By the third day of the Labor Day weekend march against the Department of Homeland Security’s border wall, protestors’ feet were feeling the long miles from Fort Hancock, Texas, to San Elizario, a semi-rural community south of El Paso. Resuming the march after a rest, Javier Perez, a staff member of El Paso’s Border Agricultural Workers Center, gave his take on action so far.

“Nobody said that the walk for justice was going to be a nice one,” Perez said, “so we’ll keep on walking until we meet our objective, which is to destroy the wall before it is built."

An urgent tone energized the slogans, chants and songs that Perez and other marchers voiced. As the march was unfolding, crews were busy at work
along the Border Highway up the road in El Paso constructing the local portion of the nearly 700-mile long wall. Unknown to protest participants, U.S. District Judge Frank Montalvo, in an Aug. 29 decision
rendered only hours before workers emptied the El Paso federal court house for the upcoming holiday, had denied the County of El Paso and other plaintiffs a preliminary injunction against the fence’s construction until certain conditions were met.

In his ruling, Judge Montalvo concluded that the plaintiffs failed to prove their case that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s waiver of more than 30 federal environmental and other laws last April “outweighs the public’s interest in securing its borders.”

Anti-border wall protesters on the Aug. 28-31 march were adamant against building a new wall anywhere on the border. They cited human rights, environmental, economic and other reasons for opposing the project. Many opponents contend the barrier will force desperate migrants from Mexico and Latin America into more deadly, remote crossings and increase the number of deaths on the border, which have reached into the thousands since the U.S. government began clamping down on the border 15 years ago.

Although opposition to the wall is widespread in the borderlands, the federal project counts its share of local supporters. On Sept. 1, an unscientific, online poll conducted by the El Paso Times showed 2,400
respondents evenly split on the question of whether the city’s Public Service Board should have leased land for the wall. Proponents of a new fence argue it is necessary to control illegal immigration, curb drug
trafficking and other crimes and deter terrorists.

Taking a Stand in San Elizario

Parading through the outskirts of semi-rural San Elizario, the group of about thirty marchers passed single-family homes, trailers and yards with farm animals. Border Patrol vehicles darted in and out of side streets. Halting at an irrigation canal almost on the U.S.-Mexico border, the march paused to hear speakers. A portable Border Patrol observation tower
equipped with a camera that one woman compared to a “deer (hunting) stand” faced the impromptu protest.

Eustolia Olivas introduced herself as a relative and neighbor of former Mexican guestworkers known as braceros. An activist with the Bracero Project, an El Paso-based organization seeking justice for the elderly former contract laborers and their families, Olivas chronicled the role of Mexican and Chicano workers in building up the United States since
1848. U.S. racists, Olivas contended, view brown people as stoop laborers made for the work others will not do.

“We’re trying to gain recognition as human beings from them,” Olivas said. “We came to work. We didn’t come to set off explosions in buildings or on bridges. We’re not that kind of people.”

Several residents, including a group of men on horseback marchers invited to join them, spontaneously approached and applauded the demonstration on the canal bank. Later, as the group marched into the center of San Elizario to the welcoming beat of Aztec drummers and dancers, the men on horseback were now the rear guard of the march, carrying anti-border wall signs.

San Elizario was perhaps an appropriate place for a protest that embraces questions of land, freedom of movement and differing cultural visions. A local museum exhibits how the fertile lands that still sprout cotton here and there have been contested territory for hundreds of years in battles involving Spaniards, Apaches, Mexicans and Anglo-Americans. San Elizario was the scene of the famous 1877 Salt War, a conflict which erupted over attempts by Anglo businessman Charles Howard to gain control of salt lakes Spanish-speaking locals long considered communal property.

Today, San Elizario is still contested space.

Hands Through the Fence

From San Elizario, the march halted in Socorro, Texas, for the evening. Picking up the protest pace the next day, the group stopped in Ysleta del
Sur Pueblo for a ceremony before jumping into cars and trucks that headed to the border wall construction underway in El Paso.

The final act was a binational rally at the border between Sunland Park, N.M., and Anapra, Mexico, on the northwestern edge of Ciudad Juarez. More than 100 people turned out, including Anapra residents who remembered once freely moving back and forth across the border. At this spot, the Roman Catholic bishops of Ciudad Juarez, El Paso and Las Cruces conduct an annual mass in celebration of a binational, tri-state region that shares a common history, language, economy and culture.

Nowadays, a metal fence constructed during the Clinton era separates Sunland Park from Anapra, forcing march organizers to stay on either side
of the divide. Participants, however, reached out to each other across the fence and U.S. marchers tossed gifts to children and adults in low-income
Anapra. The creep of the new, bigger wall was visible on the mesa above the community.

Standing in Mexico, Father Peter Hinde, who is a U.S. military veteran, was audibly distraught by the new wall, which sits under the gaze of the Christ statue on nearby Mount Cristo Rey.

“Now we have the scandal of the fence right up underneath that symbol of unity on top of the mountain,” Father Hinde sighed. “I don’t know when
we’re going to learn that our best security is creating friendship instead of creating insecurity through antagonism that is created by a fence.”

In an interview with Frontera Norte Sur, Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, a leading border wall critic, praised the march. Upholding his heritage as a fifth generation El Pasoan, Shapleigh called the local people “borderlanders” who enjoy ties up and down the old Camino Real Highway. Besides a monumental waste of taxpayer money, the new border wall was an affront to a close neighbor and trading partner, he added.

“This era will be viewed as a dark passage in American history, and I hope we have the leaders at the national, state and local level that will stand
up and fix this in generations to come,” Shapleigh said. “We need to take this wall down. We need to do the right thing by our relationship with Mexico.”

In March 2008, Shapleigh sent a letter to Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff. Citing a U.S. Congressional Research Service estimate of a $49 billion price tag for building and maintaining the wall, the El Paso Democrat insisted much cheaper means, including smart technology, are available to control the border.

In his letter, Shapleigh wrote that “history has shown that anti-immigration sentiment almost always follows a threat to national security.” Nonetheless, he continued, “despite the fact that none of the 9/11 terrorists have arrived in the United States through Mexico, the focus over the past several years has been on our southwestern border.”

Referring to criticism of the project from world figures such as former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Shapleigh warned Secretary Chertoff of the diplomatic consequences of the border wall.

“Already in churches and homes from Chihuahua to Buenos Aires, your walls are called ‘muros de odio, symbols of a new hatred for which America is now known,” he wrote. “How long will it take for our great nation to repair the ill will that these walls have engendered around the world?”

The Border Wall Heats Up Cyberspace

Reported in the regional media, news of the march and the border wall set off renewed polemics in cyberspace over questions of national security,
immigration and race. In particular, the El Paso Times was the repository of many sharp comments.

An e-mail from a person identified as “Mother” from El Paso laid out a case for the wall:

“If this fence would have been put up a long time ago, my son would still be alive,” read the message. “He was killed by a drug trafficker trying to get back to Mexico in his Hummer.”

Many e-mails were from out-of-state. Read one message: “The fence is needed. Illegal immigrants stress so much of our society, from the free
education they receive, the free lunches, free health care, the list goes on. Build the fence higher.”

Another cyber writer suggested that the new wall should be electrified with observation towers protected by numerous guards armed with “REAL not
rubber bullets.”

More than a few messages carried racial overtones, featuring insults like “nasty Mexicans.”

Although work proceeds to finish the border wall before the end of the year, debate is certain to intensify in the days ahead. El Paso-area opponents, as well as their allies in other sections of the border, plan more actions in a last-ditch effort to stop the wall before it is finished.

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Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

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