Dispatch #1: Faith and Flight - Reflections on a Trip to the Border
By Miriam Juarez | 11/26/2024
Century plant flowering stalk, a native Texas agave, nearing its end of life. Photo by Cinthya Briones Santos.
I arrived in McAllen, Texas a stranger to this version of the borderlands. I am a Chicana living in New York, but I am originally from East Hollywood, a predominantly Central American neighborhood in Los Angeles where Mexican families like mine are the minority. My mother self-repatriated in 2017 and cannot return to the US, so she has been back in her birthplace of Canelas, Durango, a small town tucked away among the Sierra Madre Occidental in Northern Mexico. My father, originally from the state of Michoacán, Mexico, remains in the same apartment I grew up in, on Normandie Avenue. At the core of this convoluted assemblage of geographies – New York City, Los Angeles, and Canelas – the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands have become an unwanted second base in my life, one that I have crossed time and time again on foot, car, and by plane with the privilege of my US passport.
My name is Miriam, and I am a doctoral candidate completing my PhD at New York University’s Department of English. One of our key research tracks within the Historias Initiative is the connection between migration and spirituality, especially as it pertains to the NYC / US-Mexico border relationship. I have been grappling with these questions in my own work on the overlooked connections between New York City and the borderlands.
Precisely a week before the 2024 US presidential election, a team from The Clemente traveled to the US-Mexico border by way of South Texas. The trip is part of our ethnographic research for a Historias special project called Flight and Faith: Latinx Migration in the Art of Belief. The Lower Rio Grande Valley has experienced the highest number of asylum seekers in the last three years, many of whom ended up on buses to New York City through Operation Lone Star. The goal of the trip was to spend time with local religious and community leaders, activists, and migrant communities on both sides of the US-Mexican border, in hopes of better understanding how faith and artistic practices shape migrant journeys, not just in the borderlands, but here in New York.
A small portion of the border wall near the Reynosa-Hidalgo International Bridge crossing. October 2024. Photo by Cinthya Briones Santos.
The difference between the US and Mexico in the San Diego-Tijuana borderlands is stark. Tijuana begins almost immediately upon crossing the boundary line; it welcomes you with an eruption of makeshift homes toppling over one another alongside the competing soundscapes of blaring horns among the traffic. On the US side, an immediate silence–one that initially seems to offer solace from Tijuana’s soundscape–washes over you. But the silence is not natural; it is manufactured by the surveillance technologies of the US Border Patrol.
In the Lower Rio Grande Valley, this difference between the US and Mexico is more subtle. Border surveillance has a different history here, one that has only recently started to attempt to mimic the strategies of other, stricter ports of entry. Still, there are times when you cannot tell what side you are on if it were not for the actual Rio Grande, or the incomplete and sometimes comical border fence, signaling to you. This is partly due to the presence of colonias, low-income neighborhoods located within 150 miles of the Texas-Mexico border line that often lack safe access to water, safe and sound housing, and paved roads, which resulted out of Texas’ “regulation-free zones.”
“ I cannot claim this region of the borderlands simply because my parents are Mexican, but I can listen and ask questions and stay attuned to any overlooked moments of connection, particularly as they relate to migrant stories that sit at the crossroads of spiritual and artistic practices.”
Prior to this trip, I had only experienced the Lower Rio Grande Valley through Gloria Anzaldúa, the late queer Chicana feminist writer, who gave her readers an intimate view of the “1,950 mile-long open wound” that she referred to as home in the seminal Borderlands: The New Mestiza. I wanted to take her words seriously and responsibly, that the borderlands are “in a constant state of transition,” and avoid falling into the trap of homogenizing and flattening a region for want of a shared experience (25). And so, I formulated my ethos: I cannot claim this region of the borderlands simply because my parents are Mexican, but I can listen and ask questions and stay attuned to any overlooked moments of connection, particularly as they relate to migrant stories that sit at the crossroads of spiritual and artistic practices.
Migrant children playing after lunch in the main courtyard of Casa del Migrante. October 2024. Photo by Cinthya Briones Santos.
One of the most urgent questions I wrestled with on this trip was making sense of the marketed and perceived “migrant crisis” in the City, as often spewed by our mayor Eric Adams. As we walked into Casa del Migrante, a migrant shelter in Reynosa, the state of Tamaulipas, that provides temporary housing to asylum-seekers on their way to the US, I asked myself how crisis was experienced differently in New York City versus on the border. More importantly, I wondered about how crisis could produce relationality in the midst of division. Casa del Migrante is led by Sister Carmen and Sister María alongside a team of Vincentian sisters, all of whom have taken a vow of service to the poor. We also met Father Brian Straussburger, a Jesuit priest who drives about 60 miles from Brownsville, Texas to Casa del Migrante several times a week, to give mass and to offer additional support to the shelter. For most of the day, I shadowed our Historias-commissioned artist, Cinthya Briones Santos, as she engaged with and took portraits of shelter residents, asking them about their journeys.
The late Nuyorican cultural theorist Juan Flores’ distinction of New York as a “diaspora city” informs much of my approach to migrant stories that bloom out of hostile infrastructures of surveillance and containment. His ground-breaking essay, “Nueva York, Diaspora City,” (2000) distinguishes New York City as a “seminal ground for the rethinking and reimagining of America” via a “radical transnational remapping” due to the frequent “interacting and interlocking” that occurs in the city grid among communities from all over the globe. Not without caution, Flores calls our attention to the possibilities of relationality, the experience of different diasporas and migrations in ongoing relations with one another, embedded in the urban setting of the City. I am drawn to the way Flores sees possibility in the vertical, superimposed essence of the City, and I think relationality is a fruitful framework for trying to make sense of how migrant communities in the borderlands interact with one another through artistic and faith-based healing.
Reynosa has changed, locals say. Its position on the US-Mexico border has always made it susceptible to violence, but now organized crime has evolved to target the ecosystem of migrants from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, all fleeing hardship and violence. Migrants from parts of Africa and Asia also traverse through here. Though they are free to leave Casa del Migrante within curfew, which some temporary residents do for work, plenty avoid going out into the town for fear of being kidnapped and held for ransom or gender-based assault. The testimonios I heard at the shelter made it clear to me that we cannot talk about the US-Mexican border without discussing the harshness of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, the complacency of Mexico’s southern border, the inhumane severity of the Darien Gap, and the structural violence of so many more borders worldwide. Like New York, the US-Mexico border is global.
Beyond political discourse, I thought back to Flores’ emphasis on relationality: How do migrants and their artistic and faith practices shape the landscape, architecture, and each other?This is the question that allowed me to almost immediately visualize a topographical collapse between New York City and the border. Both are made up of hostile infrastructure to migrant livelihood. In New York, it takes shape via basement apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, which flood and devastate immigrant families and elders every time a storm or hurricane hits. It also shows up in the makeshift shelters on New York’s smaller islands and unfamiliar hotel rooms for the migrants bused here on political whims. If we think about the migrant relationality at the level of infrastructure, we can see that New York and “the border” are much closer than we think.
Samir, a Nicaraguan barber seeking asylum, gives a haircut to Jose Antonio, who is escaping violence from El Salvador. Both are temporary residents at Casa del Migrante in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, MX. October 2024. Photo by Cinthya Briones Santos.
What did I learn at Casa del Migrante? I spoke to a Haitian man who spoke Creole and English but was working on sharpening his Spanish to be able to communicate with his daughter, who had mastered the language during the last several months of their stay in Reynosa. She spoke with a subtle but distinct Norteño accent. In the back of Casa del Migrante, where the co-ed restrooms were located, I found Samir tucked away in an open space between two small buildings, giving a haircut to José Antonio, a younger man fleeing El Salvador. Samir was a barber in Nicaragua, but now this small, makeshift nook was his new place of business. In response to Samir’s fear of going out into Reynosa, we joked about disguising himself as Mexican by wearing a Club América soccer jersey. The ease and humor that filled this corner contrasted with the heaviness of the shelter’s main courtyard. Though unspoken, Samir and José Antonio seemed to mutually agree on creating and sharing this temporary refuge through this exchange.
“For many of us, “the border” still remains a faraway and foreign place that is there and not here. With the rapidly changing migrant demographics in New York City, it is imperative that we begin to work towards a geographic imaginary that can envision NYC and the US-Mexico borderlands in conversation with one another.”
I was blown away by my visit to Proyecto Desarollo Humano, a non-profit organization founded by the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (ICM) that serves migrant communities who have settled in the surrounding colonias. The Sewing, Arts, and Crafts program is led by Maestra Isabel, a veteran member who found herself through the services offered by Proyecto. A group of these women offered their testimonios, and spoke to us about the unbearable weight of isolation once in the US, with their husbands at work and their children at school. The program reminded me of a community organization in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
For many of us, “the border” still remains a faraway and foreign place that is there and not here. With the rapidly changing migrant demographics in New York City, it is imperative that we begin to work towards a geographic imaginary that can envision NYC and the US-Mexico borderlands in conversation with one another. Art and faith are two mediums that can foster this dialogue, and so I end with this meditation on our stop at the Don Pedro Jaramillo shrine in Falfurrias, Brooks County.
Now a Texas historical landmark, the Don Pedro Jaramillo shrine is indicative of the borderlands’ spiritual and creative syncretism. The vibrant and ornate altar, filled with candles, written prayers, and other offerings, memorializes the Purépecha Mexican curandero, or faith healer, who migrated to present-day Falfurrias, Texas in 1880, and dedicated the remainder of his life to healing the sick and helping the poor until his death in 1907.
The Jaramillo family cemetery sits in front of the building that houses the shrine, meaning that you have to walk through Don Pedro’s descendants prior to reaching him. Though nobody is around and the adjacent shop seems like it has been abandoned, the flowers that sit at the foot of several tombstones, both fresh and silk, tell you that someone takes care of this place. His tombstone sits to my left upon entering the shrine, and there are mismatching church pews spread around the room, making it feel like a small chapel. There are just as many statues and images of La Virgen de Guadalupe as there are of Don Pedrito.
The dimly lit structure feels as if it evades both time and space with its excess of recent hand-written notes, photographs, and other identificatory relics decorating the walls, some posted as recently as a few days prior to our visit. In both English and Spanish, there are prayers written on notecards, post-it notes, the backs of receipts, and torn paper from lined notebooks and stationery sets. Some of the prayers are specific - they ask for Don Pedro’s assistance in the speedy recovery of someone’s husband post-surgery - whereas others are vague and daunting, simply pleading: Please, help us.
Though his work took place in the late nineteenth century, the plethora of recent prayers and visitors are a testament to his long-lasting relationship with the borderland communities. In her book Borderlands Curanderos: The Worlds of Santa Teresa Urrea and Don Pedrito Jaramillo (2021), Jennifer Koshatka Seman refers to Don Pedro’s healing as an extraordinary response to the failure of institutions. The spirit of the Don Pedro Jaramillo shrine reminds me of the instances of relationality that I witnessed on this trip in spite of institutional failure.
Father Roy reading from his bible for his 6 AM mass at La Lomita Chapel, a historic 19th century site along the Rio Grande with no electricity. October 2024. Photo by Cinthya Briones Santos.
*This article is part of Faith and Flight: Latinx Migration in the Art of Belief, a project under the Historias initiative at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, made possible with support from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. All images belong to the Clemente Center and Cinthya Briones Santos. The Faith and Flight project committee includes Libertad Guerra, Macarena Hernández, Monxo López, Sofia Reeser del Rio,Tony Tian-Ren Lin, and Sally Szwed.
Miriam Guadalupe Juárez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at New York University where she specializes in Chicanx and Latinx literature and culture through the lens of space, migration, and power. She is the 2022 recipient of the Urban Doctoral Fellowship, and proudly served as the coordinator of The Latinx Project Graduate Working Group at NYU for four years. She is a 2024-2025 Public Humanities Doctoral Fellow at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center.