La Proxima Frontera November 29, 2021
“Yo no Soy de Aqui, pero Tu Tampoco”
I’m not from here, but neither are you.
Jorge Drexler, “Movimiento”
Vanessa Gómez Ortega, my favorite author from Ciudad de Mexico, has published a blog on her experiences living as an outsider in Chiapas. One of her entries, entitled La Ultima Frontera, translates as The Last Border, although, to an English ear, the phrase conjures the Captain’s log from Star Trek.
In American English, frontiers and borders are related but not the same thing. The latter is the defined edge, sharply drawn and strictly policed, while the former implies anything but definition. On the contrary, frontiers are wild and unsettled. They are beyond the reach of law and order. In Mexico, however, borders and frontiers are synonyms—fronteras—creating paradox for this outsider. One in the same, borders contain, whereas frontiers liberate. Both are dangerous places.
The author introduces me to a song by the brilliant Uruguayan lyricist Jorge Drexler, called “Movimiento,” which probes the exigent nature of national boundaries, especially during this period of mass migration. The need to move has always been with us, Drexler explains. It is indeed the story of our human condition, as outsiders:
We had just begun walking upright.
We began to migrate through the savannah,
Following the herd of bison,
Beyond the horizon, to new, distant lands,
The children on the back.
Expectant eyes peeled, all ears,
Sniffling out that puzzling new landscape unknown.
We are a species in transit.
We don’t have belongings, we have baggage.
We go with the pollen in the wind.
We’re alive because we are in movement.
We’re never still, we are nomadic.
We are parents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of immigrants.
What I dream is more of mine than what I touch.
I’m not from here, but neither are you.
I’m not from here, but neither are you.
Not completely from one place and a little from everywhere.
We crossed deserts, glaciers, continents,
The whole world from end to end,
Stubborn, survivors,
The eye on the wind and the currents,
The hand firm on the oar.
We carry our wars with us, our lullabies,
Our path made of verses, of migrations, of famines,
And that’s how it has always been,
Since before time.
We were the drop of water traveling in the meteorite.
We crossed galaxies, the void, millennia.
We were searching for oxygen.
We found dreams.
I am the grandson of immigrants; and I, in turn, emigrated. In my own peculiar circumstance, here in Mexico, I face a new crisis of immigration, of identification and affiliation, insignificant in comparison to others but very real to me. I will soon return to the USA, the nation of immigrants, where my resident status in the New World will be stamped by some ever-suspicious border agent. I have learned the routine. I have met the dogs.
I faced the arrivals at water’s edge living in Port of Spain, seeing some of the millions of Venezuelans joining the diaspora of the dispossessed. Losing a homeland. Finding the neighbors’ gates locked. In Puerto Morelos, I remember Johnny, an American Dreamer, now estranged from his home in North Carolina, trapped on the other side, after failing to find his brother, who went missing in Matamoros, the frontier city named literally after murdered Muslims. “Kill Moors,” said the Spaniard who named the town, as if reminded of the time when Africans showed up in his country.
As my recent bus trip to Guatemala reminded me, I hate borders. It has something to do with walls and “old stone savage(s) armed,” as Robert Frost famously described. The animus also may be due to my earliest experience at a land-border crossing. Regarding the outcome of that lousy day at Calais crossing in 1984, I am grateful for the continuing discretion of Canadian Immigration.