Notes from the Other Side Growing up with the Great American Wall

Some children are born near football stadiums and are inspired to become soccer players.  Other
boys and girls grow up near factories or mines or farms and spend the rest of their lives working in them.  Not me. I was born in Las Chepas, three miles from the US border and as close as I was to America, I was soon made to understand that I would always be a world away.  What would that make me when I grew up?

When I was very young, I thought that my little village was not a place where people lived, but a "rest stop' where travelers would stay briefly on their way to someplace else.  Trucks would pull in and load up with people and head north, never to come back.  Some came early in the morning, but usually in the middle of the night.  Who were these people?  Where had they come from?  Where were they going? Why?  Was my family the only one who actually lived in Las Chepas?

To the north was the American Desert, flat and dry and casting only a few shadows.  For as far back as I could remember, a high fence stood across the land for as far as I could see.  The tall metal screen topped with barbed wire seemed to cut my world in half and I saw America as if looking through a screened window.  Or was it a door?

To try to stop the flood of people fleeing to America, the United States paid for bulldozers to come and level half the buildings in Las Chepas.  They thought that if the trucks had no “rest stop,” they’d have to find another way.

They did, of course.  Anything to get out of Mexico and into America.

One day everything I knew about my world, or thought I knew about it, began to change.  Early in the morning, there were rumblings like an earthquake.  I jumped out of bed and ran outside.  On the other side of the fence, through a cloud of dust, the machines came, huge flatbed trucks with extra-big tires carrying giant gray slabs.  American soldiers and construction workers, all wearing bright red, white and blue flags on their backs, measured lines in the air and cranked up the booms of their cranes.  Like pages of a book, the tall, white concrete slabs were lifted up and out and linked together.  Within a week, the northern desert got a novel, indelible shadow.

“Why?” I asked Mama.

“The Americans want to stop us from entering their country without permission,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because so many Mexicans are moving to America without permission.”

“Why?”

“Because there we can earn much more money to send back here.”

“Why?”

“Because Mexico has many poor people who cannot find jobs here.  That’s why they go to America.”

“Then why didn’t you and Papa go?”

“We were…afraid.”

“America is a bad place?”

“No.  That we would never come back.”

“Why?”

“We would become Americans and that’s not who we are.”

“So, America doesn’t want Mexicans to become Americans without permission?”

“Exactly.”

“But if so many Mexicans are moving to America, shouldn’t Americans be afraid of becoming like Mexicans with or without permission?”

“That’s why they built the wall.”

“Oh.”

Every day the wall confronted me.  At first, it shone a glaring whiteness in the sun, but as time went on, the desert dust clung to it.  Repeated rains could not wash all of it away and soon the wall became the color of the desert itself, as if it had grown out of the earth, as natural as a concrete cliff.

The biggest pyramids in the world were built in Mexico, but we never built walls.  Maybe we should have.  Would a wall have protected the Aztecs from the Conquistadors?

Mexico did try a “green wall,” of natural brush 30 feet wide and 600 miles long on the Texas border, to protect the Rio Grande and stop drug and people smugglers.  Black bear, pronghorn sheep and prairie dogs must have loved our “environmentally friendly” wall, but it was not big enough or strong enough to protect the national security of the United States.

What were the Americans so afraid of that made them build their wall?  What would it accomplish?  How many schools and homes could they have built instead?  How many roads could they have built or repaired?  With all that steel and concrete, what else could America have made?

The American Wall wasn’t the longest or the tallest or the thickest wall ever made, but it was the most secure.  Leaflets warned us that steel pylons had been buried behind the wall to make tunneling under it impossible.  Motion sensors and night-vision goggles made approaching the wall undetected also impossible.  Guarded by the elite Homeland Security Defense Forces, the tower guards were ordered to shoot anyone who tried to scale the wall or attempted to breach it by crashing a car or truck into it.

The mammoth, impenetrable, indestructible structure, like baseball, apple pie and Mickey Mouse, became a symbol of the United States.  The land of the free became secure and protected--being brave was no longer needed.  Thanks to the Great American Wall, the homeland was safe from invasion…by people like me.

There were many times when I would walk up close to the wall.  But I would not touch it.  I was afraid that its massive power would somehow flow into me and overwhelm my spirit.  Nor would I deface it because that would personalize the wall.  To me it would always be blank, empty concrete.

For hours I’d stare at the stark expanse of it and pretend that I was Joshua from the Bible.  After 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, Joshua and the people of Israel had crossed the Jordan River to conquer the land of Canaan.  Around 1400 B.C. Joshua laid siege to the fortress city of Jericho, the oldest known inhabited city in the world.
 
God’s plan called for the army to circle Jericho six times while the priests blew their ram's horns.  The priests with trumpets went first, then the priests who carried the Ark of the Covenant, then the army.  The only sound would be the sound of the horns; no one could speak a word.  Then on the seventh day, they would circle the city seven times in the same manner, and then when Joshua gave the signal, they would shout with a great shout.
 
And the walls came tumbling down.

If I could get all of Mexico to shout, how many voices shouting for how long would bring down the Great American Wall?  Were there any Americans who would shout with us?

Would it be God’s or the people’s will?

A wall casts shadows on both sides.  On the Las Chepas side, no more was our village a "rest stop" on the way to America.  Shops that catered to the smugglers closed, leaving little behind.  What was happening on the American side?  As I stared at the concrete cliff, I would imagine great building projects being done behind it and that one morning I would see the tips of skyscrapers poking over the top.  But that day never came.  Was it still the same desert, empty and dry with so few shadows on the other side?
 
I refused to let the wall change me.  It would not make me hate the United States.  At night, with its searchlights glowing like stars on its flag, I thought of the wall as a living thing, a snake-like creature wriggling across the land.  In our Garden of Eden, was this the irrepressible Serpent separating Good from Evil or the haves from the have-nots?

If the wall could speak, would it tell me that I was good enough?  That there was something wrong with me?  That I was poor?  That I did not speak English?  That I belonged on the other side of it?

I was unfit to become an American, but didn’t America become America by poor people who couldn’t speak English?  Could America still be America behind a wall?

How did the Chinese feel as they stared up at their Great Wall, the biggest construction project in history, so big that it can be seen from the moon?  If beings from another planet ever ventured close to earth, the first visible sign of Man’s intelligence would be a wall!

Two thousand years ago, Hadrian’s Wall was built and manned by Roman soldiers to secure their conquests in Britain.  On the other side, what did the “barbarians” make of it?  Surely they had to be intimidated by such a fantastic stone structure.  Did the wall convince them they had no chance against such a superior civilization?

The natives of Skull Island built a wall to protect them from King Kong, but the gigantic gorilla busted through it.  In fantasy and reality, were walls built to stand as historic records, which like sports records…made to be broken?

Not all walls were built to keep invaders out, but to keep people in.  The Communists built a wall dividing the city of Berlin in half.  Bristling with barbed wire and machineguns, the Berlin Wall became a symbol of tyranny.  Many Berliners were killed trying to escape, but when the Communist Empire fell, so did its wall.

What were the Communists hoping to accomplish by building their wall?  Couldn’t they understand that by dividing their own people from the rest of the world, that they would wind up dividing themselves?

What were the Americans thinking when they approved the building of their Great Wall?  What law was passed to make the wall Constitutional?  Would it make them feel more American if they could keep Mexicans out of their country?  Did it make them feel more free?  Or just more secure?  What’s next, a wall from sea to shining sea along the US/Canadian border?  And then armed forts on America’s coasts?  When will a nation of immigrants feel safe from those who only want to be immigrants, who want the same chance that Americans once got to make their country great?  How many walls will it take to make America American?

As I got older, I grew and the wall did not.  Sometimes standing before it I understood that I looked at it differently every time because I was different.  No longer did I dream of becoming a Biblical hero who would bring it tumbling down or a fantasy ape who would crash its gates.

This seemingly endless concrete barrier had been built at incredible expense to protect the richest superpower the world had ever known from people like me.  More than ancient Aztec wonders or my country’s latest technical, political, social or literary triumph, standing in front of the wall made me proud to be a Mexican.  Yes, my country is still poor and has many problems, but none were ever solved by a wall and never would be.

When I graduated from high school, my parents told me that we would be moving from Las Chepas and going south.  They had lived near the wall only because they wanted me to finish school.

For the last time I went to the wall.  In all the years I had spent studying and learning about walls, I only found out one thing for sure: Walls don’t always fall, but they do always fail.  Wherever and whenever and whyever they are built, no amount of money or architectural brilliance ever created a wall that gave any nation long-lasting protection or security.

How long will the Great American Wall stand?  Ten more years, a hundred?  And when it does come tumbling down, and it will, there will be a much different America behind it.  Those who believe in walls are betrayed by them.
   
Nevik Herana

(The author is currently studying engineering at the University of Mexico.  He has no plans to ever visit, live or work in the United States.)