Republished from mediaLeft

A World Without Borders!
Written by Rocky Neptun
Tuesday, 13 November 2007

Bi-National Tent Village, Calexico-Mexicali, November 10, 2007: The thick, chalky soil sucks at your feet, pulling them downward. Dust climbs and sticks to pants while the finer silt; translucent, airy, swirls around the head like terrestrial ghosts. This patch of ground, once hardened by millennium of human feet; migrating south to north and back again, before the men with guns came, is now a barren wasteland. Does the battle for free Earth begin here?

Several hundred young people, from all over the United States and a few other countries, dressed in black, many with red bandanas, wearing the dust proudly, as badges, think so. Radical baptism by sand, they sink their tents and bodies into it reverently; blood sand, over 4,000 immigrants have died, all along the great separation.

One hundred-fifty bright colored tents, buses, campers, sleeping vans, cooking areas, meeting canopies, porta-potties and a first-aid wickiup; they have set up their first ever five-day, No Border Camp, here at Calexico, where the wall of shame ends. The other side, Mexicali, Mexico is blocked by a simple iron swing gate that blocks a path between the end of the fence and the curve of a deep, swift canal. Thirty armed border patrol officers cling to the swinging gate.

On the Mexicali side, adjacent to the working-class Colonia Alamitos, on a slope overlooking the canal, fifty Mexican youth have pitched tents under a banner that reads “Campamento sin Fronteras.” They have hitch-hiked and rode buses from all over the country to participate. Francisco Ruis, a student from San Luis Potosi, says that borders are an outdated concept that must be changed. “The first step to world peace is the elimination of nationalism,” he said, “to do that we must tear down our walls.” His girlfriend, Maria added, “yes, if the Germans can do it, so can the rest of the world.”

Stretching from the sands of Tijuana beach, hundreds of miles eastward, its 14ft. high planks of rusted steel, cleaves at the Earth. Thousands of lights illuminate its grotesque form and purpose; our beacon of greed and fear to the Universe. For these young people, on both sides, the wall symbolizes all that is wrong with their cultures. North American youth struggle to free themselves, to disengage from the human broken-ness of xenophobia, material madness and developing totalitarianism; whilst their sisters and brothers to the South, struggle against submissiveness to economic imperialism and cultural degradation.

Here, where the great Sonora Desert begins, Calexico-Mexicali is a city sliced in half, like a piece of toast. To the north, working-class homes and small businesses, occupy the north side of First Avenue; while modest stucco homes dot the south side of Avinida Colon. Both streets, its traffic visible, separated by rusted steel and ten thousand nuclear weapons, seven thousand military bases and over a million men (an a few women) with guns.

The day before, the youth had taken their message that “no one is illegal” to the nearby city of El Centro where the infamous, sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center is located. Slightly over a hundred marched around the facility as Homeland Security personal huddled on the rooftops, taking videos.

In a predominately Hispanic city, where 60 percent of the police officers’ grandparents originally came there illegally, the youth’s challenge to the border regime and its repression drew cordial treatment from local officers and honks of community support. Demanding “freedom of movement” and “equal rights for all,” and “an end to raids, detention and deportation” they took over Imperial Avenue in front of the lock-up facility, defaced its stone marker and planted the black anarchist flag atop the entrance sign.

The poorest of all California counties; Imperial County reflects its name with huge, powerful agra-corporations controlling the wealth and politics, sucking dollars out of the communities of Calexico, El Centro and Brawley, to distant speculators, while residents work for cheap, poverty wages. Local citizens, who have seen the kidnapping and tearing apart of families, as the Feds have taken thousands of people from their homes, schools, neighborhoods and workplaces, have created an attitude, an environment, where border agents were forced to walk softly around the young, radicals camped in their midst.

In San Diego, with its militarized mind-set, city police, deputy sheriff’s, marshals, anyone with a gun, would have surrounded the camp not only as back-up but as a manifestation of power and control. Yet, during the week-long encampment Calexico police officers and Imperial county sheriff's deputies were never seen. It was left up to those ill-trained, mostly Anglo border agents in Green, to police and contain the camp. Excelling in intimidating and terrorizing people whose only “crime” is to have been born “on the other side of an imaginary line that is crossed daily by capital, commerce and privileged people of wealth” border agents stood around nervously, incredulously shocked that anyone would actually challenge their repressive actions.

At one point, on Friday morning, the 9th, several dozen camp participants went to cross-over to the Mexican side to share breakfast and attend a meeting; when they were blocked by Border Patrol agents. Marking, probably for the first time, an incident when U.S. citizens were barred from leaving the country. Quickly understanding the significance and media implications, a couple of higher-ups allowed the youths to cross through the swinging barrier on the condition they could only re-enter at an official border crossing.

Reinforcements were then brought in, with some agents in tactical gear. About three-dozen armed agents spent the rest of the week-end, on eight-hour shifts surrounding the camp that stretched a hundred yards along the fence. Like the wall of a commune, these few yards of symbolic American power, its recycled military steel planking, was adorned with political graffiti, various flags, simple cartoons and grand proclamations of liberation (from new age Luthers). Ladders breached the top as youth waved signs and passed down food and flyers to the Mexican side.

A check-point was set up about mile down an old asphalt farm road, where agents were given conflicting orders. Some campers were harassed. I was chased by an Border Agent in an SUV when I refused to stop as he was signaling me to pull-over. Surrounded by five agents and a supervisor; we, in turn, were surrounded immediately by several dozen of the youth from the camp, videos and recorders running, camera flashing. These human dream catchers, agents protecting wealth, with guns on their hips, had no choice but stand there and listen to me tell them that since I was crossing no border, they in turn had no jurisdiction over me. Whether 12 feet from the wall (where we were standing) or twelve miles; I was a United States citizen, in a nation of free movement, and if they wanted me to stop, they needed to call a local, citizen chosen, officer, who had authority over my movements.]

In five days of marching, meetings, rap sessions there were no great confrontations, no noteworthy outward acts of resistance, no great clash of generations. Yet, bubbling underneath, like the pure waters of an underground stream, there was a growing awareness, a freshness of hope in the gritty, dust covered faces of these youth. A beginning realization that....yes, there was an alternative to walling ourselves into a vast prison of selfishness, greed and fear. That walls exist in our minds, as well as the sand.

The days and nights camped in the blood sand, abutting the great steel wall, surrounded by armed agents puts the border in context for these young people; as both an physical and virtual barrier that kills, segregates, pollutes and is a strategic point of control for wealth and power. It is a barren, wasteland, a place of evil, where rights are denied to both people and the Earth.

Let us hope that these young people come away from the No Border Camp committed not to tinkering with the system, tweaking its injustices. Rather, that they find a way to liberate the detainees, tear down the wall and free us all from the madness of competition, separation and borders; creating a new, cooperative, sharing world.