Ava Tomasula y Garcia
THIS IS GOING to be a story about the end of the world. It won’t seem like it, but only because I’m telling it. Told by me, nothing will seem different, because the way things are today is supposed to be forever. This is how it’s supposed to work; this is what keeps me comfortable—in a state of numbing if not smiling acquiescence. I’ve heard people call it the dissonance of the everyday: not knowing if you should scream or just keep going. Look around to see if it really is a big deal or if you can be persuaded about the virtues of tolerance toward the intolerable too.
It is supposed to be impossible to imagine the end of borders, the end of maquiladoras, the end of hieleras y perreras, the end of robo de salarios.
Or, when it is imagined, it always means the fall of everything. Dramatic disaster movies, dreams of the end of time. I could do that too, I guess. The end of the world: batteries burst open like boils. Fiber optic cables split and fry away; canned food rots in its aluminum armor and lipstick tastes like pig’s blood. Border walls sink into soft mud like a shoe’s brand name, barbed wire melts into landslides, and all the things that make up my life slowly wheeze to a stop . . . But I don’t like dreams that aren’t any different from when you’re awake. It messes up even the smallest things. Like, Did I brush my teeth or just dream I did? Is the heater still running? Is La Bestia still running? Waking up just to check . . .
What I’m trying to say is that yo estaba viviendo bien until I realized I wasn’t. My hot water, my clean air, my right of free movement, my microwave, my strawberry jam on bread this morning. This is how I am alive, or, rather, how I am not. I don’t mean anything supernatural, but just that it is possible to die in an everyday kind of way. Life transfigured into something else in the ordinary course of events. I feel smudged out—not really dead but some state that makes you ask if this is life, after all. Like a title that stays on the screen for so long that when you close your eyes you can still see it, vibrating on the underside of your lids. I walk around earth, taking in the end that won’t end. Just watch:
Here is Pájaro Valley, home to three million acres of strawberry fields and fourteen million pounds of pesticides a year. People who are sin papeles spray the crops with chloropicrin, a gas used to kill people during World War I. There is Ajena Verdeja, emerging out of a poisonous cloud with a bandana over her mouth and nose, like in the movies when the aliens touch down and the UFO opens up with a tsssssssssssssssssss and a high-powered fog machine. Euro settlers hundreds of years ago, moving in clouds of smoke, burning down the crops that were already there and replacing them so they could eat their own bread and see their own animals. Their own little paraíso. When I go to the grocery store I see rows and rows of stacked berries in bright plastic packages printed with a picture of a red barn and a rising sun and maybe even photos of the blond Evans family—Strawberry Farmers for Three Generations—with grins ear to ear. All the particulars are stripped away, replaced by the same great big smile. This is how meaning is made; this is how money and markets abstract value into existence. Rattle it off like a drug ad: “may cause neurological deterioration, reproductive health problems, developmental disabilities, cancer, metabolic disorders, sexual assault on job site, wage theft, deportation.”1 Now you can say things like product and equivalent. Pronounced universality and occluded relationality that allows “fair labor” to emerge out of nowhere and strawberries to taste so good. Ajena goes back inside her cloud, invisible.
These are facts you live with and learn to let fade to the background, if you can. Background like the mid-length drone of the man on TV spitting up fear into living rooms across the country, like a bird pulling food out of her own throat and cramming it into her chicks’. Hunger strikes in Hutto Detention Center for Women since October, and an ICE representative explains what happens: “After seventy-two hours, detainees are referred to the medical department for ‘evaluation and possible treatment.’ They are also ‘isolated for close supervision, observation, and monitoring’ and encouraged to end the strike or accept treatment.”2 Acceptance implies choice. That’s one of the tricks the strawberry packages use too. Choose healthier. Choose Evans. Choose a smile. If you repeat it to yourself enough times, it becomes better than real.
I go wading through hydroponic strawberry fields, running across state lines as fast as a slur can slip from between lips. Another scene. In one shelf in her living room, Gloriana Rodriguez keeps her Videoteca Fin del Mundo. It’s every disaster movie you can think of, copied to rows and rows of unlicensed tapes, and I’ve seen them all. Super tornadoes, tsunamis, diseases, alien invasion. But it’s funny how none of them actually end. There’s always a Planet B, where the güeros launch off to and set up another white picket fence neighborhood, secure communities all over again. Or they pan back from the main actor all alone in the middle of the ruins and smoke, but he’s still alive and clutching a vial of the antidote or whatever so you’re supposed to have hope for humanity. Big words like that: humanity. The human race. The movies taught her English—even though they also taught that hope for humanity was hope for that one güero at the end of the movie. But Gloriana still has a soft spot for them because they were what promised a better life; their end was her beginning.
SCENE. The underground bunker. People sit huddled in groups, while A. and R. stand to the side, talking.
A: They’re not like us. They may look human but we don’t know what they want. I’m scared.
A. walks to the far side of the bunker and looks over at a woman cradling her baby in a way that shows she knows what is coming. Rapid zoom-out to the whole globe from space.
It’s only when the world’s crashing down that they start using phrases like that.
Most of the time human is just an empty word, or only meant for some people. It’s kind of like a ghost, something that hovers over a whole list it’s meant to stand for but that somehow is outside of it at the same time. Race, gender, immigration status, class. A Citizen of Planet Earth, or like they say in Last Days, “Earthizen.” That’s the future the T-shirts hope for too, ones with Ningún Ser Humano es Ilegal printed on back and front. But you become humano by fitting the profile; the character that gets abstracted into existence from the list. Do you fit the metaphor? Can you play the character they are looking for at your Credible Fear interview? Years ago Gloriana had to audition for the part of Refugee for a court and two lawyers.
SCENE. G. sits at a small table with two men behind it. The lawyers have clipboards out and are running down the checklist. They take turns asking questions without looking up.
L1: Why did you leave your home country?
L2: Any particular moment or a series of events?
L1: DV issues: Gang threats: Other:
L2: Could you return?
L1: Why/not?
L2: Are you afraid of anybody in your home country?
L1: Who is the persecutor?
L2: Why did this person/group particularly target you?
L1: Did you seek protection of authorities? (police/military)?3
Change the story slightly to fit the questions. This is the only time your humanness will be based on your dehumanization, so barter for it and say only what they want to hear.
Perfect victim. I walk across highways and under bridges. I am in the grocery store parking lot and everyone is looking. An old lady comes up to me like they do to pregnant women and tells me, Oh my, it has been so long since she’s seen a dead person, may she touch my hand? I am polite and courteous; si claro, go right ahead, I put it out to her like a bishop waiting for his ring to be kissed; I am actually enjoying being the freak show everyone defines themselves against. Little humanos and their daddies come up and ask me “what’s it like,” and I am so glad you’ve asked, I answer so well and say exactly what they expect because I’ve seen that movie too. They go away happy and impressed by themselves for guessing right. All of them thinking that dying gives one authority, or at least a different perspective, although I doubt a different perspective is what they’re after. What they want is to see themselves. Así es como funciona la simpatía—why the little girls in human rights ads are white and why individual stories work better than pointing out political patterns.
Pero vamos a hablar de otra cosa. I’m trying to see things differently but keep repeating the same thing over and over—maybe that’s why it’s so horrible, because it’s hard to see it any other way. But, like any story about the end of the world, I’m not making any of it up. I have papers—footnotes—documentation. Captive imagination: the image of a Citizen holds itself up in front of Aracely Garcia Ahuatzi, ready to slip through her fingers at any moment. Billboards whisper how to get there: Buy a microondas. Only $25 a month. Ignore the protests and work hard instead. Then maybe one day you can speak out loud and not be afraid, with the dim roar of her appliances to back you up. I know she is dreaming of buying larger and larger TVs so heavy they fall off the wall, cracking the plaster. The magazine ads promise that one day Aracely can look down on her neighbors the way they do to her now, and whisper about if she is illegal or not; say they once had a cousin who looked that way and he was no good. The job cleaning and scrubbing pays just enough to dream of owning more but not enough for health care: You make $0.58 to the Citizen’s dollar and a fourth of that is pocketed by Mr. Ryan because this is his dream too. The furniture, the lavaplatos, the house start talking in American accents as in a children’s cartoon: “The promise of inclusion through citizenship and rights cannot resolve the material inequalities of racialized exploitation.”4 They sound ridiculous, no chair should know that much. Belonging—¿cuanto cuesta? I wanted a refrigerator with a hielera but couldn’t say the word because that’s what they call the migrant holding rooms—hieleras and perreras. Freezers and doghouses. Looking for the truth as if it were a barcode on the back of a bottle of crema blanqueadora. Suddenly the makeshift reality you asked to stand in for life drops away and you call yourself afraid.
SCENE. Crossfade to white. O. is in Dilley where she has locked herself in the bathroom. She looks at the camera.
O.: You don’t understand that people’s lives have no price and you cannot buy it with money . . . You don’t believe me you never wanted to give me my freedom. What I tell you is that nobody lives forever in this world; one day we are all going to die and give an account to God. That’s why I do this because you were bad to me and my son. We did not deserve this. Now you want to deport me after spending eight months here.5
Or is it that gradual? One day I am staring up at you from among the coupons and missing persons ads. One dozen donut holes, $2 off thru Sept. 2. DOB: 8/24/95, 118 lbs. Photo rendering of what you would look like today alongside a “last seen on” photo from when you were eighteen. Bright white backgrounds; a chart that shows years on one axis and women kidnapped on the other; a spike in 1994, after NAFTA. In a thousandth of a split second it was there, but you looked away just in time. Under the soft glow of the neon OPEN sign, eyes lowered to look at the bottomless floor. What is wrong here. We called them movies starring nobody. As much as you might stick your hand out in the air it never catches on anything.
The creeping feeling that all my testimonies are ghostwritten. “It was so cold that we felt our hands and feet getting numb. The only clothes that we had were the ones that we were wearing when we were apprehended. We had seen some people that had aluminum covers and we asked the officers if we could have one. The officers refused.” “The hielera was freezing cold. To make things worse our clothes were soaking wet from crossing through the river. Because it was so cold our clothes never dried.”6 “The food is the worst, if they give us oranges, it seems as if the fruit was taken out of the trash. They treat us as if we have leprosy, they humiliate us in numerous ways.”7 “Paid a coyote? Yes, $4,000. Crossed with a group? Eleven. Where? Entered in McAllen, Texas. Harmed by anyone on the trip? Verbally abused by CBP officer.” “I cannot talk to anyone. I am going crazy. I have no one here. There is no freedom. There is nothing but control.” “I was paid $4 an hour for five years and when we tried to go to court the owner sold the business.”8
What do you do with the inhumanos. Dress me up to look like you, put me in family detention, check my ID to make sure I am dead but just alive enough to keep picking berries—making plastic pens—cleaning tables. Nuestra hermana difunta is tenuous enough for churches; body is factual enough for newspapers and remains is tasteful enough for funeral homes to hide just how lucrative it is as well. Unless you aren’t being buried—numbers have not even been released for how many died crossing this year. I heard them say it in a movie and so I went and read in the dictionary that the word for a dead animal, carcass, may be humorous when used figuratively, as in, “‘Get your carcass out of bed,’ said Mom sarcastically.” Figuratively implying that you don’t have to mean your words, that words can be meaningless when you mean them to be. That calling someone a corpse is not the same as shooting them, that alien and illegal don’t mean what you think. I woke up in the darkness that pretends to hide everything and heard my obedient heart, rushing blood from right atrium right ventricle right atrioventricular valve pulmonary semilunar valve pulmonary artery lungs heart left atrium bicuspid valve left ventricle aortic semilunar valve aorta arteries arterioles capillaries. How can I be antisystemic when this is what keeps me alive? I could say, imagine a world without borders, but I know that wouldn’t mean much; in fact, that world already exists if you can pay enough. I am locked into today and I can see the future. It is exactly like the present. No, it’s not, but I’m only saying this so you’ll do something about it instead of waiting for it to get better. This isn’t an ending because the end of the world doesn’t have an end. It just keeps going.
Ava Tomasula y Garcia is invested in fights for a redistributive, equitable, and sustainable (aka socialist) economy, and in justice for low-wage and migrant workers. She graduated from college last year, where she studied the “human” in human rights rhetoric as a category formed by racial capitalism. Ava is currently working in Mexico City at AIDA, an environmental law organization, and also volunteers at Casa de los Amigos, which offers housing for refugees and migrants, and additionally has a Programa de Justicia Económica that supports alternative economics in Mexico. Ava also makes animations, and is writing a novel: a ghost story set in the industrial belt of Northern Indiana where her family is from. She wants you to act, now!