Nogales - Beth Lowry

In Joseph Nevins' 2006 book, Dying to Live, he states "In a world of profound inequality, there are few if any nations that share a land boundary with the level of disparity as wide as that between Mexico and the United States. Which side of a boundary one is born on - something that is permanent and one cannot change - profoundly shapes the resources to which one has access, the amount of political power on the international stage one has, where once can go, and thus how one lives and dies." (186)

As a volunteer with No More Deaths this spring, I have had the opportunity to cross this land boundary on numerous occasions. On the mornings that I make the hour-long drive south from Tucson to Nogales, Arizona, the process of passing through that boundary is a question of a single moment, a few paces through the maze of metal and machine that is the Immigration and Custom Enforcement facility. These mornings I feel my privilege sitting heavily in my pocket alongside my passport as I emerge into Nogales, Sonora.

I travel to Sonora with the purpose of documenting the experiences of recently deported and repatriated migrants. Folks from No More Deaths have been doing this work for years now: filing reports that testify to the systematic abuses committed against migrants by Border Patrol and ICE agents during their apprehension and detention, be it as they attempt to cross the desert into the States or in towns and cities that are hundreds of miles from the border. Once the stories are collected, they are broken down into data that we enter and process and sculpt into an official document – page upon page of claims of the denial of food and water, of verbal and physical abuses, of wives being separated from husbands when they are sent to differing detention facilities.

I have spent enough hours translating narratives into raw data that the shock of reading the abuse reports has ebbed somewhat. But the act of collecting those stories, to sit down with migrants in Nogales and talk with them is an entirely different experience. “Nos trataron como animales” I have been told more than once by migrants with whom I have spoken – they treated us like animals. While each component of this semester has served to open my eyes the injustices that are reproduced within our global world system, the profound inequality of which Nevins writes is most clear to me when I must meet the gaze of these men and women.