Marcello Di Cintio

Archive for November, 2010|Monthly archive page

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My Mexican Grandfather

In Uncategorized on November 28, 2010 at 3:04 pm

Yesterday morning I traveled across the border to Nogales, Sonora to visit the Comedor de los Migrantes, a Jesuit-run cafeteria that serves meals to recently deported migrants. At least a third of the migrants who lined up for a breakfast of pozole soup and tortillas had been captured my US Border Patrol agents and deported the night before. After cold nights in the desert, some of the women used the hot tortillas to warm their hands before dipping them in their soup.

After the meal I had the chance to meet a family of migrants who were captured in the desert two nights earlier. There was four of them: a mother, a father, and their two young daughters – about ten and seven years-old – who played with a stray kitten while I talked to their parents. The father had crossed illegally into the US many months before and found construction and concrete work in Seattle. He returned to Mexico to bring over his wife and daughters, but were caught after two days in the desert.

The story of this family parallels my own. My grandfather was a farmer in rural Italy. He, too, had daughters and he, too, travelled to North America to find work to give his wife and girls a better life. He settled in Canada, but like the Mexican father, he found work doing construction and pouring concrete. And like the Mexican father, he eventually he sent for his wife and daughters to join him. Sitting across from this man was like seeing my own grandfather a half-century ago.

The difference, many people would say, is that my grandfather did this legally.

My grandfather in in his eighties now. The daughters he brought to Canada granted him seven grandchildren, and his sixth great-grandchild will be born before Christmas. If he looks out at Calgary’s downtown skyline, my Nonno can count the buildings he helped construct. I can’t see how his contribution to Canadian society would seem any less had he not had a envelope filled with papers saying that he legally belonged.

When people here on the border talking about solving the immigration problem, sometimes I wonder what the problem really is.

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The Tohono O’odham and the Wall

In Uncategorized on November 26, 2010 at 11:36 am

Two days ago I traveled into the Sonoran Desert and the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. The landscape reminded me of my time in the Sahara, especially in the refugee camps of the Saharawi. In both deserts, the dwelling places are simple one-story structures occupied by people named for the desert itself: both Saharawi and O’odham mean, essentially, ‘people of the desert.’ The aesthetic role of the camel in the Sahara is played in the Sonora by the Saguaro Cactus. Each acts as the part-comic, part-elegant icon of their respective landscapes.

I traveled to the reservation to meet with Ofelia Rivas, an O’odham elder and activist, to speak with her about the border wall. Ofelia is a marvelous woman. She has been advocating for her people’s rights for many years. Recently, she toured with a punk band called Resistant Culture and spoke to audiences about indigenous issues along the borderlands. She also met the Dalai Lama in Tucson. Ofelia told me how she pressed her forehead against his, closed her eyes, and spoke to him in her native language about the troubles facing her people. “I felt that he could understand me,” she said.

O’odham territory spills over the international border into Mexico. It is a huge expanse of land; the reservation on the US side alone is the size of Connecticut. Ofelia told me that traditional O’odham belief requires people to travel freely across their lands, to care for and maintain the holy sites, and to make pilgrimages along the traditional routes. The O’odham used to move freely across the border. The line meant nothing to the O’odham, after all, since they occupied these lands long before there even was a United States or a Mexico.

But 9-11 and the fortification of the border changed things for the O’odham. Tribal members from both sides of the line now needed formal documentation to cross the border. Many O’odham, Ofelia among them, were not born in hospitals and did not have their birth officially recorded anywhere. They did not have the proper documents. The increased border security also means that Border Patrol agents insist on searching through the medicine bundles O’odham elders use in their ceremonies. These bundles are sacred and not to be handled by anyone not involved in the ritual. To search through these holy packages as if they were carry-on bags at an airport is a great insult to the O’odham. Ofelia told me that once a Border Patrol agent snapped apart the antlers on a ceremonial headdress to see if there were narcotics hidden inside.

The border wall has also changed the way O’odham on either side of the line view each other. For the first time, the members refer to the Mexicano O’odham and the Americano O’odham. O’odham south of the border consider northern O’odham privileged – though one look at the poor reservation settlements near the border puts this notion to rest. The situation reminds me of the rural villages along the India-Bangladesh border (which I wrote about here). Families on one side of the line did not consider themselves any different from their counterparts on the other side until India built a fence. The steel and wire gave rise to feelings of difference that never existed before. The walls are impotent; the walls are powerful, too.

Ofelia brought me to the borderline. A wall made of steel tubes planted five feet into the ground and filled with concrete is designed to stop vehicles from crossing. As we stood and stared into the expanse of O’odham land on the other side, Ofelia told me that since the wall went up, eleven O’odham elders had died. “One after another,” she said. Ofelia believes that the stress and sadness born out of the border wall was one of the reasons these elders died. “They couldn’t comprehend what was happening,” she said.

“My hair used to be long, but I cut off a piece for every elder’s death ritual. By the end of the year my hair was gone.”

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Sounding the Wall

In Uncategorized on November 17, 2010 at 1:54 pm

“Bach played in cathedrals,” musician Glenn Weyant told me. “The Sonoran Desert is my cathedral.” And Weyant’s instrument is the border wall.

I traveled to Nogales with Weyant and watched him attach a contact microphone to the border wall. He plugged the mic into an amplifier and the wall sings before it is even played. The wall vibrates in the wind. The sun warms the metal – recycled helicopter landing mats from the first Gulf War – and the panels creak and pop. The microphone revealed that the wall, meant to restrict movement across the border, is itself constantly moving.

But the wall’s natural moans did not satisfy Weyant. He wanted to “sound” the wall. Weyant adjusted the volume on the amplifier and tapped the wall with drum sticks made of palm fronds. He dragged a snare brush across the ridges, and bowed the metal edges with a cello bow. “I have to be careful. Steel will eat the bow,” he said. The taps and rattles emanated out from the amplifier and into the border hillsides where Border Patrol officers and National Guard troops watched on bewildered.

Weyant’s soundings encompass more than just his percussive playing on the wall itself. The sound of dogs barking and border patrol vehicles passing end up on his recordings. So does street noise from the Mexican side of the wall. Weyant once played a ‘duet’ with a Black Hawk helicopter patrolling the border overhead. All these sounds form a chorus, Weyant says. “The wall is a resonator. A unifier. It doesn’t discern between sounds on one side of the other.” In this way, Weyant’s soundings turn something meant to divide into something that unites.

Weyant offered to play a duet with me. I selected a palm frond and a metal whisk from Weyant’s sack of implements. Then I stood up to the wall and Weyant and I played the wall. Weyant says that playing the wall makes beauty out of its ugliness, but I am not sure my taps and knocks, transmitted through wire and echoed through the speaker, sounded beautiful. There was, however, something beautiful in the absurdity of the action. From a distance, two men making music from on a metal wall seems ludicrous. Then again, what is more ludicrous than the wall itself?


The Fence at Friendship Park

In Uncategorized on November 11, 2010 at 5:44 pm

The Wall doesn’t end as much as it diminishes. Here, on the white sand between San Diego and Tijuana, the recycled Gulf War landing mats that form the border fence give way to a row of posts that lean like drunks in the surf. America and Mexico begin and end here, but the ocean doesn’t care about the lines men draw in the sand. It dumps kelp on the beach and crusts the fence with rust.

The place is called Friendship Park, and the name is a punchline now. I first visited the park with Reverend John Fanestil who used to serve communion through the posts to Mexicans on the other side. The border guards ordered him to stop and led him away in handcuffs when he didn’t. Passing wafers across the border was a customs infraction. The walls, here and elsewhere, breed such absurdities.

Families used to come and touch their loved ones on the other side. Mothers held the hands of their deported sons. Husbands reached through to touch their wives’ faces. John told me about one man, an ex-con unable to cross into Mexico, who met his girlfriend every Sunday at the fence and tried to convince her to marry him. She stood on the other side, holding their infant son, surmising through the fenceposts whether she could love this man forever.

The touching has ended. A new fence, tall and steel, is too far from Mexico for fingers to reach. On the weekends, humourless border guards open a gate and allow visitors on the American side to pass through the new barrier and into a fenced enclosure locals call ‘the cage.’ Visitors can get near enough to the other side to speak with family on the other side but they are too far to touch anymore. This is the poetic tragedy of this place. Once you could touch. Now you cannot. I wonder if this is worse than never having touched at all.

On my second visit to the fence I saw a family visiting the Mexican side. They all lived in San Diego, but traveled across the border to visit their father, Peter, who had been deported to Tijuana. From through the fence, Peter told me that he found the barrier dehumanizing and degrading. He accepted his deportation, but feels that “this is not the way it should be. This place should be built for families. It should be comfortable.” Besides, the fence interfered with his fatherly duties. He smiled and pointed at his teenage daughter. “If she causes trouble, how am I supposed to pull her ear?” he joked. “What am I supposed to do? Throw a rock at her from over the fence?” His family laughed.

“Fatherhood”

In Uncategorized on November 11, 2010 at 2:01 pm

Hello all.

My story about becoming a father appears in the  current issue of Alberta Views Magazine. The piece is easily the most personal story I’ve put to paper. I am sort of proud of it.

The story will appear on the Alberta Views website eventually, but until then, here is a short excerpt (and some photos of my baby boy by James May.)

The downy hair that forms on a baby in utero is called lanugo; the soft spot on its head, the fontanelle. A pregnant woman is called a gravida, and the dark line that appears on her belly and traces a path down from her navel is the linea negra. The moment an expecting mother first senses her child move within her womb is the quickening. The rupture of membranes is the breaking of waters. A child’s final descent into the birth canal is known as the lightening. The cervix ripens. The baby crowns. We call the birth process labour, the same word we use for other strenuous and gainful work. At the end, a child is not extracted or removed but delivered. And when it ends badly, we choose stillborn, a tranquil and sympathetic word, rather than something clinical and cruel.

Poets must have conceived the language of birth. Only they could justify these metaphors, these end-vowels, this rich and musical lexis. For all its lyricism, though, birth’s vocabulary lacks the words for a man who is, or will be, a father.

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About a month before my first child was born, I discovered my brother was buried in St. Mary’s Catholic cemetery and that his name was Sandro. I knew my mother miscarried twice before I was born, and I knew both were boys. Until last year, though, she never told me their names or that the Grace Hospital buried Sandro in St. Mary’s. She named the second child Marco but no one granted him a burial. My mother doesn’t want to imagine what the hospital did with him.

My father and the priest at the Italian church arranged a funeral for Sandro. My mother, 20 years old and heartbroken, didn’t attend the service. No one did. She told me Father Lino brought her the tiny crucifix that lay on Sandro’s coffin. She kept the cross but never visited Sandro’s grave. “I couldn’t do it. Maybe one day I’ll go.”

Years later, my mother signed up to sponsor a child from overseas. When she opened the package from World Vision and read the card inside she began to cry. The child chosen for her was named Marco. His birthday was the same day in September of 1969 that Sandro had been due. This Marco was born in Peru and looked like he could’ve been Italian. He could’ve been my mother’s son. “I felt God was telling me that he was taking care of my boys, so I should take care of this one,” she said.

Sandro and Marco died without living, yet I’ve always pictured them slightly older than me. My big brothers. When I was 10, I imagined them in their teens. Sandro would have just turned 40 when my son was born, and that’s how I picture him now. Taller than me and thinner. His hair a little greyer than mine. Since I learned his name I imagine him more often.

I rode my bicycle to St. Mary’s to look for his grave. A woman at the Municipal Cemeteries office gave me the coordinates to his plot—Lot 42, Block 5, Section H—but I found no marker there at all. I called the cemetery office again to ensure I hadn’t made a mistake. A city clerk checked the records and confirmed that Sandro is, in fact, buried in that lot. So are about 20 other babies. Lot 42 and many of the nearby plots are unmarked mass graves for stillborn babies.

“This is what was done in the ’60s,” the woman on the phone said. Then she told me she was sorry. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. I hung up the phone and surprised myself by crying.

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