Eagle Pass
Work Zone
In early 2020 I walked along the wide open space along the banks of the Rio Grande river in my mother’s home town, Eagle Pass Texas. This place used to be full of humanity with the international bridge looming over it. When I was visiting as a youngster it was an encampment of migratory Kickapoo Indians. Moving back & forth from Múzquiz in Mexico, they built traditional houses of river cane below the bridge. In later years they had pickup truck campers.
Crossing the bridge between Eagle Pass & Piedras Negras was under reasonable scrutiny, but simple routine. Workers, business people, goods & services crossed constantly between the two towns. It was, and is, an economy & culture based on its border location. But things have changed. The relatively harmonious border culture is under assault by outside polarising forces.
Yes it is a perilous place below the bridge, on the flood plain of a great long river that draws its water from the Colorado Rockies & the Sierra Madre of Chihuahua, subject to floods & droughts from far away places and hurricane rains. I have early memories of the aftermath of the great flood of 1954. Cracked drying mud in the patio of Fort Duncan on the hill well above the river, a banana shaped military helicopter landing on a glaring white caliche hilltop to service dark tents of refugees.
In the winter of 2020 the land under the bridge looked like this. Scraped clean, a "park", named after a defeated Confederate General who is said to have dropped his Stars & Bars into the river's flow when crossing into Mexican exile. Maybe it is used for sports, possibly picnics, but really, didn't look like much life here. Not like it was. The pillars nationalized.
Today as I write 4 years later, February 2024, I could not have imagined that this scraped barren field I walked in 2020 would be so much in the news daily, festooned with coils of razor wire. Of course I sensed the tension, green Border control vehicles vigorously patrolled, small groups of young men gathered on the Mexican banks as if enjoying a sunny afternoon by the water. But now it feels like it has become a new Fort Sumter, as the Governor of Texas is a new Jefferson Davis, defying the federal government and occupying the property of the City of Eagle Pass. A fracture is opening between the states & the federal government. I hope I am being dramatic rather than prophetic. But here on this river, once again, epic political stresses are playing out.
The bitter turmoils of the Americas to the south press north, joined now by those of the broader world, Haiti, Syria, West Africa . . . so many desperate souls. Deep in the river, drowning for relief.
The bitter turmoils of the Americas to the south press north, joined now by those of the broader world, Haiti, Syria, West Africa . . . so many desperate souls. Deep in the river, drowning for relief.
As soon as this Rio Grande, this Rio Bravo, came into human view as a national border there was a change. The Native American understanding of it as a powerful spirit to offer respite & challenge was usurped first by southern Europeans. Then as Northern Europeans pressed from the north, a natural border became a national border, a frontera. With a Texan revolution, a Mexican-American War, a civil war in the U. S., a civil war in Mexico, the river was firmed in human minds as a línea, a line. Socioglobal stresses press against it, like the earth's seismic fault lines, but faster, less logical. Tragic to behold.
(Please watch the video in this report.)