The route that I take to and from work is one of my favorite parts of El Paso. Every day I take these roads that bring me in through all the different "regions" of El Paso; the downtown area, the nice neighborhoods, the less nice neighborhoods, the historical districts. The most interesting part for me is the main highway; towering over both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, the bridge basically runs alongside the border that cuts between the two countries. This was my favorite part of my commute because, for all of the political and cultural conflict that takes place along this one border, the two cities look undeniably that same from up on the highway. Up on the mountains, the diversity of the two cultures is represented - the landscape on the American side largely composed of larger than life billboards for BudLight while the mountains on the Mexican side have written on them "Juárez - la biblia es la verdad, leela!" I could see all this from the highway, and every morning I kept wondering how an invisible divide, an imaginary line could present so much separation.
If you look down from the freeway, you can see that there is a massive graveyard for most of the trip. There are thousands of little gravestones dotting the area, some with flowers, some with crosses, some with pictures. The strange thing about this graveyard is the land that it sits in. The graveyard stretches for miles as dust, the gravestones not entirely standing up because of the instability of the ground. Then, out of nowhere, there is a tiny patch of bright, green grass with big willow trees surrounding the area. The patch of grass is gated with a iron fence enclosing it. Then, miles more of dusty graveyard. The first time I saw it, I couldn't help but laugh - even in spite of the hot, Texan heat, the rich were still able to keep up a higher-quality graveyard. There was obviously no attempt at exemplifying a more "PC" organization of the graves, because right there in the middle of dusty dead people was a lush, green and gated community. What I didn't know was how much more the divisions continued. My supervisor explained to me that the green area was for all the white Americans of El Paso, something that was to be expected. But the partitions continued, as separate graveyards were created for the large Arabic population and another for the significant Korean/Chinese population. The largest region, the one that had the most direct sunlight and gravestones sinking into the land, was reserved for the Mexican people. The upkeep of the graveyards also related to these divisions, the "Mexican graveyard" finishing last with little to no maintenance.
I still like taking the highway to work every morning. Only now, it serves less as a hopeful symbol of the closeness of the two nations and instead as a sobering reminder of the bigotry, racism and a long culture that serves as a blockade between Mexico and the United States. There may not be a physical barrier between Juárez and El Paso, but there sure as hell is a wall.
"Either we're going to solve this by realistic negotiation or there will be blood on the border."
- Tom Metzger
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment