Blueprint for Normalizing the Border
Notes
Acknowledgment
About the Author
Index
8.1Portugal’s Guimarães Castle, built over a thousand years ago, needed no panic room. It is a panic room: windowless. All walls.
8.2The cover sheet for the author’s Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Stasi) file.
8.3The abandoned Green Zone in Nicosia, keeping the Turkish Cypriots and the Greek Cypriots apart in the last walled city of Europe.
8.4The Cyprus Green Line is a ghost-town swath across the island, a scar leaving echoes of emptiness since 1974.
8.5A police dummy at work on the highway outside Addis Ababa, alongside a makeshift wall of corrugated metal.
9.1The wall of one of the “slave castles” on the Ghana coast. Through holes in the walls like this one captive Africans bound for slavery were loaded on ships headed for the Americas.
12.1Along even the most fraught borderlines in the world—such as Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall—barriers eventually become routine stops for tourists’ smiles at the camera.
12.2The Virgin of Guadalupe provides comfort—faded, peeling and sharing a sun-bleached wall with graffiti tags in El Centro, California.
14.1Sound walls keep much of the roar of traffic confined to the Autostrada without blocking the view at Arno in Tuscany.
14.2The pragmatic use of a Portland, Oregon, wall: advertising.
19.1A retaining wall north of the border in California on Highway 101 holding back a hillside threatening to slide a blockade of mud across the crucial coastal corridor.
19.2The border as business. Modest lodgings like this Calexico motel greet travelers coming across the border from cosmopolitan Mexicali.
21.1A smoke break up against a wall in Varadero, Cuba.
22.1The severe and serpentine borderline wall separating Fortress America from the Global South at Tijuana.
22.2With prototypes for Trump’s wall as a backdrop, a family walks along the borderline on the Tijuana side. Note the little girl riding on the bike: Her angelic face illustrates the front cover of Up Against the Wall.
I am prejudiced to favor immigrants. How can I not be? My father came through Ellis Island. I have the page from the logbook where his arrival was recorded by the immigration officer on duty. He answered all the questions to the satisfaction of the inspector.
“Whether a polygamist?”
“No.”
“Whether an anarchist?”
“No.”
And Question 24:
Whether a person believes in or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law, or who disbelieves in or is opposed to organized government, or who advocates the assassination of public officials, or who advocates or teaches the unlawful destruction of property, or is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining and teaching disbelief in or opposition to organized government or which teaches the unlawful destruction of property, or who advocates or teaches the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of specific individuals or of officers in general, of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government because of his or their official character?
“No,” my father answered. It was 1923 and America was still more worried about immigrating anarchists from Middle Europe than Mexicans coming north.
“You’re an American by birth,” my father repeatedly reminded me. “I’m an American by choice.”
Years ago, my wife Sheila and I spent days searching the bowels of the La Porte County courthouse in Indiana, finally finding her grandfather’s naturalization papers.
“It is my bona fide intention,” he swore to the clerk of the La Porte County Court in 1913, “to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary.”
We secured the address of the house in what used to be called the Poletown section of La Porte where her mother lived before immigrating to California. Poletown was still on the wrong side of the tracks. The railroad bisects La Porte. South of the ornate courthouse, gracious Victorian mansions line Michigan Avenue under a canopy of well-established trees. But east of downtown and north across the tracks the boxy houses are humble, packed into the rusting factory and warehouse district. The wrong side of the tracks is the usual entry point in an American city for immigrants. And in La Porte, Poletown was filling up with Mexicans (along with other immigrants from south of the Rio Grande), Mexican restaurants and Mexican grocery stores.
Radical Change
In the summer of 2001, just weeks before the September 11 attacks, I wrote the following essay for the San Francisco Chronicle, a strident call to open the southern U.S. border to Mexicans who wish to come north:
We Americans work hard to keep Mexicans out of the United States, Mexicans who want to wash our dishes and pick our crops. Those crops need picking and those dishes need washing, so workers come north despite our best efforts. America ought to open and
