Tortillas: A Cultural History

7 • THE IMMIGRANT TORTILLA

107 Chapter 7 • • • THE IMMIGRANT TORTILLA UN D O CU M E N T E D Alone, Facing foreign lights He hears whispered voices, distantly: This bridge takes you to oblivion, It changes your name. Nothing will be yours now, Listen to the departing train, The wind rubbing against the evening, Nothing will be yours now And when you return You’ll bring under your fingernails, your touch, your breath, The feeling of having visited The underside of your dreams. Nothing will be yours now As were the games of childhood, Those village gardens, The same memory. ENRIQUE CORTÁZAR (2004) (Translated by Jimmy Santiago Baca) In 1994 the single strand of cable marking the international border between San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, was replaced 108 Chapter 7 with an eighteen-foot barrier. Called Operation Gatekeeper, the new border strategy by the United States began with the construction of fourteen miles of steel fence stretching from the inland desert to the beach. When construction workers reached the Pacific Ocean they kept going and sunk steel pillars into the sand three hundred feet into the ocean surf. Supporters called it the “Fence,” intended to deter unauthorized immigration and contraband and enhance national security . Opponents called it the “Border Wall,” a new form of the old Berlin Wall separating East Germany from West Germany. They argued it created social divisions, encouraged migrant smuggling, and forced the desperate to seek alternative routes through the rocky canyons and dangerous desert. But the name that stuck was the “Tortilla Wall.” The farmer pushed out from worn-out land in Oaxaca; the teacher pulled to a job in Los Angeles; the Tijuana maid hired to cook and clean for the California housewife; the college student born in the United States, raised in Mexico, and living his dream; the narco-orphan child; and the people smuggler—documented and undocumented, they all began their journey with a knapsack stuffed with tortillas. To those on the American side, the “Tortilla Wall” was a symbol of complicated immigration and border security issues, separate from the tortilla cuisine consumed with gusto. For many Mexicans and Central Americans , nicknaming it the “Tortilla Wall” was an unfriendly gesture , a derogatory reference to the cultural and culinary staple created from cooking techniques dating back to Mesoamerica. Today, almost seven hundred miles of strategically placed single, double, or triple “Tortilla Walls” stretch along the more than two thousand miles of the U.S. border with Mexico. Do the high-tech border fences reduce illegal crossings? “The fencing is just another tool that we have. It helps to slow down the entry of these people to give our agents a chance to make an arrest. Because a fence alone isn’t going to stop people from coming The Immigrant Tortilla 109 in,” said Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Michael Jimenez in an interview with Ruxandra Guidi. “Human beings have more ideas than any device,” said an immigrant-smuggling coyote in the documentary The Fence. Whether you believe the border fences are part of what needs to be reformed or part of the solution, whether you want to cut the flow of immigrants to the United States or increase the flow of ideas and services across the border, the United States and Mexico are connected. Tens of thousands of documented and undocumented immigrants, largely from Mexico and Central America, cross the Mexican border into the United States each year. For decades, waves of immigrants born in Mexico—an estimated twelve million, more than any other single country— migrated to the United States. But in 2012, the weak U.S. economy slowed jobs in the housing construction market, historically “Tortilla Wall” border fence looking from Las Playas in Tijuana on the Mexican side into the United States in San Diego County, California. (Courtesy of Kimberly Heinle, Trans-Border Institute, University of San Diego, San Diego, California) 110 Chapter 7 a job source for immigrant labor, while in Mexico the government broadened its free market economy. In the United States, Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents rounded up deportations and it was harder to cross the border. The Mexican immigration wave subsided. Still, in 2012 the Pew Hispanic Center reported that among the 50.7 million Hispanics in the United States, nearly twothirds self-identified as being of Mexican origin. They swayed elections—71 percent of Hispanic population voted for President Obama in the 2012 election. They...