Enrique García Naranjo - Tombstone Checkpoint

 

So, I am getting ready for this poetry performance in front of 60 to 70 high school students in Douglas, Arizona. A town that sits about five minutes away from the US-Mexico border. I am getting ready to read this poem I wrote about my barrio, the barrio I lived in for the majority of my teenage years. As I am getting ready for this poem, I look into the crowd and I see all the sleepy and uninterested faces. Quickly I win them over with this poem I wrote about the holiness of tacos and the unrelenting spirit of Mexican grandmothers. And right after that poem, I ask them to pull out pencils and paper for them to write. I give them a prompt, one of my favorite prompts when I am doing this sort of thing, The city within my chest.

 

And after that, I leave the school with my partner, Selena, who drove up there with me. I am reflecting on the students and their poems. Specifically on the way they wrote these poems, right, bilingually, in English and Spanish. A real reflection of who they are as people, people between cultures, between languages, fronterizas y fronterizos, people of the border. As we are on our way back to Tucson and the entire workshop still fresh in my mind, we are passing Tombstone, Arizona, where a border patrol checkpoint sits. If you have been there, you know that there are quite a few border patrol checkpoints. 

 

As we are passing it, I notice that it is closed, which is a rare sight. So, I try to make sure that I am not seeing an illusion. As I am doing that, I look in the rearview and I see a car catching up to us, speeding up. As I am trying to do all these things at the same time, and peering into the rearview and seeing who might be following us, I see the flash of red and white blue lights. At first, I think it is a cop. But as we park and I see the officers step out of the vehicle, I see the green of their uniform and I realize it is border patrol. My shoulders tense and my heart drops. And instantly in my head, I run the instructions my dad gave me when I was younger, if I were ever apprehended by migra, do these three things. Sit up, look the officer in the eye, answer all the questions.

 

In third grade, there was a white boy who stood up in class and started yelling, "I am going to call border patrol and deport all the Mexicans in school." I remember running as fast as my brown feet would allow with tears in my eyes, hoping I got home to make sure that my parents were still there, because I lived in that reality. I was born on this side, the American side, which makes me a citizen. But the majority of my family are undocumented. We are a mixed-status family. So, I grew up with their stories of crossing the border, of what border patrol does to people who look like me. And it was terrifying. We lived in the shadows. And in the shadows, silence is survival.

 

So, all this is running in my head. I see the officer walking towards us and I realize, yeah, I am a citizen. But Selena, my partner, is undocumented. Although she has DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and technically we got documentation that allows us and permits us to be here legally, documents fall flat in situations like this. Documents don’t change the color of our skin. So, the officer shows up to the window. I put the window down to engage with the officer, and I notice his gun. I immediately think about José Antonio Elena, a 16-year-old Mexican killed by border patrol in Nogales for holding rocks in his hand. I am stunned in that fear and that disempowerment of not knowing how the situation would end up.

 

So, the officer begins the interaction, asking us what our business is in Tombstone, where we are coming from, where we are going, and asks Selena where she is from. Selena says, "Oakland." "Oakland? Oh, man. Are you going to stab me?" We are both like, “What the hell?” Selena says, "No,” thankfully. [audience laughter] So, then he proceeds to ask if he could go to the trunk to check if we had a dead body in the back. Again chuckling and again us being like, “What’s going on? What the hell?” So, I am like, “All right, man.” I open up the trunk, he goes back to review it and I realize he is making jokes. He is making this a lighthearted situation. 

 

And for him, that’s the reality. But for us, at any moment, we trip up, at any moment we give him more suspicion, because we already, suspicion being brown, three things can happen in that situation. Detention, deportation, death. I know the stories. I have heard them. It is not unheard of for brown folks to go to those things, citizens or undocumented. So, he comes back to the window, Selena's passenger side, and says, "Well, you two look like you could be American citizens. Have a pleasant day," and he lets us go. As we are driving off, Selena is boiling in her seat, breaking down every instance of that situation, running it by me. And I am quiet. 

 

I am running that sentence over and over and over in my head, "You two look like you could be citizens." But what good does that do me? How can I look like a citizen if I was stopped precisely for the reason of how I look? And it always comes to this for a fronterizo or a fronteriza, always on the brink of being, always having to prove that we are something. I think of that old Mexican saying, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá,” not from here, not from there. And this flux and this brink that we exist in. 

 

I think about the students in Douglas. I think about their poems, and their bravery to write their narrative and the way they speak. I think about my parents, I think about Selena, I think about myself and I realize how we as fronterizos y fronterizas are caught in this flux between citizen and alien, between silence and disruption, between here and there. All told, the situation with the officer lasted about 10 minutes and never escalated far beyond the awkwardness and the microaggressions. And through it all, Selena and I were happy that we still had our lives. The thing we could have lost at that moment, if anything. We are happy, for the most part, that we are still free.