Storming the Gates of Paradise (14 page)

The Canadians were horrifically clueless about where they were; they regarded the desert with all its dangers, both intrinsic and manufactured—dehydration, flash floods, rattlesnakes, scorpions, drug dealers and other armed desperados, intensely toxic water—as some sort of underequipped version of Club Med. Only an older man who had spent time in Africa comprehended the possibilities of the situation; he and I seemed to be on one trip, the rest of the crew on another, down a pleasantly meaningless river I couldn’t recognize as the borderlands Rio Grande, let alone what it is called from its right bank, the more ominous Rio Bravo, the ferocious river. (Of course, the right bank is nowise different from the
left bank farther upstream, where it divides, for example, West Albuquerque from Albuquerque proper: my aunt and uncle cross it every day to babysit grandchildren.)

On the last day of my journey down the river, a long parade of goats trotting by the dusty riverbank made me think of Ezekiel Hernandez, who lived and died not far upriver, in Redford, Texas. His story seemed at last to make the ominous ambience of the border real to the people I was traveling with. A high school senior and a U.S. citizen, Hernandez was herding his goats near the river one evening when he was shot in the back by U.S. Marines wearing camouflage and night-vision goggles. They claimed that he had threatened them with his .22 rifle, which he apparently carried for rattlesnakes (and because he was a West Texan—even the fisherman I saw on the Rio Grande had six-guns on either camo-clad hip). The circumstances, however, make it seem unlikely that he ever even saw the marines. Who knows why they shot him, except that he looked like a Mexican, a stranger in the garden?

Hernandez’s story reads like a pastoral eclogue—not one of Theocritus’s cheerful Greek ones, but Virgil’s sad pastorals, where Arcadia is always under siege, and where shepherds are the principal spokesmen for a vision of tranquility in the deterritorialized pastures. Sometimes their songs are of Daphnis, the ideal shepherd who died in the fifth eclogue. The men with arms win the battles, but those with the shepherd’s crook win the war of representation, as Cain and Abel demonstrate.

What is so peculiar about these new wars of meaning in the American West is that the imagery is so rustic, full of appeals to the beauty of the mountains and the fields. But the dead young goatherds are on the other side, not of the border, but of the cult. We have reversed Virgil’s terms, or perhaps Virgil himself distinguished between the eclogues’ Arcadia and the georgic Paradise. After all, it was Cain who was the gardener. (Along these lines, one can trace the moral reversal of
Jews becoming Israelis as that of nomads becoming gardeners; since goats walk and crops don’t, agriculture requires territoriality in ways that pastoral nomadism does not. Or note that country boy Timothy McVeigh used a truckload of fertilizer to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building.) Gardens are portrayed as serene spaces, but perhaps it is time for the guards to be incorporated into the iconography of gardens.

Borders don’t exist in nature, but they can be made. In San Diego and Tijuana shortly after the devastating 2003 October fires, friends pointed out to me how a single bioregion had sharply diverged because of distinct human practices. On the Baja side, the resources to put out fires never really existed, the fire cycle had never been seriously interrupted, and so the colossal fuel loads that would incinerate so much around San Diego had never accumulated. Besides, Mexicans are less interested in moving into locations remote from their fellows. The upshot is not only that they don’t have such devastating fires but that they tend not to have mansions in canyons and on mountaintops for which firefighters must risk their lives and the state squander its funds. Sometimes the ecology is better preserved south of the border than north of it. Consider the case of the nearly extinct Sonoran pronghorn on the Arizona-Sonora border. About ten times as many survive on the Mexican side, while on the U.S. side, they’re pretty much confined to the Barry Goldwater Bombing Range—not the healthiest habitat for the last couple dozen of their kind in the United States. I traveled there too, amid signs warning of live ordnance and the sound of distant bombing operations.

And back and forth across the Tijuana–San Diego border, where you can head south without fanfare but get stuck in endless traffic and searches and screenings
on the route north. Part of the border there is made out of old slabs of metal from the first Gulf War, an ugly literal iron curtain, but the new border wall is elegant and visually perforated though equally impassible. When you cross into Mexico, nothing changes, because you’re still in the same territory, and everything changes, because you’re in a whole other cosmology and economy.

The takeover of the Sierra Club would have succeeded only if the invaders had convinced people to believe again that the border marks a coherent environmental divide. The official idea is that immigrants are bad for the environment, but you can reframe that a couple of dozen ways. One is to point out that we don’t need help being bad for the environment. The United States consumes the world’s resources in huge disproportion to its percentage of the global population, and most of us work overtime to do our bit for global warming. (My mother got caught up in the same arguments the last time the immigration issue roiled the Sierra Club waters and exclaimed to me, “But what if they come here and live like us?” to which the only possible reply was, “What if we stay here and live like us?”) If you care about the environment, there are more relevant issues you might choose to take up before immigration. But if you care about stopping immigration, the environment is a touchstone of conventional goodness, or at least of liberalism, you can hide behind.

The poor nonwhite immigrants who are the real targets of this campaign are generally building and cleaning those big houses in remote places and mowing the lawns and fueling up the snowmobiles, but they tend not to own them, or to make the decision to delist an endangered species, or to defund the Superfund cleanup program, or to lower emissions standards. (We elect people to do that, actually.) In fact, if sprawl and resource consumption are the immediate threats posed by population growth, then the new immigrants, who live frugally, densely, and often rely on public transport, are a rebuke to the suburban majority in the United States.

The fantasy that the United States can be sealed off from the world like a walled garden in a slum overlooks dozens of other inconvenient facts, such as the role of our country, with tools such as agricultural dumping and the World Bank, in making those other nations slummier; or the fact that they too have their gardens and we too have our slums. (Sometimes it’s the destruction of their gardens that set them on the immigrants’ path in the first place—certainly that’s the case with the Mexican farmers bankrupted by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.) But it’s also dismaying because setting gardens apart is how the conservation movement began, back at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was far more closely affiliated with racist, nativist, and eugenicist movements. Behind the early national parks and wilderness areas was the idea of scenery segregation—that it was enough to save the most beautiful and biotically lush places, a few dozen or hundred square miles at a time.

The implication of setting one piece apart is that the rest of the environment is put up for grabs, and into the 1960s the Sierra Club’s basic strategy was doing exactly that. They fought a nuclear power plant in California’s Nipomo Dunes, but agreed that it was okay to put one in Diablo Canyon instead. Club activists such as David Brower eventually came to regret that they had secured protection of Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument from damming by letting Glen Canyon Dam go forward. Now most environmentalists are against big dams and nuclear power, so that the debates are about policy, not just geography.

Back then, Rachel Carson had only recently brought the bad news about pesticides—that they didn’t stay put but moved through the environment into both wild places and our own bodies—and with that, it began to become clear that you couldn’t just defend places. You had to address practices; you had to recognize
systems; you had to understand that, in John Muir’s famous aphorism, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” When he said that, of course, he wasn’t imagining plastic detritus being ingested by seabirds in the center of the Pacific Ocean or polar bears beyond the industrialized world becoming hermaphroditic from chemical contamination. But we can.

More and more things come under the purview of environmentalism these days, from what we eat to where our chemicals end up. Immigration, unless it’s part of a larger conversation about consumption, birth rates, reproductive rights, trade, international economic policy, sprawl, and dozens of other issues, isn’t really one of them. It seems instead that environmentalism is a cloak of virtue in which anti-immigration activists are attempting to wrap themselves. But they’re better looked at naked.

And those portrayed as invaders are in fact maintaining the garden. Throughout this century, various bracero programs have brought in Mexicans to do the work citizens don’t want—namely, to toil in the garden, not only the gardens of the wealthy, but the agricultural fields. Despite all the rhetoric depicting immigrants as assailants of the economy, the vast agricultural economy of California and much of the rest of the country is propped up by farmworkers from south of the border, documented or not (including many fleeing the post-NAFTA economic collapse of small farms, brought about by the sale of cheap U.S. corn in Mexico; NAFTA opened the borders to goods but not people). Think Virgil, think wetback georgics.

And the desire to secure cheap labor has created an alternative boundary around some of these agricultural gardens, ones that the workers cannot get out of. In 1990, a Southern California flower grower was given a small jail sentence and fined for enslaving undocumented Zapotec Indian immigrants from Mexico
(and fear of the Border Patrol keeps many undocumented inhabitants of the Southwest not as outsiders but as insiders, afraid to leave the house or the private property boundaries of the farm they work on, garden captives). It is part of the murderous poetry of these garden wars: slaves on a flower farm. Who thought, picking up a dozen roses for love’s sake, that one person’s bed of roses was another’s wall of thorns?

“A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forests stand!” exclaimed Thoreau. America was founded on a vision of abundance, enough to go around for all. The relatively open immigration policies of past eras are based on this assumption, as was the Homestead Act, which gave away western land to anyone willing to work it—a vision of privatized land but universal ownership that would’ve put everyone inside some garden or other. On a smaller scale, city parks were founded on the interlocking beliefs that nature was uplifting, that open space was democratic, that it was possible and even important for all members of society to find literal common ground.

The great irony of Central Park in its early years was that public money and democratic rhetoric were used to make a place most notable for its concessions to the rich, who promenaded there in carriages, while the poor took to private pleasure gardens where less aristocratic pleasures such as drinking beer and dancing the polka were acceptable. As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig write in their magisterial history of the place: “The issue of democratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people—from the ‘squatters’ of the 1850s to the ‘tramps’ of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s—have always turned to the park land for shelter. . . . The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park posed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans’ commitment to democratic public space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.”

This is the same park from which Michael Bloomberg, the Republican mayor of New York, banned activists in August 2004 during the Republican National Convention, saying that they would be bad for the grass if they gathered on the Great Meadow, as a million antinuclear activists had done some twenty-two years before. New York, in this scenario, became pristine nature to be protected. Despite the overwhelmingly Democratic majority in New York, the media reassured viewers that the anti-Bush contingent was made up of “outsiders.” One of them carried a photograph of his son, Jésus A. Suarez, who had died in Iraq, on a pink sign labeled
Bush lied, my son died (and 1000s more)
, and his face was filled with an unabashed infinite sorrow. One of the peculiarities of the current war is that the economic draft brought in thousands of young people who were not citizens; those who died fighting the “war on terror” were given retroactive citizenship. In death, but only in death, did these young Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans become Americans. One could rearrange the old Western saying about Indians to go something like, “The only naturalized immigrant is a dead immigrant.”

But when I flew east for the New York event, the airline screened the film
The Day After Tomorrow
, a movie in which global warming convulses the Northern Hemisphere with a boomerang cold snap that buries and freezes most of the United States and Europe so fast that millions freeze like popsicles. In the most interesting scene in the movie, groups of gringos wade across the Rio Grande carrying luggage, trying to flee the ecological destruction of El Norte, while the Mexican border patrol tries to keep them out. Finally, in return for a blanket forgiveness of Latin American debt, the Yankees are welcomed in, and the Dick-Cheney-look-alike president admits that the United States has been wrong in its environmental and social policy and vows to try to do better. The Yankee refugees
waded across like the U.S. Army deserters of 1846–1848 whom no one on the north side of the border remembers.