AVERAGE VELOCITY
by Lucy Kirkman
August 2021
"Another hypothesis might be that America is no longer what it was, but is continuing on its course; its power has entered a phase of hysteresis. Hysteresis: the process whereby something continues to develop by inertia, whereby an effect persists even when its cause has disappeared."[1]
Paco and I drive west along the border wall near Sasabe, Arizona, stopping to look at the different eras of wall that have been constructed, or pulled up and piled in mangled heaps near the clean cut dirt road. This road is a Trump-era road, wide and graded flat for the heavy construction machinery needed to erect the thirty foot steel monstrosity. It cuts through blasted mountains, rock debris lines its edge. We see the rock’s morphology in these newly-exposed walls, the layering of sediment in seams deposited over millennia. We drive for less than five minutes before we are tailed by two border patrol trucks. One of them pulls us over, and an angry-looking white man asks us what we’re doing, and lies, tries to tell us this is a “no-trespass” road. “Isn’t this road public property?” Paco asks. “Well, it doesn’t go far,” the agent concedes, caught by someone who knows their tricks. We drive on, with one of the border patrol trucks giving us a soft-tail until we reach the end of the thirty foot wall, the end of the road scar.
Along the border between Arizona and Mexico, since 2019, 225 miles of new border wall, steel slats thirty feet high, have been built. The average cost to build one mile of border wall is $20 million, and based on this the sum spent on Arizona’s border wall is $4.5 billion. In areas of Arizona’s more inaccessible terrain, reports state that the cost could be as high as $41 million per mile, so the real figure is much higher. If time is money, then money could also be time, and the materiality of the border wall represents both. Time, distance, and speed. How long will this structure last? Which of its dimensions, or consequences?
After living in and driving the Southwest for some years, I am sometimes fooled into thinking that all the rock here, the geology, must be soft. Roads and highways are carved into the undulating hills, which are sliced through and shaved down, coated with tar and pebble for ease of travel, so that I press my foot down and glide. But this is an illusion – the rock is not soft, but rather the determination of creating this infrastructure is as hard, and sometimes harder, than the rock itself. And there is something else here. These roads and highways are built for speed. The wall is an exception to this dynamic desire – it states clearly that the United States will create, create, create (through destruction) only up to a point, a delusion of speed and acceleration, and that this dystopian project has well defined limitations.
***
I read Baudrillard’s America during this trip, which at times reads absurd, others – strangely canny. His commentary on Reagan’s America feels unnaturally applicable to the past four years, even now, in its aftermath, afterlife, or continuation. For we know that the Trump era is not a singular event or an unexpected phenomenon – rather it is the consequence of the momentum of US culture and politics. Inertia describes a principle of motion, Newton’s first law: a thing at rest will continue in a state of rest, and (this “and” is critical) an object in motion will continue in a uniform state of motion unless acted on by an external force. Baudrillard’s commentary on the desert feels like it is at times essentialized, at times the ravings of a dehydrated madman, but his description of speed feels insightful, especially if we place it in conversation with the inertia of immigration policy: “Speed is not a vegetal thing. It is nearer to the mineral, to refraction through a crystal, and it is already the site of a catastrophe, of a squandering of time.”[2] This speed, this hysteresis whose effects proliferate, is tangible and intangible, but always feels like the site of a catastrophe inscribing itself again and again in the lives and landscapes of the border.
The visuals of the wall do the heavy-lifting of its political work. It is massive, and hard to capture the sheer scale of its enormity. It bears down on the landscape, slicing it, and I stand at the base feeling small and overwhelmed. The space between the huge metal beams is a few inches, giving it an impermeability that its predecessors never had. It cuts off the landscape beyond it, unless your face is close, your eye held to the gap. The vastness of the desert evokes a different kind of overwhelm – the sublimity of expanse creates a feeling of opening up, of being opened up and evaporated and thus annihilating the singular self. The expansiveness and scale of the wall, however, is a trap – up close it creates a feeling of limitation, which is its physical and psychic function, of power that conflicts with the seeming openness of the desert.
There are vantage points along the Arizona-Mexico border through which you can glimpse a different time, a different reality. And these glimpses highlight the starkness of the wall’s consequences. Large gates, medieval in size, are welded open in the washes to let the monsoon deluge through. Rain transforms the desert in a week, the dusty green of the mesquite turns translucent, neon green, the ocotillos become fluffy with leaves. The grasses and small seedlings shoot up in bursts. After last year’s drought, the rain makes everything new, giving the July heat a tropical, heavy edge. We stand in the openings, peering through to the sandy riverbeds on the Mexican side. Along the tops of hills you can see over the wall into Mexico, and if you hold your hand halfway up your face and block out the metal snake you could imagine a different kind of border.
Baudrillard writes, “if America is no longer the monopolistic center of world power, this is not because it has lost power, but simply because there is no centre anymore. It has, rather, become the orbit of an imaginary power to which everyone refers… America has retained power, both political and cultural, but it is now power as a special effect.”[3] These special effects in the desert come at great cost. The planes, this wall, the surveillance towers and the razor-sharp barbed wire, the border patrol trucks scrambling like white rats along the so-called border, these are the working equivalences of the special effect of Trump, the inflammatory speeches delivered to MAGA hat-wearing crowds, the instantaneity of Twitter, the tan and toupee, the ostentatious facades of the hotels and casinos, and, indeed, the White House Christmas displays. “Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction.”[4] This is the catastrophe of this time – that catastrophe is made credible at any cost.
***
Twenty miles from the border wall, where it is no longer visible, I spend a morning walking up and down a canyon with Matisse, a group of students, and a rancher. We haul rocks to make barriers along the creek bed to slow the water, to let it sink in. Erosion is a concern for all the farmers around here, where long dry seasons wither young plants, and torrential summer rain washes away the upper crust of the earth. It is hot and muggy, my legs feel heavy. The rancher points to rock structures that various groups of students built two, three, five years ago along the creek. He points to the grasses and the desert tobacco that emerges from the sand, “These plants are able to grow and wouldn’t be here if we weren’t slowing the water,” he explains. I no longer move quickly, habituated as I have become to a more sedentary lifestyle, reading and writing in the desert heat. My body aches the next day from even moderate amounts of exercise, reminding me how far I am from physical work, from necessity, from speed at the scale of the body.
With the students we write collective poems about the mechanics of flight, allergies and pores, strange men and rocks and rain. The two headed cow stared into the sky… reappears later: a cow head in flames in the valley. Immaculate corpse: the associative connections transfer as if we are inhabiting, for a brief moment, a collective brain, and bristle next to each other. We know small slices of each other, only, but slices nonetheless. I see small slices of the desert, the people who live here, the people who pass through, the landscape and the architecture. I catch glimpses – that’s all. The students have their own ways of thinking about the borderlands, and some of them seem impervious to the politics of what is happening less than twenty miles away. Some of them have family in Mexico, and talk about Mexico as “home,” even though they have lived, officially,in the US since birth. As an outsider I see the different narratives of the border coming into contact here, in the classroom with these students. I feel my understanding reframed as less stable, and rather as something that is traveling through landscapes.
***
Paco and I meet with Father Pete, a Jesuit Priest who has been working in the county for over twenty years. We catch the end half of his mass, wherein the homily is about welcoming the stranger. After mass he changes out of his green robe into slacks and a button down and a huge cowboy hat. We get breakfast at a café in a small touristy shopping center in Tubac, faux adobe and all. The sound of the juicer, where the barista deposits whole cucumbers and apples, intermittently drowns out our conversation. Father Pete used to work for Immigration and Naturalization Services in the 90’s, overseeing the spiritual needs of those in private and government detention centers. He would check on each detainee’s religious affiliation and make sure that if they were Catholic, there would be visits from a priest, Jewish, a rabbi, Muslim, an imam, and so on. After 9/11, he says, U.S. immigration enforcement radically changed, and he quickly abandoned government work. Now Father Pete is a full-time priest, and says mass on Sundays in various towns along the border. When we ask him about the demographics of his congregations, he admits that while many support migrants, others adamantly believe in the need for a wall. He explains that it is difficult, “like family is difficult.”
To understand the changes instituted by the government with regards to immigration since 9/11, I find it helpful to refer to Giorgio Agamben’s writing, where he describes the “state of exception” as the paradigm for modern governments[5]. In periods of political crisis governments can adopt “exceptional measures” in which the law is suspended, the exception to the law is part of the law itself, which creates a gray area between legality and politics that leaves citizens as both bound and abandoned to the law. If the state of exception is the norm for the post-9/11 political landscape, the “immigration crisis,” and more recently the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, then the law is subject to radical restructuring at any given moment. The physical structure of the wall gives a new meaning to the phrase “political landscape,” where politics has taken on a permanent spatial rearrangement. The state of exception rules now, as it has done before: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the expansion of surveillance technology, the construction of the border wall, constant deportations, and the enactment of Title 42 to deny asylum seekers entry to the US. Agamben continues “the state of exception appears as a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism,” and it becomes clear here that we are towing a razor-sharp line between the two.[6]
I cannot write a full account of all the good work that has been happening in relation with the border. So many individuals, organizations, and communities have, for years and years and especially in the last few, been working to support migrants, provide aid and care, legal services, have been protecting borderlands ecologies, have been fostering relationships and standing against the tyranny of US immigration policy and policing. Trump’s wall represents a catastrophic failure in the political system. In spite of widespread protest, direct action, organizing, against common and economic sense, in spite of appeals and pleas, against environmental and social impact, against care, against casualties, in spite of violent interference in Central America, we will continue to face the border wall and its effects.
***
We drive, always driving in the Southwest it seems, along the border wall from Douglas towards Guadeloupe Canyon. We are with two nuns who work with migrants in Agua Prieta. This is a section of the wall that is continuous for more than thirty miles. The going is slow – the terrain is steeply undulating and there has been rain in the last few weeks. We stop along the way to see crosses that the nuns have placed in the desert, with trinkets nestled in the rocks or hung on the wood, in commemoration of those who have died on their journeys to enter the US. Names are carefully painted along the horizonal piece of wood, sometimes dates. The nuns wanted to show us one site in particular, along the course of their annual prayer walk for those who have crossed and who will cross. We stop and get out the car. We look around. “It’s gone,” says one of them. “The cross is gone.”
At the end of the road we drive with the nuns we see that Guadeloupe Canyon has been blasted almost out of recognition – the dark, weathered rock and vegetation now laced with freshly exposed yellow and purple graded roads, huge chunks of surface sloughed off. It feels complicated, to be here, seeing these sites of death, destruction, and detention or deportation, while we are still living and driving along, in a kind of border tourism. If a writer’s role is to depict in words some kind of truth then this is no place for a writer. No place for an outsider, especially someone like me who has crossed many borders to be near this one.
The speed with which the border wall was constructed is made plain this summer, after a single monsoon season. A summer of no rain in conjunction with the state of exception enacted during the onset of COVID in 2020 allowed contractors to rush forward, onward, upward with the wall. Now, we see the wall’s foundations being carved out by the force of the summer deluge, the construction over river washes showing no signs of engineering prudence, no real drainage systems. As impressive as the wall is in terms of height and length and straightness, the $20 million per mile construction feels darkly ludicrous.
But there has been enough theorizing of the wall, of immigration policy, of immigration itself in this place. As a visitor to this place I can add nothing substantial. A girl with lavender sneakers waits near the wide scar of the construction road with no more and no less than a backpack. She waits for a border patrol agent, hoping to get asylum and live with her aunt in the United States. She has travelled for months to get here, seventeen and alone. Paco speaks with her aunt on the phone, and hands it to her. While she talks he whispers to me, passing on information from her aunt that she was not safe in the place that she came from, that her life was in danger. I have no Spanish, so Paco translates between her and the border patrol agent. I rack my brain for the phrase “vaya con dios,” not knowing if it is appropriate, or if this will be any comfort in her present state. Instead I stand with her in the sweltering heat, sharing water and granola bars, and say, “it’s going to be ok, you’re going to be ok,” more for myself than her as we do not speak each other’s languages. She is on the verge of tears. After we leave her I cannot speak for the rest of the day, not really.
The wall, the wall! How many times have I said this, thought this, written this? When I write “the wall” I do not mean the wall. I do, and I don’t. I mean the things that have happened, years, decades, and centuries in the making, over vast distances, the many people wittingly and unwittingly involved. And the things that are still happening now – the hysteresis embodied in this steel structure. I mean the velocity of politics, forward and backward, still for a second in this moment while I pause to think.
There is a particular distance from the border, a mile or two away, when the wall looks small, just a smudged brown line in the rocky hills. Since Biden took office the wall construction has been halted, leaving some of the land intact, openings and apertures that still contain some possibility. And left behind are half-finished patches of wall, abandoned muster sites, some still spotted with silent mechanical beasts and guarded by one or two security guards dozing in their trucks. A pair of deer walks across the graded road, up to the wall. They stand still, a few yards from it, for a few seconds, then turn and retrace their steps into the brush. No passage today. Time, like money, passes, and one day this snaking steel blockade will lie in mangled heaps like its forebears. I hope this will be true, that the rain will wash its feet out from underneath, and not because something more monstrous will take its place.
[1]Jean Baudrillard, America (Verso, 2010), 126.
[2]Baudrillard, 7.
[3]Baudrillard, 117.
[4]Baudrillard, 119.
[5]Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception(University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.
[6]Agamben, 2.