Crossing Borders

Our first few hours in Mexico, Mark from Frontera de Cristo took us to the border wall, had us stand in a circle, and invited us to reflect on what borders mean to us.

We had just driven through Cochise County in Arizona, where we had passed four different kinds of military or police vehicles, and through the Port of Entry in Douglas-Agua Prieta, where we had been mini-interrogated by Border Patrol. I had felt nervous on the US side, and found myself relaxing now that we were on the Mexico side where, it seemed, no one was going to hassle a bunch of teenagers and young adults in beat up old minivans.

Asked to think about borders, I struggled to rectify what I had just experienced on a militarized national border, and what I know of migrant deaths and the human rights crisis in the desert, with what permaculture and anthropology have taught me about borders.

Permaculture urges us to mind the edges. The space where two systems meet is often the most productive and diverse, like the transition from meadow to forest or the shallows of a pond. And in a postmodern anthropological thought there is much discussion of syncretic culture, the complexity that emerges when two or more cultures collide, meld, overlap and borrow from each other. In our increasingly globalized culture, a lot is syncretic, for better or for worse. (This idea is even present in the Anne Fadiman quote that is the guiding principle of this blog: "The action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where the edges meet.")

And I am reminded now, in retrospect, of what the Christian story (and by extension Quakerism) has to say about the borders of empire and how they are to be challenged in favor of justice and belovedness.

I am grateful for this grounding in permaculture, anthropology and Christianity as I process my experiences on La Frontera. It helps me to see that borders are points of interaction and fertility, and opportunities for human connection, rather than simply divisions or boundaries to be guarded and defended.

*Photo: The border wall ("aesthetic fencing" version) from the Mexico side, the obelisk that marks the true border, and crucifixes.