Securing Our Nation's Roads and Borders or Re-circling the Wagons? Leslie Marmon Silko's Destabilization of "Borders"

In the United States, roads symbolize the freedom that Americans have come to value. Early on, American literature expressed the connection between freedom and the open road, a feeling Walt Whitman conveys in the first three lines of his poem "Song of the Open Road": "Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road, / Healthy, free, the world before me, / The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose."¹ Even before the introduction of the automobile, Whitman under-stood that roads were synonymous with freedom, and his poem still seems contemporary, in part because it continues to convey the special meaning of roads for those who live in the United States. Significantly, laws have also protected the freedom that roads symbolize for many Americans. Article 13 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state." The United States Supreme Court has also upheld the right to travel as a basic constitutional freedom protected by the Fifth Amendment, stating that travel is a liberty interest that cannot be limited without due process. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas has even described freedom of movement as "the very essence of our society, setting us apart . . . it often makes all other rights meaningful."² Since the Constitution and the Supreme Court have guaranteed the right to travel, and since United States citizens presumably live in a colorblind society, most Americans would deny that race helps secure or protect these rights or that race-based laws regulate mobility.³

While justice is theoretically colorblind, the disproportionate number of minorities who are targeted as potential criminals is an indication that she does see color, especially on the road.⁴ In addition to contemporary laws that govern the smooth flow of traffic, there also exist unspoken legal rules that have determined the ability and choice of certain individuals to move freely across America. In this sense roads preserve an image of imperialism, because they remind indigenous peoples that roads helped facilitate colonialism's expansion into new territories, their ancestral homelands. Furthermore, roads continue to demonstrate how colonialists exercise power over indigenous peoples through laws that attempt to disguise that power.

Balanced against the presumption that laws constrain the exercise of power within limits or that laws serve everyone's interest are the views of critical race theorists Robert Williams and Cheryl I. Harris, who assert that legal rules often serve the "interests of the powerful and that rather than being a constraint on power rules are a reflection of and help enable and reproduce relations of inequality."⁵ By perpetuating legal rules of exclusion sometimes based on race, those in power have continued to maintain the racial and social hierarchies that colonialists created. They codified racial and social hierarchies through laws similar to those that once supported and maintained the institution of slavery or the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese peoples from migrating to the United States. Today, United States law still maintains conventional patterns organized by colonialist regimes designed to regulate space and manage people. These include immigration and drug laws that have created for policing agencies along the border a specific and homogeneous conception of the nation that essentially predetermines who belongs, who should be excluded, or who might be a criminal.

The southwestern United States continues to feel the impact of imperialism as a result of a colonized legal system that arbitrarily, but systematically, continues to racialize and categorize nonwhite peoples as savage or dangerous.⁶ While drug and immigration laws single out for punishment "illegal" border crossers from the south, their broad accusations of race-based criminality affect "people of color" from the north by restricting their right to travel freely and without fear.⁷ The United States attempts to diminish its ongoing occupation and control of the border region by delivering these limitations under the guise of securing the nation's roads and borders (for "Americans") from drug runners, illegal immigrants, and, since September 11, from...