The National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso Texas has a replica of the Statue of Liberty on display, amidst the various implements used to secure our border: Chevy Tahoes, Jet Skis, ATVs and small aircraft, fences and concertina wire.
I witnessed a Latino family assemble for a photo in front of the statue of liberty replica, when I asked the adult if I could take a picture of the children with those big ‘cheese’ smiles that little kids make in family photos, with their tiny chicklet baby teeth, the woman vehemently said, “please, No.”
The urgency in her voice made me consider the fear and terror Latinos live with under today’s threats of ICE raids. Only minutes before they posed for her photo, the children were climbing atop the Jet Skis and ATVs with glee as they acted out their fantasies of being, what?
I can’t imagine what a child pretends when they are astride the very vehicles which strike fear in their families. What is it that we worked out as children when we played cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians?
As I wandered through the Museum,I couldn’t escape the words of Emma Lazarus sonnet “the New Colossus” inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” I visited to try to understand what history led us to no longer honor the words of this sonnet.
In 1904 the Bureau of Commerce and Labor founded a group of 75 men to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 along our borders. This was the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. Although the Chinese only accounted for .002% of the nation’s population, many blamed them for declining wages and economic problems. Congress passed the exclusion act to soothe worker demands and concerns about maintaining white “racial purity.”
History shows there is always some demonized ethnic group- The Border Patrol Museum displayed a replica of the homemade rafts used in the mariel boatlift of 1980, the mass immigration of Cubans who were fleeing their Tempest-tossed communist country for the freedom of America.
Fidel Castro in trying to diminish why his citizens were fleeing Cuba, tried to explain it away as they were escaped criminals and Insane Asylum escapees. Among these Marielitos is player Barbaro Garbey who played for the Detroit Tigers and Texas Rangers, and Pedro Zamora from MTVs The Real World, and opera singer Elizabeth Caballero a lyric soprano.
And today we are considering building a wall between the United States and Mexico. On display in the museum are the rope ladders seized at the monolithic fence that now secures our border. A chilling reminder of “if there’s a will, there’s a way.”
As the wheels of history turn, towards another scapegoat. this wall will become as obsolete as Emma Lazarus words on the Statue of Liberty.
Written By: David Churchill
