Border Expat: November 2013

When you've lived decades right on the border--I mean blocks away from an international crossing--you start to forget it's there at all. You forget the political and cultural differences that supposedly exist--forget the lines drawn and walls built by politicians a thousand miles away. Instead you see a river, a bridge and a neighboring city connected to your own, where friends and families of friends happen to live, just as if they might live in another neighborhood across town. Your children have friends who live on the other side of this border. They cross every day to come to school, and you send your kids to birthday parties and sleepovers at their houses in this other country. Some of your co-workers live there too and come across each day for work.You walk across this bridge for lunch or drinks after work because you like the tacos better or the live music in the bar or the cheap prices or memories from past outings. It is friendly and comfortable and familiar. You drive across "the bridge" to the pharmacy or dentist or a quincinera or a work meeting or to visit a friend's sick grandmother or to a celebration in the Plaza or to the market to buy avocados or a purse or pinata. You get your hair cut there. Sure you wait in a line coming back across the bridge and get questioned a bit by a U.S. customs agent, but when you are privileged with a U.S. passport, or have a Mexican passport and money enough to get a visa to cross back and forth whenever you please, you start to forget about the border at all. You forget it's another country and think of it as another neighborhood. It's that close. It's that familiar. It's part of your community, your people, your place, your home. Almost everyone you know has family living on both sides of this river.

So when suddenly part of your home is cut off--when war breaks out and you hear blasts and gun shots and grenades exploding. When your kids' friends post photos of soldiers and explosions outside their front door on Facebook, or people you know get kidnapped or go missing, you don't believe it. It feels surreal and you are in denial and defend the safety of this place across the river that is also your community. This country that was your birthplace and has been your work and travel destination for many, many years is so close but out of your reach. As the smoke plumes rise from across the river, less than a mile away from your own front door, you start to believe. When you are evacuated from your office to avoid bullets landing on your campus from across the river.When you plan your annual Thanksgiving road trip to camp beside pristine tropical aqua waterfalls just a day's drive south, everyone tells you not to go. You don't want to believe that the friendly roads you traveled year after year are now littered with dead bodies and threatening road blocks. You cancel your trip thinking it will be just this one time. Surely this will be over soon.

Time passes and you see more and more wealthy folks from across that river and beyond settling in your town. They huddle around laptops in groups at Starbucks whispering, pulling their money out of their home country and investing in businesses on this side of the river; reinventing themselves. They buy nice homes and send their kids to schools here and don't talk about the problems in public. Things seem to calm down, because you don't hear about the "detonaciones" anymore. But when you ask your co-workers and friends who live across they lower their voices and tell you not to go down that highway if you don't "have" to. You skip another trip, another year goes by. Bodies are discovered in mass graves, but nobody talks about it much. Just a quick mention on the evening news and life goes on.

"You can fly further south if you're missing Mexico. Just don't drive. Get on a plane and fly over the dangerous northern careteras (highways)!" friends tell you. Just fly over the troubles and suffering and fear and danger to safer tourist destinations like Cancun, San Miguel de Allende, Puerta Vallarta.

But you find yourself not wanting to forget those beautiful places and people that were always just a day drive away-such a part of your family life during holidays and anytime you had a weekend to spare: Real de Catorce, Tamasopo, El Cielo, La Pesca. You can't bring yourself to fly over the friends who welcomed you into their homes year after year. Dona Luz who killed a chicken for delicious caldo on the wood stove of her thatched hut home after her husband rowed you in a lancha up the aqua blue Rio Tampaon to the roaring Tamul Falls. Lucio and Mayra who take your children on horses up to the mystic high desert Cero Quemado to see the Huichol Indians deliver religious offerings and then host you in their beautiful stone villa and share their home-cured prosciutto and pizza in their brick oven. Or the friendly ranch ladies who cook the crabs your young boys catch after releasing hundreds of sea turtles at dawn on the wild Tamaulipan coast.

Insidious is this war. Insidious like harmful but inticing and seductive. Insidious like having a gradual subtle and cumulative effect. The disappearing, erasing of a whole country that is right next door. But you have no right to complain for while the loss you feel is real, it pales in comparison to the loss of human life, income and the daily fear and pressure families living there face. As you stare through the bars of the border fence across the green Rio Grande, herons gently wading at water's edge, you are struck with the irony that thousands of longing immigrants have felt something similar but stronger as they stare across from the other side.