The Border Crosses Her

I was standing in what was Mexico when they signed the paper, and I was standing in what was the United States when the paper was ratified, and I had not moved.

Let me be precise about this, because precision is the point: I did not move. Not south, not north. I did not cross a line. A line crossed me. The Gadsden Purchase, December 1853 - a document signed in Mexico City and ratified in Washington, drawing a new international boundary through the southern part of what had been northern Mexico, so that the territory where I had taken an oath and held ground and established obligations suddenly belonged to a different country than the one I had been standing in.

I had been watching empire operate for three hundred and thirty-two years by then. I was not surprised. I was - not even sardonic, exactly. I was the thing you become when you have watched enough repetition to see it clearly without it destroying you: clear-eyed.

Here is what the Mexica did, when they organized the valley. Here is what the Spanish did, when they came with iron. Here is what the Americans did, when they had finished organizing the eastern half of the continent and needed the southern route to the Pacific. The mechanism is the same each time: the decision about what the land is and who it belongs to is made somewhere far from the land, by people who have never stood on it, using the logic of what they need rather than the logic of what is. And then the line on the paper becomes the line on the ground and the people who were already there find out that the category they occupy has changed.

I had been a Mexican subject, technically, since the independence of 1821 - or perhaps I had not been, since the O’odham territory I occupied was O’odham territory regardless of what the governments on either side thought about it, and the Tohono O’odham Nation’s understanding of whose land this was did not require Mexican recognition or American recognition to remain true. The political categories were always a surface layer. But the surface layer is what the law writes its sentences in, and I had just become a resident alien in a country I had never agreed to live in.

The Mexica born. The conquest’s first result. The exile who walked north out of dying Mexico and found a place in the desert she could hold. And then the country built on the conquest’s model drew its boundary south of me and called me American.

I did not feel rage. Rage is for the people who thought the category was stable. I have not thought any category was stable since 1521. What I felt was something more like the recognition of a recurring joke that is told by history with complete sincerity, each time as if it is original.

The land did not change. The O’odham were still the O’odham; the Tohono O’odham Nation is not a concept that requires American ratification to exist. Sivan Va’aki was still the node it had been for a thousand years. The ley line still ran from there through Ioligam to Baboquivari.

The terms of my oath did not change.

The only thing that changed was what the Americans would call me if they found out I was here. I noted this and filed it in the category of things that do not require action, only awareness. The awareness has been operational for one hundred and seventy years.

It has not yet surprised me.