Voices of Mexico no. 107

Our Voice

The first border is inside us, in the split between our psyche and our soma. Although connected, the mind and the body do not always operate in harmony, so this first division exists in each one of us. The next frontier extends to the skin that contains us; that is the first boundary that separates us from others. It offers different responses to aggression, fear, love; it is the basis on which we define and identify ourselves.

However, very probably, when we hear the word “borders,” we think of the national spaces contained by them, territories; the times we live in make this obvious. I referred elsewhere to the paradox of North America today when products flow freely while many, many human beings are detained at the edges of the countries of the region, making border crossings a kind of limbo.

Racist and anti-immigrant discourses that divide one population from another have been built around the border, around its hundreds-of-years’ old history. But strategies have also been devised that allow the human beings separated by them to meet again, even if only by voice or virtually. The threat of continuing Trump’s wall has prompted creative responses by inhabitants of one and the other side, artists, and civil society.