An amalgamation of worlds

Marfa, Texas: Robert Arber works and lives in what used to be a movie theater. He sleeps in the old projection room, the window of which no longer looks out at an auditorium, but rather at the lithograph machines, cutting tools, vats of ink, and enormous wooden tables of a printer’s studio.

Standing in the atrium, beside a series of colorful grid-like panels, designed by Donald Judd and printed by Arber, the printer described the two competing forces in Marfa.

“This is a town with two kinds of people,” Arber said, wiping his hands on his ink-spattered apron, and looking exactly like Nick Nolte in the short movie Life Lessons. “There’s the artist community, the kind of people that don’t necessarily create trouble, but like to have fun, and then there’s all the law enforcement. The border patrol and the police and all those guys.”

There did seem to be two worlds coexisting in very little space. I had seen many police and border patrol cars driving around, but I had a hard time imagining any of the stoic drivers spending much time in an art gallery that was once a church (the giant orange horseshoe out front just didn’t scream “law enforcement” to me).

Still, it only took one person, James “Trey” Allison, 20, to show that there was plenty of overlap of the two worlds. A young guy hip to the Marfa art and youth scene, Allison is also the son of a retired border patrolman: a job filled with ups and downs.

“If you think about it, it sounds like a pretty cool job on the surface,” Allison said. “You get paid at least $60,000 a year to walk around in the desert, to hike, and see all kinds of great things and it’s your job. But there’s more, part of it is taking people whose dreams it is to get into the United States and send them back to Mexico. There is a spectrum of people that cross the border illegally. There’re felons that have raped killed and smuggled drugs, and not just drugs like coke and pot, but heroine and things like that. These are guys that will kill because they are smuggling things that are worth so much. And then there’re families that are literally just trying to get to the United States to find a job and work and live a good and healthy and productive life. I think my dad didn’t mind cuffing up and putting away the guys with drugs and everything, but I could tell that it really bothered him to be wrangling families. He said that some of the agents would cuff families, but that he never would.”

Having a family in border security has led Arber to think about the issue a lot. In fact, he said it was one of the most important issues for him when it comes to politics.

For Arber, the solution for immigration problems in this country is a three-pronged approach.

“I have this joke. On my iPod it says Trey Allison for president 2024,” Arber said. “I’ve been working on my immigration platform. First, there’s got to be an agency designed to seek out businesses that utilize the labor of illegal immigrants, and punish them for it. Second, the process for becoming a citizen needs to be much easier. I’m not for amnesty, I’m for rewarding those who go through the system, but I want the system to be easier. And the last part of it, this is my more radical part of it is that we should legalize marijuana, which isn’t so controversial, but I even think they should legalize cocaine. The only reason why I say that is that they are the two biggest money makers, and because they are illegal they drive up the market on other drugs like meth, drugs that can be created in a lab without having things as blatantly obvious as fields. Because coke and pot are illegal you have this horrible smuggling problem, which is really what makes the border so dangerous.”

A not so long distance relationship

Del Rio, Texas: Maxaira Baltazar, 24, is the youngest member of the Mexican Foreign Service. A consul working a half mile from the border, Baltazar is responsible with what she considers the first step toward attaining legal status in the United States: providing documentation to Mexican citizens in this country.

“Without a Mexican passport, there is no way to get an American one,” she said.

In order to do her job, Baltazar lives in the United States full time, but is still a citizen of Mexico.

“I would say it’s very very interesting,” she said about her living situation. “Being a Mexican, living in the United States but close to the border allows you to live in two different worlds. On the one hand you are in touch with all the Mexican issues that very important to the Mexican government. At the same time you are exposed other cultures. And of course there are the issues that involve both countries.”

Of course, one of the biggest of these issues is immigration. In 2007 Del Rio implemented a zero tolerance policy regarding illegal immigration, a procedure Baltazar described as a “streamlined process.” If any Mexican (or presumably any citizen of a country other than the United States) tries to get into this country without the proper documentation or through an unauthorized port of entry, he/she is sent to court and will see jail time of up to six months (up to two years for repeat offenders).

For Baltazar, the zero tolerance policy is a mixed bag. On the one hand, fewer people are trying to get in illegally, but with all offenders going to jail, the amount of Mexican citizens in American prisons has risen.

“[The policy] has decreased the number of accidents, which of course is good for both countries,” she said. “And, I understand that every country has the right to decide who is coming into the country. But, at the same time Mexico is very interested in keeping its citizens from looking like criminals. The Mexican people coming into the U.S. are mainly coming to work and to get a better job and better salary. Most of them come with good intentions even if it is by the wrong means, and it is important to not create a perception of them as criminals, because they are not.”

Although she did not propose a solution, Baltazar made it clear that something needs to be done to naturalize the illegal immigrants living in hiding in this country.

“We are talking big numbers, millions of people, working in the U.S. illegally,” she said. “We know that those people are working for the US economy and are being very productive and have a great impact on this economy. So to talk about sending all of them back would be a problem for the U.S. At the same time, we understand that the U.S. cannot allow people to break their rules, I think that’s something that cant be allowed in any country. The idea of finding a way for those people to get legal status would be best for those people and for the American society. Whoever wins the presidency will have to find a better way to address that phenomenon.”

Baltazar also mentioned temporary working visas as a win-win solution for both countries.

“We know that a lot of people want to come to the U.S. to work, but that doesn’t mean they all want to just leave their own country behind,” she said. “With families and history back home, some people might want to come up and do their work.”

If nothing else, working at the consulate near the Mexico-U.S. border has taught Baltazar that the two nations really are not that different.

“People think that if you cross from Del Rio to Acuña you will be in a totally different place with an entirely different population,” she said of the two border towns. “But, what I have noticed living here is that it is in fact the same community living in both countries. Americans and Mexicans go back and forth everyday and what we then have is a very close relationship between the two places. All relationships, even personal ones, have ups and downs, and take a little work. Of course there is work to be done on this one, but I think it will all work out.”

Daily Crossings

Del Rio, Texas: The town of Acuña is exactly 2,325 feet away from Del Rio, yet the commute still takes 23 year-old Maria Sanchez an hour and a half. That is because the bridge that connects the two towns also connects two countries: The United States and Mexico.

Born in the United States, Sanchez is an American citizen who spent much of her life living with her extended family in this country. But, when money got tight, she moved back in with her mother and two sisters, all of which are citizens of Mexico.

I met Sanchez at her place of work, Del Rio’s public library, a location that seems worlds away from home her home.

“It’s not really something I can see myself getting used to,” Sanchez said about the long wait to cross the border. “I understand that they catch drug dealers and keep bad things from getting into the country, I read about it all the time in the paper, but it’s a difficult necessity for me to deal with.”

One of the ways that Sanchez has tried to combat the daily border crossings has been to try and get citizenship for the rest of her family; a process that has proven very difficult.

In 2005, when she turned 21, Sanchez began the application to bring her mother over legally. After a couple of years of background checks and forms filled out, the Sanchez family finally earned the elusive interview.

“I figured if anything was wrong, they would have told us before the interview, so it could get cleared up before we went in,” she said. “Usually the interview is the last step, it’s either you’re in or you’re out. Well, when we got there, three months after being told of our interview time, they said there was a problem. They needed to make sure that I, my mother’s sponsor, was actually a U.S citizen. Suddenly the investigation was on me, and I had to prove myself. I said, ‘Here’s my birth certificate,’ but they said it wasn’t enough. They wanted school transcripts, yearbooks, and photographs of my when I was younger in American stores like Wal-Mart, as if there aren’t Wal-Marts in Mexico.”

Sanchez said she felt that process felt like it was much more difficult than it should be. Three years after beginning the process to bring her mother in, and all she had to show for it was an investigation into her own citizenship. As for bringing over her sisters, Sanchez was told that process could take up to 12 years.

Living in a country of immigrants

Schertz, Texas: If ever there was a day to think about immigration, it is Independence Day. After all, it was on this day, that a land of immigrants took its first step toward making America their own. With this in mind, I spent the afternoon at your archetypal 4^th of July event–the local jubilee–in front of tilt-a-whirls and carnival games talking to people as they munched on corn dogs and fried dough. What I found, was that at least in the town of Schertz, a city of 20,000 outside of San Antonio, young people from many backgrounds had the same basic stance on immigration: make it harder for illegal immigration but easier for legal immigration.

Zach West, and 18 year-old about to join the military and McCain supporter said he believed there were two types of immigrants, the ones that come to the states to work hard and those that come for a free ride.

“I understand the urge to come to the U.S to make a better life,” West said. “If you’re going to come here and work hard to make life better for your family great. But if you’re going to come here when our economy is already in the tank and suck up welfare without paying taxes, that’s not ok.”

West believed that the best way to filter out the second category of people was through the legal immigration process, but also believed that the process should be made easier for them.

Likewise, Lamonte Harris, 25, an African-American who is going to vote for Obama, had the same basic stance.

“I love immigrants,” he said. “I want there to be more and more, but I still think we need to have some control of our borders. I’m not saying we should have a wall or anything, just more patrol.”

Even the children of Mexican immigrants like Sal Garcia, 18, repeated the same sentiments.

 “I don’t see what the real problem is with having more immigrants come to the country,” Garcia said. “There really are plenty of jobs, especially of the ones that most immigrants take, and it would be nice if my entire family could move here if they wanted. But that doesn’t mean everyone should be able to come over without any kind of process. The process should be made so people don’t feel like the have to come over illegally, but should be just enough to weed out the people who are too lazy to do it.”