Walls and Borders, the Tribal Memory

Every time I hear about the path of the border wall, it sends a jolt of recognition through me. I grew up in Mission, Texas, right on the border with Mexico. The wall will cut through land south of my town, down by the Rio Grande. That includes a state park I have visited, the National Butterfly Center and La Lomita Chapel, the small Catholic church that actually gives Mission its name. My home town and the Rio Grande Valley are in the news every day, especially during President Trump’s visit to McAllen, the big city east of Mission. With the border wall now the point of contention in the government shutdown, the place is more notorious than ever.

The idea of moving among countries is familiar to me, as is the idea of staying in a place for generations. That all depends on what side of my family I talk about. On my father’s side, the rootlessness is very obvious. My grandfather, father and myself were all born in different countries: Ukraine for my grandfather, the United States for my father, and France for me, when my parents were living on a US Air Force base in the 1950s. My grandparents came as the typical Jewish families who got out of Eastern Europe, fleeing the pogroms and poverty. They came through, legally, and settled in St. Louis. My father was born there, but he had a wanderlust that took him back to Europe in the 1950s after he married my mother in Texas. In his case, he went to France to work in the auto racing industry. My brother and I were both born at the Air Force hospital there. But the marriage ended and my mother brought us back to her home town, Mission, and that’s where we stayed.

As that story of return suggests, my mother’s family shows a great attachment to place. I can’t think of anybody in the family who permanently left Texas, other than me, and I’m here in the Northeast for over 40 years. Family members came to New York from Germany in the 1840s and to Texas by the 1860s or before. One was the first ordained rabbi in Texas. He was my great-great-grandfather, Hayyim Schwarz. Zooming through time 150 years, my brother’s twin grandkids had their second birthday earlier this month. They are the seventh generation in Texas, living in a town outside Houston that’s just 35 miles south of Hempstead, where the esteemed rabbi Schwarz settled in 1873. Three or four generations can be found in the Jewish cemetery in the town of Gonzales, between San Antonio and Houston.

So when I see the wall, I think of people on one side, leaving what they have known for the unknown in search of something they can’t get where they live. I also people on the other side, where they’ve been for generations, feeling their sense of place and society threatened by disruption.

That’s been humanity’s pattern for hundreds of thousands of years. Move away or stay and fight, conquer or resist, adjust or repel, welcome or ignore, cooperate or clash, assimilate or stand apart. I can sense that story from both sides of the dynamic. The plans for the border wall may be new, but the emotions the wall evokes by are as old as our tribal memories and stories our ancestors told under the stars and by the rivers of Babylon.

As for me, maybe it’s time to look into applying for an EU passport. I was born in France, after all. I should keep my options open in case the wanderlust strikes me for some reason I cannot imagine.