Book: Racial oppression of Native people at US-Mexico border

When we stop the car, David Garcia opens the door, steps out, and walks straight to the metal border gate that officially separates the United States and Mexico. Garcia, an elder of almost sixty, has long graying hair that reaches to his shoulders. Without a word, the former Tohono O’odham tribal councilman opens the gate. He does this as if it were his automatic impulse. There is nobody on the other side waiting to come in, nor are we planning to cross into Mexico ourselves. Garcia opens it simply as if the barrier didn’t belong, as if it were artificial and imposed, something to breach, something to open, something to resist.

Garcia stands in front of the open gate with Mexico’s mountainous Sonoran Desert spread out behind him. There are the same gorgeous saguaros, arms extending upward to the sun, that one finds on the U.S. side of the divide. There are the same ocotillos, and cholla cacti whose spiny segments often puncture the shoes—and flesh—of people attempting to enter the United States unnoticed by traveling vast distances across the desert on foot.

With the border gate open to the world, I know it is only a matter of time before the Border Patrol comes to investigate the area and close it.

We are in an isolated area near Papago Farms in late June, in the south western corner of the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona, the second-largest Indian reservation in the United States in sheer land mass. Though only a fraction of the Tohono O’odham’s original land, today the nation’s territory is the size of the state of Connecticut.

Up the rutted road about a mile from where Garcia and I stand is a Border Patrol Forward Operating Base. The base is more than just a center for mission communications and surveillance; it’s a strategic presence demonstrating that the U.S. government is in a wartime posture that regards borders as front lines, whether or not they run through sacred Indian land or ruffle the locals’ feathers. The Pentagon commonly used Forward Operating Bases in Iraq and Afghanistan as secure military positions to facilitate tactical operations in remote regions, essential for “gaining, maintaining, and expanding,” as the Border Patrol’s Ramiro Cordero told the New York Times. Such bases are now commonplace along the U.S.-Mexico border, and there are two on Tohono O’odham territory. Never before has there been such a widespread presence of U.S. federal forces on the Tohono land.