A Few Essays and Other Commentary
Borderlands
A Comment on:
The Cat that Wears the Night Sky for Skin: Charles Bowden and the Northern Jaguar,
By John Macker. asitoughttobemagazine.com
Dear John,
Bowden wrote, “If you want to see the future, look at the borderlands.” He was so right. When Bowden died, I was in a small Arizona town where he lived a while. Arivaca. Not well known. People in the cafe were saying, “Chuck died,” because they knew him.
To get there we’d driven through checkpoints. Then we’d camped out in the nearby desert, buzzed, not by alteratives, but by fighter jets tearing low overhead every night. People scrambled into camp under cover of darkness, looking for food, water, first aid. The beautiful hills textured by species of desert plants were also littered with rosary beads, weathered photos of children, slashed gallon bottles that could have saved migrants who died.
A war zone of sorts, the desperation accumulates there now more than ever.
Bowden loved the wildlife of the Sonoran Desert. I imagine him with his friend, novelist Jim Harrison, bird watching, discussing the antics of snakes and habits of the jaguar with wit and reverence. The closest I’ll ever get to the flavor of those conversations is in their books.
I don’t really think he saved any of us the trouble of crossing those borderlands. Any of us who have had to have had to, otherwise we don’t, and he took unfathomable risks as a journalist to tell what it is like. He heard stories the likes of which are now told by families in the Sierra Madre, whose lives have been upended, or just ended, by the ever-expanding trafficking organizations, sometimes called “cartels.” There is nothing romantic about sitting, as I have, with a Tarahumara father whose son has been shot dead for having refused to join them, or to plant their crops, or to look away while they log his forest. Nor is there anything romantic about the stories told at camp near Aravaipa.
Let me tell you this: there are no borderlands anymore. Anything and everything that Bowden reported on now happens throughout the USA, as in Mexico. The causes are mutual in both countries. The devastation is right here in US cities, wild-lands, and on rural acres. All of it is here. All of it. And illicit money is being made by people of any ethnic and economic designation, from the kid on the street trying to feed his baby sister to the banker at the upper echelons of Wells Fargo. Canadian mining companies run some of the most lucrative criminal operations south of El Paso. Some of it goes prosecuted. The poorer one is, the more likely the prison sentence.
Nebraska’s governor recently championed legislation to loosen child labor laws, as if inspections were anything like adequate anyway. Children from Mexico and Central America, and elsewhere, are being maimed while working graveyard shifts in meatpacking plants in Minnesota, children are working and dying as roofers in Texas, children are trafficked in interstate rest stops across the US, guns are smuggled to Mexico, illicit guns are fired in turf wars from Chicago to LA to Topeka to Atlanta, in Michoacán and Sinaloa…while the drugs our children buy in bright, clean suburban schools are produced in both Chihuahua and North Dakota.
There are no borderlands anymore.
But the jaguars are some kind of promise, as are people who remember how to live in the jaguars’ regions with love and respect, like you, John, or at least are willing to learn.
Image Credit: Public domain image originally from Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. London: Academic Press, [etc.],1833-1965. Courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library