Writing the Border (regarding my publication in the Tuscon Sentinel)

Ben Bergquam, host of the show “Law and Border” on ‘Real America’s Voice'

A non-apology for my publication on Oct. 11, in the Tucson Sentinel, of the following essay: The Conflationists: Purveyors of the Emerging Far Right Narrative on the US-Mexico Border

I’ve been obsessed with the border since the early 1990s, when I drove across the country and crossed on foot into several Mexican border towns on the way. Something about leaving your own country behind with just a couple of footsteps acted on me like an aphrodisiac. And it had nothing to do with the reasons white men in their 20s are depicted, in Hollywood, as going to border towns. It wasn’t prostitutes or booze or drugs. It was, I suppose, a feverish curiosity. The grass is always greener… At that time, I hadn’t ever been out of the US, except for a short excursion or two into Canada, one of which had taken place when I was three years old. I visited at least four border towns on my way west: Naco, Agua Prieta, Juarez, and Nogales.

Two years in Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer near the border of Nigeria didn’t cure my obsession with border towns. When I helped my parents out with their move from Indianapolis to California, driving with my dad and the dog, I insisted on dragging my dad into Tijuana where we checked out the excellent Museum of the Californias, which I thought was better put together than the Natural History Museum on the other side of the border. We also visited the Tijuana Wax Museum where the only realistic figure, to my eyes at any rate, was that of Michael Jackson. My dad’s never been back. Marriage and raising a child got in the way of crossing the border for the next decade and a half (except for a daytrip with my then wife to Ensenada from San Diego in 2008).

In 2016 I crossed once again with my sister’s boyfriend Greg and a friend of his. By that time I was freelancing as an arts writer for NUVO and I thought it would be cool to do an arts story on Tijuana. Before I went on my trip, I asked Indianapolis-based artist (and now curator for the Global Village Welcome Center) Daniel Del Real, who knew something about TJ, what would be a good place to visit: he suggested the beach, Las Playas de Tijuana, where the artist Ana Teresa Fernández painted a fifteen foot stretch of the border fence blue, making it appear that you could walk through it. So I put this on the itinerary. We also visited La Caja Gallery, a sort of hybrid art gallery/nonprofit located in an industrial area far from the typical tourist areas. Unfortunately, the resulting article suffers a little too much from a lack of focus and I was only able to publish it on my blogspot blog. ) But a year later, when I became arts editor for the alternative weekly NUVO, I began taking time to cross the border to find arts related stories—stories with some kind of connection to Indy no matter how tenuous—to write about for NUVO. I even had one of these stories translated into Spanish for Indy’s growing Spanish-speaking population.

This October, an opportunity opened up for me to drive along the entire US-Mexico border, from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas and I seized it because I wanted to write about the migration crisis, the most urgent news story happening now, a crisis that will undoubtably have an impact on the 2024 presidential election. When I recently told an Indy-based artist about my itinerary, this person was skeptical, and I was asked why I don’t write about my own ethnic group instead—my own grandparents’ history of migration to this country, for example. (In my poetry, I have addressed this subject.) I didn’t tell this person that I’m Jewish. I didn’t want to get into this at the time for reasons that should be obvious to you, dear reader, but being restricted to writing about .02 percent of the world’s population would put me in quite a bind as a journalist. At any rate, the question perplexed me. Of course, the background here is the growing number of people being accused everywhere of cultural appropriation, including various white-identifying authors. I think I was also being so accused. The most notable case of this, I suppose, is that of Jeanine Cummings, author of American Dirt. I have no opinion on this particular book because I haven’t read it, but this particular project of mine is journalism, not creative fiction. And the fact that I’ve actually encountered more African migrants on the border than Hispanic migrants complicates the issue, I think. I don’t know.

There are too many people out there who think they know everything both on the left and on the right. The best asset as a journalist you can bring to a given situation is to admit you don’t know when you don’t know. Then you interview the right people and do your research. You use your skillsets. In my case, my knowledge of French let me talk with Senegalese migrants and gain insight into their situations. (I’m doing everything I can to improve my Spanish for future encounters on the border.) Anyway, I could go on for pages about this. But I won’t. I will say that an article of mine resulting from my trip: The Conflationists: Purveyors of the Emerging Far Right Narrative on the US-Mexico Border has been published in The Tucson Sentinel and I’d like you to read it. Is it a good piece? Or am I guilty of cultural appropriation? Or maybe it’s both? Let me know what you think.

Border fence at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument: Tom Wingo (left) and Ken Sylvester pictured.