4/25/21

By Josh Rubin

I traced the route of the Walk for the Children/Caminata por la Niñez. First I went down to the bridge, the Paso del Norte. It was very early this morning, Sunday, so there were only a few cars coming from Ciudad Juarez, pausing for inspection and creeping out into the under-construction egress to the sleeping and shuttered El Paso streets.

And I, too, pausing, look at the iconic mural of the twin sisters, JRZ and ELP, indigenous girls, I suppose Raramuri, on a wall on Father Rahm Avenue, practically in the shadow of the bridge. The sister cities.

And then tacking back and forth northward, crossing the overpass of Interstate 10, making my way to Montana, the Avenue, not the state, and eastward toward the airport, but north before then, alongside the Patriot Highway, climbing the beginnings of the Franklin Mountain foothills, and reaching the locked Pershing Gate into Fort Bliss, where, somewhere in those thousands upon thousands of acres, are tents full of migrant children, who made the journey before me, and unlike me, are now trapped inside, wondering when they will get to leave.

And right there, a pretty park where, when we arrive near midday on April 30 we will beg for an end to Title 42 and for the right to migrate, and for the frightened young souls being kept at the largest military base in the country.

I look back at the view that shows a city, the little bit of distance making the division invisible.