[ nation building / women’s legal identity : the border’s apocalyptic mater-futurity: ]

By José Alvergue

 

Two columns, divided by a thick, bold dotted-line arrow. The right-hand column says: In 2006, former governor of California, Pete Wilson was invited by the Hudson Institute to discuss proposition 187 and California’s struggle with immigration. In the talk, titled, “Illegal Immigration: Past, Present, and Future,” the former governor makes constant appeals to two pathological axes of American historical consciousness. One is the rule of law. The other is citizen children, his term used to describe children born to immigrant mothers in North America, and thus aligning National temporality to the legal identity of women as the bearers of future citizens; women, that is, not as beings but machinery. The coming together of these discourses reveals the heteropatriarchy at work in the opinions against immigrants, women in particular, in that they bear a potential to unravel the structural empiricisms of cultural identity: body, place, language, and memory. The logic through which personhood is materiaized at the border singles out, among bodies, women’s bodies. Women’s bodies are de/composed and managed, integrated. Their wombs are captivated by the idiom of a Nation, religion, given to one moral law and logic of biopolotics enforced as necropolitics. The manifestation of temporality, of power, articulates this legal authority in the practices of border policing and is embodied in Wilson’s speech ::: “But far and away the most important cost paid by all Americans for decades of federal neglect - it’s a very serious undermining of law,” and so on. ::: The rule of law is used to imply “obedience” to modes of self-management applied only to certain beings. In the case of Wilson’s unexamined temporality - “past, present and future”- we have to consider what the implication of “obedience” pre-prescribes for subject-categories that intersect around the questions of power and neglect: exclusion, enforcement, and(im)mobilities codified by the border in its securitization of temporality/-ies. And then suddenly rule of law and the legal identity of women collide: “And by that time you’ll have had children - citizen children. And that, myfriends, is how we will get to 20, 35, 50 million - unless earlier we reach a point of such moral fatigue that we no longer even pretend to enforce our immigration laws. We repeal them, disband the border patrol, and have open borders. Long before that day comes, America will no longer be the country that attracted those generations of legal immigrations who immigrated under the rule of law.” The focus on taxes in Wilson’s political-theoretical framework is legitimated by an unspoken construct: woman, not as existential being, but categorically maternal. The mother’s role in this nation-building imaginary isn’t that of raising children either, but rather of yielding children to the set of morals and history that builds citizens, to the narratives of Nation that emerge from colonial geographies and other epistemologies. Thus, taxes come to represent what is not addressed: that all children are adopted children. There are men, adopters with their taxes, and there are women, producers within (not of) the imaginary; but an imaginary sustained by the reality of those resources implicated by taxation. In this arrangement of exchanges immigrant women are doubly alienated geopolitically by the precarious status of their bodies as producers of citizens, but producers of inferior citizens for whom the normal exchange of material subsistence cannot account for the innate deficit of their inherent, biological, conceived origin in a “peripheral,” “third world” country. To quote Wilson: “You have got this long, porous border. You have got this nation full of people, poor people. It is full of poor people. It is not a poor country in terms of resources , but it is full of poor people.” Drucilla Cornell asserts, “the obsession with genetic ties is also tied into unconscious fantasies about the meaning of masculinity and racial superiority.” Fantasies are stories, descriptions of an inconsistent universe, one with a different tempo, cadence, like Wilson’s temporality; his past is not ours, the present is not a full one, and the future is a fantastical arrangement that preserves the modes of exchange that keep patriarchy powerful. Stories are temporal, locative, and dismantling. Place written as time in-place. Border stories focus on women or the young, the young remembering between two national matrices—that of their birth, that of their adoption. This story is both true and fantasy, a truth within the patriarchy-fantasy, and a fantasy rehearsed to undo a truth about the place of women in-place, a writing cadence from the border. The left-hand column says: [nation building / women’s legal identity : the border’s apocalyptic mater-futurity: ] This is such a book: From Veracruz, outside Veracruz on a street running directly westward into the country from the ocean, she made the long walk to Jalapa whispering the same son about a highway. In Jalapa she visited her mother’s grave & stole a horse from her brother. As she rode past him & then away from him she whispered again to the horse. Then to the men in corridors and walkways. Await the morning call. Sleep towards the pull of the long walk away from dreams. A reality of work & songs & walking to be sung: the sea, the highway & goodbyes. The horse died as she remembered an even older traditional son about Jalapa & the sanctuary provided by a southern horizon awoken, laid a restful elegy over the horse’s body. Movement on the highway alone or static. Movement whispering songs, simply hear the whispersong. Close, the terror of loudness & repetitious melody of goodbye & Jalapa, highway & horizon. Movement, scoop her from the bloated grave. The old song looped in small dust devils, movement-move again, north again. San Luis Potosí: buses & buses, cities & highways. Movement to Tijuana was like remembering old traditional songs in the place where they were born amidst the things that inspired them to be written, sung the way they were sung. Risk the loudness of their singing. Locate this precisely. A melody repeated twice, by two, by one until another is remembering by looking out into horizons blooming over cities past. Sing with me. Close her eyes, body van enclosed. She: imagine the city outside piece to gather from a book read so far. This set out amidst nothingness, desert patrolled at little hours, voices controlled at all times. From silence the crossing begins. Imagine it small enough to see at the end. [And then there is a smaller arrow, diving the space on the left further into a left and right]. On the right hand sign of the arrow: From the practice of lullabying a small girl to sleep in a small port town in Veracruz & the habit of breathing in & out old sons, writing, the over active habit of transcribing visible reality to melodies easily repeating, she starts her last walking, the desert closely holding inside her mind & the phenomena in the lyric sung cannot remove the marking of things left behind And then starting on the lefthand side of the arrow and moving across the dividing line: Señora. Señora, hay que movernos. Apúrese, señora, ya viene la mañana. Mís tenis. And then on the left-hand side, an em-dash and a thumbprint. And on the righthand side, in brackets: [dismantling composition] and a tiny ink trail from the thumbprint. GRAFIA: GEO DEMO TELEO [Then, a series of arrows next to each other, one pointing up with fine dashes like a train track, one solid ink and pointing up and down, one pointed up with long and short dashes a la morse code] [Below these arrows is the following text: BIO errant: errantry err itarere ere re re & re & re & re &re & re & re & re & re & re & re &re & re & re & re & re & re & re &re & re & re & re & re & re & re &re & re & re & re & re & re & re &re & re & re & City is an organ the body ocean feeling swaying bag hanging bodying knees bending calculating distancing streets measure pacing. Shoelaces hang through a holing & an aluminum fence. A light breeze crawls along the breadloaf grooves. Laces withouting, shoes sway. Aluminum sheet spreads horizontal, canals. Thought stops her. white strings held together a knot she tied [three long dashes] A horizon unravels elegy above lain down She only breathes to continuewalk. [two short dashes and then another arrow pointing up and down, of which text is placed on either side and across:] smell of little things sounds of wings of insects Never find a way back sand. One other. see circles rebound moving dark scattering desert light frequent eight open graves decision to sit a blank name on the lips pronounce the air pronoun even scatters night & the position the smellmirrors & corpsehair is a metaphor: spiderwebs, the world dries over all the characters named will soon walk into themselves the ocean receives wash in the surf in those fields ants driven to chaos dances from the feet sound sharp stones. Vowels dissipate. Break apart hard dirt rocks. Consonants retaliate. The lingering murmur of the truck long down the road. Capital nominates. Lights look back. Fall. Marks. Back. Nation of language is a thought. Back. a Memory like that need: mother’s face as waves came in. The face a seeing, sees the first time, the world mimes the noise closest a heartbeat. Close eyes halfmouth and tongueshy. Behind lips taste salt & flake skins fishskin hands of men. Fingers in the pound an off shore breeze again. A face through hair. Rhythm does again. The poet wave. Poem traces again. only the fishandman & the mark of again memory is again re-an “er” of stutter: Where are my men again. Why a little girl written again: the sky is only red humidity With her mother to beach, the sky. The sky, then reddening the humidity. Marking weighing heavy on the branches. Thin progress in trees casting shadows. The beach at that hour grey and littered. Broken shells colored pale pone burnt of wood. The look of paper scraps tallied fish scratched. Ink & marks, fly back stay. Fall black. Hammer an echo. Fishman voice & the drum wood. The drum wood & the boat wood. Thin trees. Fat radio fire & the fish talk, the man voice. Sung songs in Fishanman fishman dialect voice. White crumpled insects over the sand again. Gusts against her feet & through yellow plastic sandals. The hour waits for fish & man. Her small feet little ducks beside the fat toes of her mom. Toes turned into walking: the sand like jelly stuck to the insides again. A mark.