Banal Violence

TUCSON, AZ

Living in a militarized border region, even temporarily, forces one to confront paradoxes and contradictions.  The border captures and moves.  It's a place that stops movement and lets some of it continue.  It piles up movement and disperses it.  It concentrates people who search for somewhere else to go.

It's hard to call violence banal, but that's how it feels.  The machinery of the border is intricate and routine.  It's militarized and hi-tech.  It's computerized.  It's a turnstile.  It's Border Patrol agents on bicycles, on ATVs, standing at checkpoints, standing at ports of entry.  It's drug-sniffing dogs.  It's private contractors building bigger walls.  It's Border Patrol trucks topped with camper shells that contain human cargo.  It's ICE transport vehicles.  It's local police calling Border Patrol to "translate" or "verify identification." 

Every bit of this work, and the local, state, and federal policies and funding that support it, add up to what feels like a slow-moving humanitarian crisis.  Any one of the hundreds of thousands of lives of migrants caught up in the system captures a mundane truth of its daily banality.  These repetitions add up and promise to create a single category called illegality that legitimizes these myriad abuses folds in all individual  experiences. 

Establishing the US-Mexico boundary has been a project of military-backed territorialization for well over a century.  But particularly since the 1990s, people living in the border regions have experienced an increased militarization.  The creeping changes do not inure people to the violence; many oppose and protest the border wall, organize to keep loved ones from being deported, conduct know your rights trainings, monitor and document abuses by law enforcement, and provide direct aid.  Some of this work is dedicated to building power to stop the abuses, create freedom of movement. Most of this work is also mundane, how else to confront a crisis that unfolds everyday?

In the face of this systemic crisis, it seems that recapturing the individual makes it all real again, makes the banality horrifying, saddening, sickening (even capturing emotions, the affective dimension, is difficult). And so how to also speak individually, and recognize people who look like my neighbors, people who are charismatic, people who are shy, people who have obligations, people who are searching for some place for themselves? How to support Marlen, one young Tucson resident's desire to be a school teacher and mother and community member and also make it possible for thousands of flowers to blossom? That's the tricky line so many are walking, all the while laughing and crying, mourning and rejoicing, healing and hurting, dropping out and organizing.