Migrant Western

the Manichaean narrative of the US Southwest

I keep thinking about a moment in Javier Zamora’s memoir, Solito, when, in 1999, a group of disheveled and desperately thirsty — and probably not far from suffering lethal hyperthermia — migrants come to a ranch house in southern Arizona.

There they find a hose and drink deeply from the nozzle. A moment later, nine-year-old Zamora, who is among the small group, hears a dog bark. And then, he writes, “a thin gringo walks towards us.” The man, “thin like a pencil,” is holding a shotgun.

As one of the adult migrants stands to run, the thin man fires into the air.

Dressed in boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt, the gringo keeps stepping closer, pointing his gun at each of the migrants in turn, including young Zamora. And then, instead of shooting them, or marching them across the desert, or summoning the sheriff, he calls the migra, the Border Patrol.

Swap a couple of the nouns (migrants for cowboys, blue jeans for chaps, the migra for the local posse) and it could be a scene from a Sergio Leone film. How the current situation on the border (and by current I mean from the mid-1990s — when significant portions of borderwall started going up and, soon thereafter, an unprecedented number of federal agents began prowling the line — until today) parallels the tropes and mythos of the classic western is not a fun throwback into classic Americana, but a disturbing reminder that the United States remains trapped in the ethos of conquer and kill or conquer and banish.

I recently wrote about Solito for New York Review, and highly recommend picking up a copy of the book.

The penny dreadfuls of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, the Bonanza series (which my Romanian grandfather watched religiously), as well as Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and his Border Trilogy, all pit good against evil, defenders of a homeland against interlopers, or the solitary do-gooder against the sheepish hordes. (All of those nouns belong in scare quotes.) And while the better novels blur and swap those opposing sides, what remains constant is that duality, which derives as much from narrative propensity as from politics.

This is the Manichaean — acid and internecine — position that arises when a government or ruling party, in the Weberian sense, claims a land or idea as “ours.” This is the bloody history of the West. And while it was bad and sometimes bloody in 1999 when young Zamora was confronted by that skinny rancher playing the gun-wielding hero, and it was bad and bloody in 1848 and in 1890, it’s bad and sometimes bloody today.

Reporting from the Arizona border for The Intercept in the days following the repeal of Title 42 — which pundits and politicians on the right ludicrously claimed signaled an open borders policy — Ryan Devereaux describes vigilantes spouting inane and dangerous conspiracies, harassing peaceable aid volunteers, and corralling children. (The Border Patrol, in cahoots, practices much of the same.)

I’ve had my own run-ins with these militia-types along the border, have been barked at by sun-stroking men cosplaying cowboys and have been needled, followed, and intimidated by Border Patrol agents in boonie hats and body armor.

One weird thing both parties have in common, and which they frequently invoke — besides that us-them mentality — is children. A lot of the vigilante types, militia folk, crowing nativists and Border Patrol defenders alike, talk about protecting kids. The depressing irony is that strict border and immigration enforcement — as well as the us-them provocations practiced throughout the history of the west — harms children much more than it, speciously, helps them.

Child as Plot Device

(Or do I mean plot as child device? No, I don’t think I do, but I had to think it through to be sure.)

Plot is a good and weird word: meaning both a bit of land and the arrangement of narrative devices. It also carries dark undertones. To plot is also to scheme, to — often wickedly — devise. It can also mean to locate points on a chart or graph, as a means to understand or navigate them. With those four meanings, taken together, can you think of a better word to apply to the American West?

In Hernan Diaz’s 2017 novel, In the Distance, Håkan, a young Swedish boy born in the middle of the 19th century, leaves his native land with his older brother. They’re not seeking riches (the rush for gold was just beginning), but rather are escaping privation and a brutally feudalistic landlord. On the way to America, the brothers get split up.

Håkan, who disembarks in San Francisco, spends the rest of the book, in one way or another, looking for his brother. In so doing he gets abducted and sexually initiated by a toothless prostitute, is trained in pre-Darwinian evolution by a naturalist in Utah’s salt flats, becomes a surgeon, expert tanner, and grows into both a literal giant and a mythic outlaw as he wanders the American West.

Diaz, in describing how he didn’t want to rent a car and do perfunctory research in the American deserts to write the book, said, in an interview published in The Nation, “I was interested in… the set of expectations with which we walk into a story, rather than the actual geographical conditions.” (Diaz recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his new novel, Trust, currently on my stack.)

In the same interview, Diaz calls the West “so ideologically charged and neglected that it’s ripe for subversion. Its scaffolding is there, ready to be hijacked and repurposed.”

In the Distance is rightly heralded as an evocative take on the western, but not many reviews honed in on the circumstances that drove young Håkan and his brother to flee their native Sweden. And yet such displacement — though often ignored or glossed — is quintessential to the American West. Nothing today better captures the spirit of the west than crossing a border (think of the central role of fences in the western mythos) which today, ipso facto, turns one into a juridical outlaw.

Diaz is drawn to children, not only as characters as such (we meet Håkan as a child, and even as he ages he remains both childishly wise and, somehow, ageless) but as sparks, conundrums, the kind of narrative crag that turns a slowing flow into urgent whitewater. Håkan defends, kills for, and rescues children throughout the book.

I don’t have a grand synthesizing theory (yet) but the reality and politics of children in American self-conceptualizing (especially in the west) is a constant: rescued and helpless babes, virgin landscapes, and both natalism and genocide are all frequently recurring themes.

Has there been a more significant plot point in the US border/immigration story in the past decade than the family separation crisis? I reported on the heartlessly cruel fiasco at length in my book and elsewhere, and saw first hand the deep and lasting violence it enacted. And yet the focus on “intentional” family separation, I’ve always maintained, is myopic. This is why plot points can be false friends: undoing the most egregiously awful policies can lead to the trap of an incoming administration, or some other heroic figure, patting themselves on the back and not addressing the myriad other harms currently and systemically being enacted.

Babies are adorable little things, but they’re deceptive as plot points: they distract and, too easily, open the heart. As Maria Stepanova writes in her entrancing memoir, In Memory of Memory, “Both the past and childhood are perceived as stasis, a permanently threatened balance — and both are most venerated by societies in which the past is misrepresented and childhood is abused with impunity.”

Let’s go back to Devereaux’s recent reporting from the border:

Jane Storey is a 75-year-old retired schoolteacher and member of the Green Valley-Sahuarita Samaritans, a group that offers water and basic humanitarian assistance to people in the US-Mexico borderlands. She was recently driving just north along the borderwall, where she has assisted hundreds of people in recent years, when she spotted a group of children who were approaching a gap in the wall, one of whom was holding a baby.

As Storey described, a Border Patrol agent had been trailing her as she was driving. She got out of her car and asked the agent if she could give the children water. No, he told her, and then arrested her.

“With flex-cuffs fastened tight around her wrists,” Devereaux writes, “the retired teacher was driven to Border Patrol headquarters in Tucson and placed in a cold, concrete cell.”

The same day, another group of vigilantes prowling the border harassed another group of Samaritans offering water to people, saying, “If you voted for Biden you’re assisting in the rape of little children.”

You can scoff at the absurdity of the claim, but the nutjobs spouting that weird cocktail of protective hate are striding a well-worn path.

As Diaz writes of a money hungry gold prospector Håkan connects with, he was “at once distracted and focused, as if seeing the world through a dirty window and inspecting the grimy glass rather than looking through it.” The misfocused gaze captures the bleary-eyed hard squint of the western “hero.” It captures our distraction with the wailing babe (who should be coddled, milked, and loved — no doubt) from the policies that pushed that child into the mud in the first place.

Jail → Death

Speaking of sheriffs and shootouts, here’s a disturbing update from Pima County Jail, which I have been reporting on at Arizona Luminaria for the last eight months.

Looking into the death of 29-year-old Joseph Zarate, whose heart stopped beating the same day he was released from Pima County Jail, I learned that the number of deaths in or related to the Tucson jail since 2022 is twice as high as previously known. That’s an astronomical per capita death rate, and underscores, once again, what a dangerous and deadly place this jail is.

It’s a very disturbing, and rather long read, accessible here.

I’ve spoken to too many people who have lost children or loved ones in jails and prisons in recent weeks to try to end this newsletter on a lighter note, but I can repeat this lovely advice, and, as Håkan does, suggest that we seek some solace in listening to “the constant sermon of things.”