To remember

Fond memory brings the light of other days around me --Thomas More

I’m going to take a slightly more personal approach to discussing the borderlands this time. Particularly, I’d like to discuss things as they relate to my greatest fear: a fear of forgetting, and of being forgotten.
In every place I’ve been thus far this summer, remnants of migrants’ stories are strewn about in plain sight. Because they are found in so many places and in abundance, it’s almost easy not to see them. It’s almost simple not to question what hand carried this water bottle, almost comfortable not to picture the body that carried that backpack, almost routine not to see the faces behind the tinted windows of the Border Patrol or Wackenhut vehicles. After a discussion with some volunteers this last weekend, it became obvious to me that refusing to see in the present is really no different than forgetting a person or moment from the past. For me this is a realization that I’ve had before, but put into these terms brings profound new meaning.
Since middle school (we’re going to gloss over the reasons why this point is significant, but if you know me you may be able to guess a few reasons why) I have been terrified of losing what resides in my mind, and in turn, of others losing their memories of me. To physically exist means little to me without remembering the experiences of the past and tying them to the present. I’m likewise not sure how truly alive I can feel without the knowledge that I exist in the memories of others. The act of remembering is the greatest display of love I can imagine, a conscious act of ensuring that a person or other being continues to live on well past a specific moment or context. From my perspective, to remember and be remembered—in both past and present senses—is the quality that distinguishes between living with all one’s soul and merely existing.
With this emphasis on remembering, I now sit amidst a scene of great forgetting (points to those who can recognize where that last phrase came from). The hundreds of thousands of lives who cross through this desert each year bring their own stories—the admirable, the terrifying, the fill-in-the-descriptor-here. I can’t think of one characteristic that applies to every single story out here given the massive diversity of persons, but they all seem to be faced with a similar risk of disappearing into the thin desert air. Since the people who carry these stories come to this side of that false, now fenced border and begin to live as a hidden class of people, their arrival is not marked as a milestone in any story most of us hear about—indeed, it’s an event that is purposefully concealed as best as possible. In many ways crossing this desert seems to serve as the beginning of the end for their stories, as they disappear into an unacknowledged class of persons.
To take part in the dissolution of their stories is a spot of shame for me. To slip into an easier method of going about my day and sometimes fail to recognize who has recently shared this desert space with me is understandable, but not acceptable. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to be surrounded by (at least on weekends now) volunteers who have the insight to point out the value in being present in the moment. Such volunteers have another role in this context, as well.
Beyond the direct aid duties of volunteers in this desert (meaning their roles in providing water, food, and medical aid to reduce the deaths and injuries in the desert), each person (hopefully) returns to their respective homes carrying a few bits of stories from the migrants out here. They often move on to sharing these snippets with people who have no exposure to this desert, no awareness of the massive catastrophe that is “border enforcement.” Beyond whatever policy and awareness implications this sharing holds (and these implications are significant, I do believe), it also creates an avenue to ensure that the migrants are not forgotten. Even though the people whose stories are shared at kitchen tables or in classrooms across the nation may never know that their brief moments are remembered, I think there is still value in the fact that they are shared. That they are remembered and their stories retold with empathy and often impact. In my mind this ensures that the migrants remain alive in memory, and I’ve already shared with you how important I believe this is. So here we have volunteers who not only work to keep migrants alive in that most essential, biological sense, but also in what I see as the most profound, emotional sense, as well.
I am so unbelievably lucky to work with such people.