Comforter Art Action - Blanket Roll

Borders & Walls

In South Africa, between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, In Brunei, in India along the Pakistani and Bangladeshi borders, between Uzbekistan and Kyrgystan, between Botswana and Zimbabwe, and then of course around the Spanish enclaves in Morocco, between the United States and Mexico, around the Israeli colonies of the West-Bank, and between Gaza and Egypt ... all nations states, both rich and poor, display a passion for building walls, even those which predict a world without borders; walls which always come tumbling down, as everyone knows... (Jean-Louis Violeau in "The Littoral as Final Frontier: Paul Virilio & Jean-Louise Violeau, Animal Shelter, Issue 2).

On December 24, 2014, the United States Canada Peace Anniversary Association (USCPA) celebrated the bicentennial of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the British/US war of 1812, at Peace Arch International Park. The ponderous white Peace Arch (1921) that sits in the middle of a grassy stretch between the US (Blaine, Washington) and Canadian (Surrey, BC) border stations was built to mark the treaty’s centenary, so park supporters felt that it was also fitting to host bicentennial celebration.  I didn’t make it to the park for that event last week, but I have recently driven through the park on either side of the arch, on my way to and later, from San Diego. During the first two weeks of this month, I travelled by car all the way from the Canada-US border, to the US-Mexican border (2, 250 km), and back. Whereas at Peace Arch International Park, there is no fence, just parkland and a big open arch, at "Friendship Park / Playas de Tijuana" the situation is eerily different.

 May These Gates Never Be Closed. (Peace Arch inscription, east side.)

On December 13, I joined Pamela Calore, Angel Chen, Carl Wiebe, Enrique Morenes, and other border advocates and Mexican-Americans at the parking lot of Border Field State Park. We gathered there in preparations for a 40-minute trek through mud and sand to reach the site where, on August 18, 1971, Pat Nixon opened Friendship Park on the extreme southeastern corner of the US. Reaching across a barbed wire fence to shake the hands of Mexicans gathered there, Nixon is quoted to have said, “I hope there won’t be a fence here too long… I hate to see a fence anywhere.” She then ordered her security detail to clip a stretch of the fence so that she could properly greet her neighbours, by hugging some of the Mexican children and by wandering through the crowd followed by a Mariachi band (“Look who was at the gate?”  Huffington Post).

Unfortunately, Nixon’s hope was never realized. What I experienced at Friendship Park earlier this month were two enormous, fortified fences, a closed road, and a chained park boundary. After the long trek, and finally reaching the most southerly fence separating the two countries –a privilege reserved for visitors for two hours on Sundays and for the afternoon of this special pre-Christmas La Posada celebration, we were confronted by a thick metal grid with openings just large enough for single fingers to reach through, or for an eye to look into, like a peephole.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall! Ronald Reagan (June 12, 1987)

La Posada Sin Fronteras is an annual event held simultaneously at Friendship Park and Playas de Tijuana. It borrows from the carol singing of the nine-day Las Posadas processions that take place in Mexican and Latin American neighbourhoods for nine days preceding Christmas. Singers and players, including the pregnant Mary on a burro, travel from house to house looking for a sympathetic host, but hearing over and over again that there is “no room at the inn.” The numerous stanzas of the Posada Song become explicit: “…Ya se pueden ir / Y no molestar. / Porque se me enojo / Los voy a apalear.” (“Better go on / And don’t bother us. / For if I become angry / I shall beat you up.”)* Eventually, the weary migrants are greeted by a welcoming host: “Entren, peregrinos, / No los conocia.” (“Enter pilgrims, / I did not know you.”) La Posada Sin Fronteras included carol singing, warm wishes, and the reading of a long list of missing migrants, after which we were instructed to call out “PRESENTÉ!”

Through the metal grate and fences, I could see and hear that on the Tijuana side there was food, music, power for the sound system (someone brought a cordless microphone synced to the Mexican sound system, for the US side), and a fenced off monument to friendship and peace between the two nations. Soon, there will be a monument to migrants (“Fuente Monumento De Migrantes”) by Laura Diaz Soberanis. Rising from a bed of brightly coloured flowers, the monument will be comprised of two faces in profile looking north toward the edge of the fence near the beach. Water will be flowing from the eyes of the faces, and will produce splashes in the pool below.

*Text and translation from the pamphlet provided to participants of the December 13, 2014 event.

Lois Klassen

 

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Micaela Saucedo - A tribute from Pamela Calore

The Comforter Art Action blankets that found their way from Vancouver to the canals between San Diego and Tijuana late last summer became unexpected markers of a Mexican woman's radical life. Micaela Saucedo, who established "Casa Refugio 'Elvira'" --a shelter for men near the Mexican/US border, died suddenly in the midst of the blankets' transfer from Vancouver to the shelter. On September 23, 2013, the blankets became part of a day that celebrated her legacy, and mourned her passing. They were delivered to both the shelter and to the cannals where Micaela frequently made her "rounds" with the people who find shelter there.

Pamela Calore who carried the blankets in her luggage from Vancouver to her home in San Diego, and then with a group from the organization "Border Angels" to Tijuana, wrote this memorial tribute to Micaela Saucedo. Before her death, Pamela also made a tribute video that is linked below. In it Sauceo is seen delivering felted mats to people in the cannals.

Thank you Pamela, for continuing your family's tradition of transporting goods between cultures and across borders and between people! Thank you for introducing us to Micaela Saucedo's life and work.

~

It’s been hard for me to approach writing about Micaela Saucedo. There is so much to say. She’s the rabbit on the moon, from a Mexican folk story about a rabbit that sacrificed her life to save another. The Aztec god placed her image on the moon.  That’s Mica. That’s her; she sacrificed her life for others. “That’s how I will remember her for all time.”
 
This story also evolves from pre-Hispanic legends, and it tells of a time when the great god of the Sun, the Plumed Serpent Quetzalcoatl lived on Earth as a man.

One time so long ago that no one is left to remember, he started on a difficult journey. After walking for a long time, he became hungry and tired.

With no food or water around, he thought he would die. Then, a rabbit grazing nearby offered himself as food to save the God’s life.

Quetzalcoatl, moved by the rabbit's noble offering, elevated the rabbit to the moon, then lowered him back to Earth, and told him, "You may be just a rabbit, but everyone will remember you; there is your image in light, for all men and for all times." And so it was and so it has been. (CasaRefugioElvira_brochure)
 
The last time I saw Micaela, I left her in her shelter and I thought she is so petite and yet she has no fear staying there, the only woman in a shelter with all men, near the canals, the red light district, and drug trafficking area.  She did her work and everyone respected her. She also rolled with the punches… She had a certain dignity about her, like my dad. They are two of a kind,  no bullshit, all goes to those in need.
 
When I visited Micaela’s shelter one time after her death, Siete the new director, told me that sometimes, Micaela would walk the canals at dawn to check on the people living there.  Micaela was a retired nurse, who  raised a family and she and her husband ran a bus service from Tijuana to Mexico City.  She spent all her days in service to others…
 
In my thoughts forever…
With love: Pamela Calore

 

Precarious in Public

(Photo - L. Klassen, Vancouver Welcome House, 2013)

On July 16 and 17, I hosted Pamela Calore during her first visit to Vancouver Canada. Calore traveled here from her home in San Diego where she is a photographer, teacher, and Outreach Coordinator with the advocacy group - Border Angels. To expand her understanding of Pan-American migration issues, she was eager to learn about how Canada was managing the migration of workers and displaced people from Mexico and Central America. So we visited two agencies in Vancouver: Settlement Orientation Services (SOS) and the Vancouver Welcome House and Settlement Services (ISS of BC) .

Whereas SOS offers counseling and legal support for people who make refugee claims once they arrive in Canada, ISS hosts those who have already been accepted by the Government of Canada as refugees before arriving. There are 800 or so who every year receive federal government support to become BC residents. Upon arrival a Welcome House bed is made available to them for about 2 weeks while their official paperwork is processed. During those whirl-wind days they are assisted by a person—overburdened it goes without saying—who assists them in finding an affordable place to rent using a meager monthly government stipend which will continue until they find work or for a year, whichever comes first. (http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/07/22/Safe-From-Violence-Seeking-Home/)

Back in the SOS office, the Spanish-speaking Settlement Workers seemed happy to have Pamela and me as visitors on short notice, in the middle of an idle summer afternoon. After Bill C-31 passed last December 15, and after Mexico joined the list of Designated Countries of Origin (DCO) on February 15 (Chile on May 15), the likelihood of Spanish-speaking people appearing in the SOS office to claim refugee status (or of those speaking Mayan languages, for whom the SOS workers are also prepared) is nearly non-existent. Under Bill C-31 if refugees have arrived by way of a DCO they will be returned to that country to seek asylum first, since the DCO list implies that these countries are "safe" and equipped to deal with incidents of persecution in legitimate ways; or, if they claim persecution despite originating in one of the DCOs, they will have a significantly truncated time (30 days) in order to prepare documents proving their persecution before appearing before a review panel. It appeared during our visit that Bill C-31 had effectively quieted the offices of settlement services workers.

"In the late 1980s this office was always full..." one of the settlement workers told us, describing some 30 years of on-going unrest in Guatemala and subsequent investment in mining by Canadian companies throughout Central and South America. He described how Canadian companies do not want Central American laborers to leave for higher paying work, and how Canadian agri-business wants to ensure a similarly low wage work force to be available in Canada under controlled circumstances, for seasonal work. He urged us to go to Langley and Abbotsford to meet with these foreign workers to find out about their working conditions –though, he said, we should expect to be intercepted by their company's security detail, who routinely accompany the workers into town for groceries, on days off.

Pamela and I wondered about which situation was worse: Canada's agenda to disappear from the citizenry economic migrants or asylum seekers by refusal of access – to hearings and advocacy; or, the violence of the US/Mexican border zone, that is revealed by organizations like Border Angels? At least in the US, I argued, there is now a generation of undocumented residents whose very presence in schools and workplaces and protests produces the conditions needed to defy the silencing.

Later, talking further about the conversations I had had with Pamela and the settlement workers, I was reminded of the way Judith Butler used the example of a 2006 Los Angeles demonstration by illegal immigrants to show how performativity defies the precarity of those denied legal status ("Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics" 2009). Butler recounted how the LA demonstrators had sung the national anthem of the United States in Spanish, as well as in English, and alongside the national anthem of Mexico. For Butler, these people were both performing as if they had a legal right to free expression even though they did not, and producing a situation in which their invisibility –in her words, illegibility—could be defied. They were just singing something American in Spanish, but by doing this in public, they were legitimizing the way Americans live in/with Spanish all the time. She described how they were exposing as well as opposing “those modes of exclusion through which the nation imagines and enforces its own unity”. Similarly, young activists who have grown up without legal documentation have been using the strategy of getting arrested to test deportation patterns. Their actions have exposed how there is poor on-the-ground compliance to federal government directives to only deport undocumented immigrants who have committed criminal offences. Once these activists –los infiltradores—are arrested and put inside detention facilities they have been successful in forcing deportation officers to release others who are detained but do not meet the official requirements for deportation. Their activism however depends on what one of them described as the theatre of the oppressed (Marco Saavedra, quoted by Michael May). In other words, the effectiveness of their work is dependent on the noisy crowd outside the detention centres who command the TV camera lenses, and appeal to the millions of American residents whose stories are echoed in the ones revealed to them by the activists.

In Canada there is silence resulting from effective avoidance or deflection into the US of a noisy population of illegible workers and children. Ironically, this silence was recently broken by a noise-producing incident in which a TV camera crew accompanied a Canada Border Services Agency raid of a Vancouver worksite in March 2013. Reversely making legible the condition of illegal workers in Vancouver--as well as the border officials’ highly questionable contract with a reality TV program, the incident produced significant public consternation and visibility of the “No One is Illegal” campaign (http://thetyee.ca/Blogs/TheHook/2013/03/14/Migrant-Arrests/).

The 11 blankets that Pamela Calore carried in a used hockey bag from Vancouver to a men's shelter for migrant men in Tijuana are not that noisy (see Blanket Roll # 101 - 111 in the left side bar). But like the water stations that are resourced by the volunteers and often visiting scholars that come to Border Angels to learn more about the border issues, the blankets materialize for those of us who make them the silent, and often failed, migration of people away from poverty, across the often failed national lines.

Lois Klassen, Vancouver

(Thank you to Lexi Owen and Margaret Dragu for the conversations and resources that I drew from for this post! - LK)