Immigrants, Dreamers, And The Wall: The Issues That Never Went Away

For a while it served as the most combustible hysteria-inducing political bogey to shake our world – immigrants from south of the border, the promise of a wall, the swelling caravan of Latin America’s unwashed heading towards us. Then it suddenly went away. In part because the non-existent crisis completed its function as a hoary election gimmick, overblown in the first place. In part, because the horrors of the detention camps worked all too well as disincentive to migrants. And, finally Covid froze all large population flows.

How remote and unimportant it all seems now, not a topic to trouble our abundance of concerns for the upcoming election. It won’t be the first or last incendiary theme picked up and dropped as a passing distraction by the Trump folks. Yet the underlying structural realities have scarcely shifted, so the issues will return, will need to be resolved, may indeed be artificially reignited to influence voters. Herewith some events pertaining to the matter that will help clarify the mind.

First up in heft and drama is the documentary entitled “Blood On The Wall” premiering September 30^th on the National Geographic Channel by Goldcrest Films – Nick Quested and Sebastian Junger’s documentary production arm. The reader will recall that the near-legendary Junger is the investigative journalist and war reporter, winner of numerous awards, who (among many other things) wrote “The Perfect Storm” and produced the documentary “Restrepo” where he embedded with US soldiers at a constantly embattled forward base in Afghanistan. This latest venture looks at realities south of the border in Mexico, an utterly breathtaking achievement of the highest caliber. It takes three complicated narratives and interweaves them with a kind of orchestral cadence so that the viewer never breaks free of its spell til the credits roll – this despite delivering jolt after jolt of shocking exposes.

By the end, we haven’t merely watched a film about Mexican drug cartels, about the notorious human caravan heading to the US, and about Mexico’s sociopolitical history – we have lived it all personally, intensely. Along the way, we have travelled in a car with a cartel hit man as he tells his story, with ‘mules’ driving large caches of cocaine past US border guards, with strangely sympathetic but murderous cartel militia in the back of trucks. We understand, in effect, how perfectly ordinary decent folk find themselves trammelled up in a vile profession. We do not forget how vile because we see recurrent footage of their merciless crimes as part of the sociopolitical history: the multiple hangings off bridges, the abduction and mass murder of innocents being unearthed by their families, and not least the transformation of once-glam Acapulco into killing fields.

This last is told from the perspective of a local photographer-reporter working the streets. It’s his job to capture images of tortured torsos, headless bodies and the like day in day out. He reveals what everybody knows – that the police scarcely interfere with the mayhem. And that the mayhem was unleashed when the cartels were decapitated by law-enforcement, deprived of their bosses, thereby igniting endless renewed turf wars. The photographer’s story illustrates the show’s particular peerless strength – telling the stories through participants’ eyes. Pause a moment and think what that means. It means getting the most apparently irredeemable characters to co-operate with the project. It means gaining their trust. How was that possible? According to Nick Quested he did it by distributing to them his last documentary ‘Hell On Earth: The Rise of Isis And the Fall of Syria’. An explanation almost impossible to believe – unless you’ve actually seen the 2016 film which depicts with enormous sympathy and brutal honesty and astonishing access the only place on earth more terrifying than Mexico’s cartelistan.

Meanwhile we also follow the human caravan story as it gathers numbers and struggles from Central America up through Mexico. We live it through the eyes of a matriarch marshalling her brood of little kids and working with other mothers to survive the ordeal of crowds, predators and hunger. But chiefly we experience it through a pretty 16-year-old lass coming up from Honduras, suddenly realizing the perils of her desperate undertaking, fearfully seeking her lost boyfriend who must protect her. They find each other and their old neighborhood friends and for a moment it’s an adventure. But only for a moment. Soon they’re all begging for food, turning ragged and ingesting strange intoxicants as teenagers are prone to do. It will surely all go badly wrong. Her boyfriend has turned back. But let us stop there – the rest is in the film.

We find out how Mexico got to this extremity. The political corruption, the indigenous issues, the poverty, the bottomless demand for drugs on US streets. Some of it we already knew. Yet the overarching narrative never palls, never fragments, largely because of the exquisite editing skill of the filmmakers. Quested chose to put subtly different color filters on the differing stories to make them familiar as they recede and repeat. He started out in his youth making music videos where use of color played an important role. Watch the show for all the reasons above, for its human drama and its astonishing inside access, but above all for its supreme expression of the art of film in any genre.

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Talking about art, there cannot be many examples of DACA status being granted to young citizenship aspirants aka ‘dreamers’ – for their virtuosity as artists! The reader might recall that the current White House froze the DACA program and left many DACA hopefuls stranded, stateless and illegal. DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival. In effect, kids whose families came into the US illegally got the chance to become legal through this program. But they had to be exceptional kids. Possibly unique is the case of Raul De Lara who won his wings by proving himself gifted as a sculptor and installation artist. Surely the toughest of all possible categories in which to gain DACA status. Yet De Lara, now 29, consistently proved himself. He graduated top of his Texas high-school class. He got a Fulbright scholarship to study art at graduate level by which time he’d had some 40 shows around the country. At age 20 he beat out thousands of highly renowned professionals in music, architecture, art and design to come second in a national competition sponsored by Hevadurra Tequila to exhibit at Miami Art Basel. He has just completed a residency at the prestigious Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Cape Cod. Now he has a show at a major venue in Manhattan, Ethan Cohen Gallery (and one at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia simultaneously).

Yet things started out most unpropitiously for young De Lara. His family lived in Mexico’s cartel country, Sinaloa, where his father practiced architecture, his mother interior décor. One day, their building was shot up in a drug-related crossfire. His father uprooted the family and moved north near the US border. De Lara was a year old. There he stayed attending a Catholic School until one day, at age 12, his father uprooted the family again just ahead of trouble and they fled to the US, ostensibly as tourists visiting relatives in Leander, Texas. Raul didn’t speak English. They stayed, illegally. He attended the local high-school. He did undergrad in Austin, and graduate school in Richmond, Va. At high-school he managed to get sponsorship for doing extreme BMX bicycle sports, during college waitered in Mexican restaurants. Along with his family he spent many years in a legal no-man’s-land awaiting normalization. When he applied for DACA status, he did so fearfully because all the details he had to supply such as home address, family name and the like could equally have led to everyone’s detainment and expulsion. Yet he prevailed and achieved consistently, never relinquishing his deepest calling. If anybody has earned the right to pursue his American dream it’s De Lara.

His show at Ethan Cohen Gallery gives us a taste of De Lara’s themes. But first the gallery, one of New York’s top-of-the-line storied venues. Ethan Cohen started the gallery in the late 1980s by showing contemporary Chinese artists about whom the world knew nothing at the time. Many have become internationally-renowned. They included the likes of Ai Weiwei, whom Cohen debuted in America. There’s a reason why Ethan had the contacts to do such things – his father taught Chinese and East Asian Law at Harvard and his mother wrote the first books about modern Chinese art. They travelled often to China when few outsiders did. Their young son got to meet the country’s emerging top artists in person when no one else had comparable access. Over the years Ethan Cohen expanded his roster to include global talent of De Lara’s caliber.

De Lara’s work is always obliquely autobiographical, presenting hand-crafted objects iconizing the barbed adversity of his growing up years. Mordantly surrealistic, they have a pellucid clarity as of a child envisioning familiar objects in a semi-cruel dream. The first item upon entry to Ethan Cohen’s triplex gallery space is a large cactus fashioned out of wood, painted green and adorned with trompe-l’oeil self-references such as the little blue car carved into a cactus paddle denoting the vehicle originally used by the family to escape Mexico. At the gallery’s center sits a fearsome looking object described by the artist as a “left-handed Cactus school desk with over 2000 hand-carved needles”. It commemorates his years at Catholic school being punished by nuns for being left-handed. Along the walls are examples of his ‘tired tools’ series, an arching broom handle resting on its brush, an undulating spade hanging on clothes hooks, each betokening the years he labored to exhaustion with others like him in stateless fear and obscurity doing survival jobs.

Raul de Lara’s sculptures like Goldcrest’s documentary “Blood On The Wall” personalize the fellow humans we don’t see in our midst, or at our borders and detention camps. Innocent folk criminalized by murderous gangs at their back and rigid laws up ahead, they have learned to be invisible to slip through the cracks. For now, they’ve largely rejoined the shadows amid Covid conditions but surely not for long.

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Sympathy for the existential agony of migrants does not equate to a slam-dunk argument for open borders and dissolution of the nation-state. A modicum of rationality will show us that uncontrolled mass-movements across evaporating borders cannot work – not for the migrants nor for the original populations. Site-specific cultures and languages, local employment, environmental standards, customs and traditions, bacterial resistances and much else will be compromised. Anyway, given the option, most people prefer to stay in their own habitat. Given the option – increasingly they don’t have that choice owing to climatic changes, civil wars, hunger, poverty etc. The US cannot unilaterally impose sanity and peace on ever more distant troubled places to forestall immigration – short of invading everywhere to do so. We know how that goes. Yet solutions must be found, based on improving the living conditions in countries of origin. Herewith an example of a model that works, as yet a modest mid-sized initiative by private US citizens, focused thus far mostly on Latin America and especially Peru, but also on Bulgaria, Guatemala and Tanzania. Mexico comes next.

The organization is called Sustainable Preservation Initiative. It’s not a micro-lending but more a long-term micro-investing enterprise, one that doesn’t recoup its investments so much as reinvest in its projects – mostly directed at women in the communities. SPI has been around for over a decade and took a while to get its model right. It now manages 15 sites with several hundred women, increasing into the thousands next year. Initially, the purpose was to preserve far-flung archeological sites by stabilizing communities that abut them, but as time passed SPI found itself in the business of teaching business skills, that is teaching locals how to achieve sustainable revenues for their community. It focused on crafts, tourism, guest houses near architectural sites and the like. Through trial and error it arrived at an optimum function – to set up business schools and monitor their efficacy.

Currently the most successful scalable example, one of several in Peru, by the name of Pachacamac sits on the edge of Lima in a community that sees a great deal of turnover with a large migrant population. It has returned almost twice the initial investment in five years. The mission, according to SPI’s executive director Larry Coben, is to teach “basic business and management skills, accounting, legal issues, customer service, sales and the like”. Coben is chairman of NRG Energy
NRG
, a fortune 200 electric power company, so he knows from business. He adds that SPI aims at ameliorating problems at several levels simultaneously, “whether it’s poverty alleviation, gender inequality, immigration, cultural heritage or even social justice issues – it’s a wholistic model that succeeds across boundaries and categories.”

The germaine category for our purposes is the immigration one. Here, then, is an example of how so much suffering abroad and political polarization at home can be stemmed. This is the kind of initiative, expanded and multiplied, that will make a difference and deserves our support maximally.