Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

Border wall and "stories preserved by women"
June 17, 2008

Though the big news around here right now is those Bengal tigers for sale at Wal*Mart's parking lot, I'm hoping you'll instead consider a much bigger beast threatening to maul the South Texas landscape.

Michelle Garcia's piece in the Washington Post last month, "On the Texas Borderline, A Solid, if Invisible, Wall" is getting lots of well-deserved attention.  Her entry this weekend on the WIMN's Voices blog will link you to the article and give you a taste of why this native South Texan sees the wall as a women's issue:

But my feelings about this border wall, the reasons why this report had to go “personal” spring from stories embedded in the land, family stories, stories of men and revolution, of the Rangers and vigilantes who slaughtered thousands of Tejanos. Those stories mostly published in books by men are preserved in families like mine by the women, dogged researchers who flock to genealogy conferences and knit together the quilt of my past, my heritage.

But I’m still trying to figure out why I feel the border wall issue should be so important to women, the argument I can make other than [that] the public face of opposition is a woman. Eloisa Tamez has led the legal fight to stop the wall from tearing through her property...

Tamez is a University of Texas-Brownsville nursing professor and Lipan Apache activist whose land downriver in El Calaboz is famously threatened by the wall project.

This new four-minute video by Brownsville documentarian Matt Smith makes for a good overview:

Posted by Bruce Jensen on June 17, 2008 | Comments (0)