3/8/21

By Josh Rubin

It began as families huddling together at the foot of the bridge across the border river in Matamoros, Mexico. Told at first that they must wait their turn for a chance to plead for asylum, for mercy, they stayed on the plaza, in a pocket of concrete in sight of the uniformed troops that stood guarding the arched path to the other side, a walkway daily slowly traversed by those clutching the documents that allowed their passage.

As the tourniquet at the border tightened, the small colony of hope and defiance grew. Without a lifeline from groups on the US side, which began as bags of food from McDonalds and later became a well-organized network of organizations providing sustenance and care, the beachhead might have lost its tenuous grip, and dissipated as waves of opposition, criminality, and weather swept over them.

But they remained, and their numbers grew. Small tents little by little advanced over the levees to the banks along the scrubby parkland that lined the river, and small clusters grew to a village stretched along its swirling water. Clay stoves were molded, mesquite gathered and burnt, and when the wind was right, fragrant clouds of smoke drifted to the US side, to the tents set up to be courts that tried to dignify with formality the crime against humanity they represented.

For Mexico, this village of the refused was an eyesore. It could not but remind all who saw of the humiliation of a weaker country agreeing to be the firsthand persecutor, prison-keeper for its arrogant neighbor to the north. Efforts were made again and again to shift the camp to be less visible testimony to its disgrace. And when at last, in the name of protecting these refugees from the predators with whom they were complicit, Mexico fenced and razor-wired the encampment, they sealed more than the fate of this symbol of defiance.

The encampment, witnessed by many, supported and elevated to national attention in the US, has for many now stopped being the symbol of the crime against humanity that denies the right of families to migrate in order to survive. It is a symptom of that failure of moral imagination that substitutes a manifestation of struggle for the struggle itself.

The struggle is still there, in plain sight. I will tell you where to look. Don’t look inside the fenced encampment where the remains of the village show us what is left of the life many lived, the testimony both to persecution and resistance. Look just outside, at families just arriving, huddled together on the pavement, numbers growing, the fences and barbed wire refusing them access to what was left behind.