The Evening Redness in the River
On Blood Meridian and the Violence of Borders
“The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta (is an open wound) where the third world grates against the first and bleeds”
-Gloria Anzaldua
Three forms float along the river, one boat, with two small ones at her side. The boats harbored dreams, histories, stories, a yearning to reach a safe harbor, a port of opportunity. Now they begin to sink, and the cargo that captured the crew’s memory has sunk with it. They are not boats, but bodies. Bodies whose blood now flows into the slow-moving water of the Rio Grande. A mother with her two children drowned in the water that cold January night, swimming to the other side of that muddy, bloody river.
On one side, a vast desert, cruel and unforgiving. No water can be found, but pools and oases of blood dot the harsh landscape. Cacti and shrubs are the only greenery that calls this dry land home.
They say if you slice open a towering saguaro cactus, a puddle of red will fill your hands and run down your neck as you sip for any sustenance to survive. It is the blood of migrants who trek across this wasteland, walking and walking to find the lighthouse that illuminates the river.
On the other side, a wall that towers above them. The lighthouse they sought was a watchtower, with heavily armed guards. In the high noon, the shadow of this barrier looms over the landscape, covering those on the other side in darkness. Along the base of this imposing edifice, razor wire waits to greet those who attempt to climb its steep metal precipice, and fall to the other side like birds, a fall to freedom. Those who find themselves at the end of this road want nothing more than to become birds, to soar over this partition, and to migrate to a new life, a new nest, asylum.
This place of horrors is aptly known as Eagle Pass, Texas, as so many seeking safety desire to become like the symbol of the country to which they seek entry. Many of the lands they hail from honor the bird, the Golden Eagle of Mexico, the Quetzal of Guatemala, and the Venezuelan Tropital. Yet, these birds are caged, their talons caught in the razor wire. They cannot move inside that wall. Their wings are caught in the concertina cable, and their blood flows like a river, to feed the Rio Grande. They cry and call and press against the cage, demanding to be let out. Some are able to fly across, but they live a life in the shadows, afraid at any time that they may be captured, caged, and carried back across that wretched wasteland.
That night of January 12th, 2024, I remember staring at the photos that define this story. It was reported that a mother and her two daughters drowned late in the night, in that frigid winter weather that turns the Rio Grande into an ice flow. Their screams could be heard in the night, their cries of anguish as their lungs filled with brown water, and their blood became one with that murky water.
It was reported the next day that their deaths were the direct result of Texas’ new wire and their takeover of Eagle Pass. Previously a center for migration and asylum claims, it had become the epicenter for a power grab by the State of Texas and Governor Greg Abbot. At gunpoint, the Texas State Guard had taken over management of this park, a port of entry for those seeking refuge. Instead of a place from which to file for that basic human right of asylum, they began to construct a wall of horrors, a cage of hate. They wanted to take these birds and break their necks and wings against this partition of steel, wire, and corrugated metal.
No doubt the guardsmen stationed there heard the screams of this mother and her children, who sought solid ground. But due to direct orders from the Governor, they refused to intervene. Because of this stand-off between the Federal Border Agents and the State Guardsmen, no boat could be sent down to find and pull them to safety.
Instead, they drowned in that cold creek and their cries went quiet. Their names would never be known, and their history and dreams never orated. Her humanity and that of her children were denied. Instead, they became those sinking ships in the night.
That night, my tears surged as a river, like the mighty Rio Grande. I sobbed at the story and the photos released long into the morning hours, wondering where this would lead. As I came to see, the deaths would not stop, and in 2024, immigration became the epicenter of both fascist Republican talking points, and neo-liberal Democrat policies that only backed the desire for blood at the border.
I remember my mother bringing me to this country at a young age, and I too was without papers. We fled an abusive man, and the violence that had skyrocketed in our barrio. Like that woman in the river, nameless and denied her humanity, I couldn’t help but remember my family’s flight to refuge. The woman in the river reminded me of my mother, with her two children in tow, at the time pregnant with our youngest sister.
One of my earliest memories was assisting my mother’s boyfriend in spraying blood off the street with a hose. That night had been Mexico’s Independence Day, and much like the States, our neighborhood had large fireworks to light up the night. I remember the excitement I felt to watch men in our neighborhood gather, drink, and light massive fireworks displays.
Our celebrations were cut short, like the life of the man we witnessed shot at random. With my mother’s boyfriend’s ties to the cartels, this violence was a constant fear. As a young child, I would guess I was 5 years old, that violence had come to our doorstep. I helped him in the night as fireworks continued to rise above the slums, to cover the pool of gore with Coca-Cola and soaps and scrub it off the gravel street. I stared down at that lake of blood and noticed the explosions above illuminating my reflection. That night, I looked down at my young and starving face. I wondered whether I too would one day drown in that red river.
In the wake of that tragic night, and the sheer fear my mother had living in an abusive household, as well as her addictions; my mother sent my sister and I to live in a Catholic orphanage. She said that she would come back for us one day when she could keep us safe and she was healthy. Fear filled my heart, as the other children would mock me for believing she would return. Many of them were told the same thing by their parents. Many of them had never heard from them again.
The treatment there was strict and at times inhumane. I bled from my knuckles often, as due to my being born left-handed, the nuns worked to slap my hands with rulers until I wrote like God. Apparently, He was left-handed. This was the place too where I shattered my arm in an accident that left me with a limb with little range of motion. That event was one of the most extreme pains I have endured. The rest of the orphans and the staff were at lunch at the time and I had snuck out on my own. My arm had fractured, and a bone protruded from the skin. I cried for help for hours, crying to God to save me, crying to my mother. I don’t know how long I laid there in and out of consciousness. Blood gushed like a faucet, and as I drifted back to witness the red reservoir growing, I passed out.
I came to in a hospital room, to find my mother at the other end of the bed. I wondered whether she was real, whether I was having some sort of waking dream. She cried and cried. It reminded me of the monsoon at the orphanage, flooding my room with sorrow and apologies. I was just happy to see her at 6 years old. She told me she had great news. She was coming back for us soon, me and my younger sister. She seemed happier. She said she was leaving that evil man, she just needed time. And before she left the hospital room, she gave me one more piece of hope. We were going to America, we were going to build a new life. We were going to seek safety.
One day, I remember the sunshine enveloping the entire earth in a warm embrace. For some reason I told my sister how I felt today was the day, that mama would be back soon, and that she was going to set us free. One of the teenagers, who would abuse me, mocked me. I watched like an eagle from the nest, from our room keeping an eye on the dirt road that led to the gates. And there I saw her, I saw her! I flew down the hill at a record pace, and when I saw her I jumped into her arms.
We returned to our dingy home in the barrio, a slum. She told us that she was pregnant. But with the man in her life now removed, things were safer and she continued to work for a few months to save for a new life in the States.
One of our last weeks there, our mother took us to the beach. This remains one of my fondest memories. Despite growing up in Tijuana, this was our first time encountering the mighty Pacific. The shore we found was filthy, and the water was full of trash. This didn’t deter the sunbathers and beachgoers, who made their best of the sun and sand, even though one could see the border fencing separating the northern coastline. Yet, I couldn’t help but jump into the salty water, and sink or swim. I swam and dived for hours and hours, until my eyes were bloodshot from opening them in the salinated sea swell. As the day grew long, and the sun began to set, we packed our things. Before we left, my mother pointed at the border barrier and promised us that soon, soon we would be on the other side.
So when we crossed the border, early in the morning in the winter of 2006, I felt a breath of freedom. My mother snuck my sister and me across in a car, as our aunt, who lived in Utah, drove to bring us north. I remember my aunt handing the border agent her passport, with a bundle of cash. We had bribed our way across the border. As we drove the long stretch across Southern California, onto Nevada, then Utah, the air felt clearer up here, it felt new. My mother had always told us the United States was a golden land. We made it to the golden land.
***
Once I learned English, in foster care following the migration; I discovered one of the greatest novels of all time, which captured the anxiety I felt of being an immigrant to this nation. The novel in question is Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy.
Blood Meridian is a novel that describes a point in history that was brushed over in my education in Utah. Our social studies teacher taught us that America was the greatest nation on Earth. Yet, I was horrified as I read McCarthy’s retelling of a blight in U.S. history, the Mexican-American War, and the violence that it unleashed. While a fiction novel, it is based on historical events and describes the true experiences of those who took part in this bloodshed, as well as the natives and Mexicans who found themselves at the end of barrels, bayonets, and bombs to force them from the frontier.
The book revolves around a nameless “Kid”, nameless as the thousands that die on the journey to the north, to opportunity. The Kid found himself in trouble with the law, after murdering an innocent man and robbing him. Instead of the gallows, as they promised to hang him, he was instead invited to join a band of U.S. Army deserters. In the wake of the war, they joined roving bands of marauders and murderers across the border, to seek blood in border towns and deep into northern Mexico. They were sent to hunt for scalps, for which they would be rewarded and to destroy the towns and pueblos they found. This was truly one of the most horrifying narratives I have read.
There is an underlying darkness, “ The Evening Redness in the West”. The volunteers ravished native communities and Mexican towns alike, without reservation. They slaughtered everyone they found, to scalp them and to aid the American effort to destabilize the region. One scene describes a “baby tree”, which caused me to have sleepless nights, crying at the horrors he described, and shivering at the scene.
It was not only the extremity of what McCarthy wrote about, it was the realization that this was a reality of the settlers’ destruction of people, to assist Texan and Anglo-American expansion. It also delved into how the atrocities were not merely confined to the Americans. While the Comanche and Apache natives resisted the incursions and killed many of his men, which landed the Kid in a Mexican prison; he is eventually hired by his Mexican pastors to join a crew of veterans of the Mexican military and locals to attack these indigenous tribes, in search of scalps and bloodlust.
As a printed work of historical fiction, it leans heavily into the history aspect. McCarthy perfectly encapsulates the legacy of violence that has defined this southern region of the States. It began with war and continues to this day through the obsession with control of this nearly 2,000-mile border zone. The impact of this violence cannot be denied, especially as we discuss the “border crisis” that has led to a fascist movement, threatening to overturn our democracy.
Not only is there this barbarity along the border, but there was also another side of the novel; the racism that the then inhabitants experienced as scores of Spanish and Mexican families were forced to surrender their property in Texas and the rest of Nuevo Mexico. Segregation began, and the Mexican population was forced into slave-like conditions, as they were underpaid, overworked, and forced to do the hard jobs that the Anglo settlers refused to do. The mass dispossession of these people from their land, most of them sharing native blood, led to a labor force that could be exploited and abused by the settlers. The violence that was inflicted on innocent people led them to flee their lands in search of safety. Many headed north to build a new life, even if to work for the white men. This continues to this day after decades of continued American interference and destabilization of governments in wars and coups d’état.
We bled Latin America dry by deposing democracies. Yet we wonder why these migrants flood north, to find a new life here.
***
Now, why do I discuss my reading of my favorite novel of all time? It’s clearly the topic of the day as we close the 2024 election, a conversation that has defined the last nine years of our nation’s politics. The advent of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign heralded a dark turn against immigrants. From that very first speech, he made his hatred of migrants clear. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
I cannot go into every detail of the anti-immigrant policies that defined the Trump era. There was the Muslim ban, overturned by the ACLU. And there was the cruelest policy of all, the family separation of thousands of children from their parents, as they were apprehended seeking asylum. The majority of people understand the cruelty of some of his most heinous desires to immobilize the influx of immigrants.
While this time in our history seemed hateful enough, the bloodlust has ballooned and blackened. It began with the Biden years, defined by record-breaking asylum claims at the southern border. In many ways, Trump’s claim of curbing the border crisis reflected the state of the global pandemic and his installation of Title 42, which restricted emigration in the wake of the public health crisis. Biden refused to remove this restriction until the end of the COVID emergency in the States, May 11th 2023. In short, the influx of migrants is not the fault of Biden, nor did Trump ever solve the “problem”, as the pandemic caused a steep drop in migration.
I bring up the Biden administration and the subsequent policy proposals of Harris’ campaign for the Democrats’ acceptance of right-wing fear-mongering around the border. Even four years ago, in the 2020 election, the DNC railed against Trump’s nativist and anti-immigrant policies. Yet in 2023, they attempted to pass a bill to end the wave of migration that has expanded in the last four years. This bill was prevented by the far-right members of Congress that had made undocumented immigration one of their pillars, as it would allow a bipartisan solution, with credit to the Biden era.
At the beginning of 2024, Biden announced a policy that limited asylum claims and shut down the border if the minuscule number of around 2,000 migrants was surpassed in a day. In other words, while their approach is more humane, the Dems, especially Kamala Harris, are feeding into the flawed and horrific approach to migration. They have suggested a pathway to citizenship for the millions and millions already here “illegally”, without any real progress to propose a path to citizenship and an overhaul of our broken immigration system. Something that the majority of Americans, in study after study, claim to support.
The inscription on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France that greeted immigrants to New York reads, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses yearning to breathe free”. Yet even a liberal bastion like NYC is run by a mayor that embodies right-wing politics.
Trump capitalized off of this wave of migration to engage in new-found depravity, lies, and evil, to call for violence against migrants seeking safety on our shores. Throughout the 2024 campaign, our screens have filled with vile vitriol. Trump has fully embraced dangerous talking points, calling for himself to be a “dictator for a day”. He claims that on day one, he will immediately send federal forces to begin the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country”, and that this response would commence in Aurora, Colorado and Springfield, Ohio.
Aurora and Springfield especially have become the epicenter of hate. The debate saw the beginnings of one of the most racist conspiracy theories to ignite the focus on immigration. “They’re eating the dogs,” he said of the Haitian population building a new life, legally, in the Ohio community. “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Despite the fact-checking, this claim has continued to galvanize a racist mob. In the aftermath, Nazi groups like the “Blood Tribe” have marched the streets of that small town, relishing in the racism and terror that Trump unleashed. There was a flood of bomb and shooting threats throughout the town’s institutions unless the deportations commenced. Even after being fact-checked, his Vice-Presidential nominee has specified that he is proud of having concocted the story.
What would these mass deportations look like? It will require deputizing thousands of federal agents and active military. Trump has already discussed the “enemy within” and releasing the military to crack down on protests that will surely follow if he wins. This would be another aspect of that apparatus. Not only will Portland see the return of the Federal forces that caused the George Floyd Uprisings to become a warzone in front of the courthouse downtown, but these forces could then be sent to begin knocking door to door in search of “illegals”. As a part of that, Trump has discussed creating mass detention centers to facilitate the deportations. This itself would require billions and billions of dollars, eroding civil liberties with each bill.
All the while, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida have vilified the migrant population that only adds to the lives, economies, and cultures of their states. They have embodied Trump’s demand for deportation by bussing migrants to liberal states, trafficking their bodies as a political ploy. In Texas, we watched as the State Guard is still amid a stand-off on Federal property at Eagle Pass and elsewhere. Because they deemed the Federal government’s response as being too free, in following international law that declares the human right to asylum; they determined that they would take control of the border. Texas constructed miles and miles of razor wire, to greet the wanting immigrants with death, to make them bleed.
Consider the implications of what this means, as well as Trump’s promises. Already in the last two years the Supreme Court granted border patrol full-scale authority over the “100-mile border zone”. This allows federal law enforcement to disregard the bill of rights of anyone, citizen or non-citizen, if in the act of tracking down undocumented immigrants. History has taught us what happens when jack-booted soldiers knock door to door in search of the chosen target for deportation and concentration camps. This is how the Nazis painted their solution to the Jewish population in Germany and Europe. Building bases to ban migrants will lead to bloodshed in these camps. The calls for such a system have never seemed so explicit.
Blood has built the land that we call home. Blood of natives who were slaughtered and forced from their land. Blood of slaves that died under the whip, treated as nothing more than money for their white masters. Blood of Mexicans who were driven out in war. Blood of those who trek across the desert, in search of a better life. Blood blossomed the cotton, the corn, and the crops that fill this land with plenty. The crops are picked by cracked hands caked in red mud, migrants.
Blood coats the border wall, from those that try to crawl and climb to freedom. The razor wire that runs along the river is dripping thick red droplets, from those who tried to swim to shore. Footsteps streak across the barren borderlands, and all across the stark expanse, bones burn in the sun. The Rio Grande runs red with the blood of migrants. There is an evening redness in the river.
Hear my impassioned plea, like the torrent that floods the streets of Tijuana in monsoon. I pray one day the rain will come and wash our land and hands free of this legacy of bloodlust.
