Borders and Elections

Borders can have a strange fascination. At times they seem so arbitrary, as if they were not based in anything belonging to the material world, and yet the more fake and imposed they are, the more likely that they are reinforced by soldiers with guns. Nothing like the Berlin Wall during the Cold War to make this point. Its irreality, the fact that it did not belong to Berlin's urban fabric, was everywhere apparent. Whenever it cut through a street, veered too close to a building, it showed itself as a false imposition, yet of course its very arbitrariness underscored the violence that continuously supported it. Without the eerie equipment of the East German border police, without the tank traps, barbed wire, and hidden machine guns, the border would have seemed like a baroque figment of some ancient diplomats' negotiation.

How much can we compare the US-Mexican border with the Iron Curtain? Certainly there is more movement across, and the security is no where as tight. The similarity lies in the double perspectives the border invokes. To see the border as a Mexican who cannot cross, gives the it a hard quality that Americans wandering over never see. Borders create divided consciousness through their selection process. I crossed over the Berlin Wall, whereas my German relatives could not and dared not—a matter of passports and fear.

The American exemption in Berlin and today across the Rio Grande means that border seems something like a folly, those illusionary ditches from English estates—you, the privileged spectator are only vaguely aware of its existence, but the other side sees a sheer barrier. This applies better to the US-Mexican border than to the German-German, where the military was omnipresent, yet as an eighteen-year old I also claimed an immunity, which let me walk past the turrets (nervously to be sure).

The difference between one person's passing and another's remaining creates the border's contradictions. It sets one group against the other, even if none of them is responsible for the border, a reality we will see in today's German elections.