I see things I never saw as a child. I notice white-painted wooden crosses flanking the fence, representing people who have died trying to cross the desert to sneak into the United States. I notice the overwhelming difference in the standard of living on the two sides of the fence. And I notice the fence.

Tell us about the fence.

In places, it is a seven-million-dollar per-mile, reinforced steel/concrete-plank wall, but in other places it becomes a steel-mesh fence, then it turns into painted white boulders you can step across. We build this wall for billions of dollars to keep out "illegal" immigrants, but parts of our border are wide open. A Mexican town near one break in the fence has no hospital, so pregnant Mexican women come to the border and call for an ambulance. They are taken to a U.S. hospital, and give birth to a child who is born on U.S. soil and thus is a citizen. These children grow up in Mexico but they go to school in the U.S?a school bus picks them up every morning at the hole in the fence. So we build a border fence to keep people out, but we school them and we give them medical care. You have to ask, what is this wall? There are so many contradictions and inconsistencies, and so many leaks in the wall because we need these workers. The wall is representative of our own mass confusion over immigration into the U.S. from Mexico.

What keeps you coming back to the border?

I'm looking for people who change or improve their worlds and those of the people around them, people who are willing to literally jeopardize their lives to make their communities better. Their mantra is: "We only want a life with dignity." This passion is simple and pervasive. I want to pursue it.

Tell us about some of the people you're talking to.

Javier Perez, whose mother picked crops as a migrant worker, now dedicates his life to making workers' lives better. In El Paso, he works at a shelter for migrant workers where they are given food and a floor to sleep on. About 95 % of them have legal documentation but don't earn enough money for food, shelter, or health care. Their average age is 50, but some are 70. And then there is Marta Ojeda, who worked in the factories as a girl. Later she went on to law school, learned English, and became an advocate for workers in the maquiladoros (factories operated by transnational corporations). And Reub n Garc a, who runs three shelters called "Annunciation House," that are open to people who have crossed the desert and entered the U.S. illegally, allowing them time to regain their health and get in touch with their families. The border patrol knows that 90 people stay in those houses every night, but the border patrol does nothing because we need these workers. If they don't pick the vegetables for our tables, the crops rot in the fields. Who else wants these jobs?

What is it like when you cross the border from the U.S. into Mexico?

From a distance, it is difficult to tell where one country begins and the other ends.

From close up, though, there is a startling distinction. In general, border towns tend to be very poor in Mexico, while on the U.S. side, the living conditions are U.S. standard.

For instance, on the U.S. side across from a Mexican town called Anapra, there is open desert with indigenous plants and a well-traveled, carefully groomed roadway where the border patrol constantly runs up and down the fence. Looking through the steel-mesh fence toward Anapra, however, endless shacks are visible, some constructed with tacked-together packing crates. No heat, no water, no electricity, just endless sprawl. Most of the residents who eke out a living here arrived in Ju rez looking for work in the maquiladoras, most of which are operated under the aegis of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. Unfortunately, those companies don't pay a living wage, although it may be a legal wage. Bands of children run up and down the fence, looking for border patrol officers who know the kids by name and pass candy to them through the fence.  

What should we know about immigration policy?

We should question our national policy. The immigration policy currently in place does not work. In fact, the policy seems to encourage undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States. Numbers from the Pew Hispanic Center show that last year fewer Mexican immigrants returned home to Mexico than in previous years, due most likely to tighter border security and the increasing danger associated with trying to cross back to the United States later.

We should petition our legislators to allow the farm workers to form unions?currently prohibited in all but two U.S. states?to guarantee legal migrant workers a living wage. When you think of what Cesar Chavez accomplished in California, it's absolutely amazing.

We should try to sift through the misinformation, such as popular notions that Hispanics in the U.S. don't want to learn English or assimilate, or that they are associated with criminal behavior.

And we need to try to understand what frightens our country so much about immigrant workers. Some people say that every "illegal alien" should be shot, and they believe that. It's hysteria, and part of it is racism. We should become better educated.

You're also an active volunteer on behalf of Latino workers employed at the Saratoga Race Course.

I volunteer with the Backstretch Employee Service Team, translating for those who need medical care. There are 1,200 workers at the track from May through October working with trainers and for the New York Racing Association, as grooms, hot-walkers, cooks, part of the cleaning crew, whatever job is necessary on the backstretch to keep the track open and the horses running. Eight hundred of them speak Spanish. Some people call them "Traxicans," but there is a lot of diversity within the backstretch community, with workers from Paraguay, Mexico, Chile, and other countries. They're very proud of their heritage.

Some have never before worked with horses. Most are here to earn money to send home, with no intention of remaining in this country. But our labor laws make it increasingly difficult to get working visas in the U.S., a big change from the ease with which "bracero" workers crossed into the United States from the 1940s to the 1960s. We keep exacerbating our immigration "problem" with confusing?and changing?labor laws. Meanwhile, workers in the U.S. send some $20 billion a year back to Mexico, paying taxes and social security on that money?benefits for which they will never be reimbursed.

There's a whole border phenomenon?India and Pakistan, Israel and Palestine?but the Mexico/U.S. border is the one that I know. And a piece of that border is right in our own backyard. There are similarities between what goes on at the Mexico/U.S. border and what happens in the Saratoga backstretch community?language barriers, cultural barriers, racism. I think of a graffiti message that is spray-painted on a cement drainage wall on the U.S. side of the border, facing Mexico: "There is no such thing as an illegal human being." ~ Interview by Barbara Melville, Office of Communications