BORDER COMMUNITIES ARE GROUND ZERO FOR HUNGER
Photos and story by David Bacon
New American Media, 4/18/11
http://newamericamedia.org/2011/04/border-communities-are-ground-zero-for-hunger.php
TIERRA DEL SOL, CA - The tiny towns in the borderland of East
San Diego County - Campo, Boulevard and Tierra del Sol - mark the
road north for hundreds of migrants as they cross the border and
travel on. Hardly any migrants stay -- just those who die in the
crossing. Instead, for the people who live here, some with roots
going back for generations, these tiny communities are home to
growing hunger and poverty.
The border fence is the main feature of the landscape, as it
passes through the desert between the U.S. and Mexico, two miles
south of Campo. A big Border Patrol station sprawls across several
acres just outside this tiny town. Hundreds of people try to walk
though the mountains here every month, and many die as they attempt
to cross the border. The potters field graveyard in Holtville, a few
hours away, is filled with hundreds of graves of those found dead in
these hot dry hills.
Up the road from Campo is Boulevard, another tiny town on the
border highway. Near it sits "Camp Vigilance," home to the Minuteman
Civil Defense Corps, a rightwing anti-immigrant militia. The camp
became notorious after Shawna Forde, recently sent to death row in
Arizona for murdering a nine-year-old Mexican girl and her father,
stayed there on her way to the shooting.
Until fed-up locals recently stopped it, the Blackwater
security company planned to open a clandestine training facility
nearby as well. It presumably would have focusing on paramilitary
action against the poor farmers and workers making the trek north
from Mexico. When company mercenaries were charged with murdering
civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square, however, the training camp
proposal was quickly shelved.
Its little wonder that national media describe this section
of the border as immigration ground zero, where border enforcement
both by the official authorities, and border violence by right wing
militias, is the big story.
But for the people who actually live here, the real story is
not having enough to eat. East San Diego County shares with other
border communities, from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to the
Imperial Valley just hours east on the highway, the distinction of
being the poorest communities in the United States.
Every week, Ken Koppin leaves his shack here on Tierra del
Sol Road, where an American flag in the window shades the interior
from the sun's intense heat. He drives up to Highway 94, and there
puts out a signboard telling his neighbors that the food pantry will
be handing out bags that afternoon.
Around two o'clock a large white truck with murals painted on
its sides pulls into the open area beside Koppin's shack. Willie
Mills, an African American driver, pilots it from one border
settlement to another, from the suburbs of San Diego itself, through
these mountain hamlets, to the border of Imperial County. Koppin
says that it was hard at first to find a place for the truck to make
its stop in Tierra del Sol, but his landlord finally agreed to let it
park here.
Mills and Koppin call for volunteers among the people leaning
on their cars or sitting smoking and talking in the shade of a
solitary tree. Soon folding tables are set up, and the area's
residents begin parceling out food from bins into bags. Then they
all line up, and each person gets whatever the truck is holding that
day. Oranges. Canned milk. Potatoes. Bread or hot dog buns.
Off to one side sits Jesus Rodriguez. He says he doesn't
know exactly when he was born, but he's lived his entire life here on
the border, over 80 years at least. "My family has always been
here," he says. "We were probably here when this was Mexico."
This land became part of the U.S. in 1848, after the U.S.
army defeated the Mexicans, and General Santana signed the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo giving up what's now California, Arizona, New
Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado and Utah. It was only Mexico
for 27 years - until Mexican independence in 1821 Spain claimed it as
its colony.
But long before the Spanish conquistadores and their friars
arrived in the 1700s, native people occupied the land for 10,000
years. The Kumeyaay and Cocopah Indians were its original
inhabitants, as late as 1880 Indians resisted outside settlement.
Fifteen were massacred that year by ranchers in nearby Jacumba.
Today a number of small reservations are scattered through east San
Diego County. The Manzanita Band of Diegueno Mission Indians has its
tribal office in nearby Boulevard, and sometimes tribe members also
get food from the truck.
A Spanish-speaking neighbor has brought Don Jesus, as she
calls him in respect for his age, down to the food distribution. "He
needs the food, of course," she says. "But he also needs to get out
and see people. He gets depressed living alone by himself, so I make
him come. The food feeds his body, and the people here feed his
soul."
Nick, another old man, also comes down to get food, even
though he's also a food producer. He has a small pig farm that
actually abuts the border fence itself, down Tierra del Sol Road
another three miles. "He's really too old anymore to slaughter the
pigs himself," Koppin says. "So every now and then I'll go work with
him, and in return I get some of the meat."
There are no official statistics on hunger specifically in
these border communities, but in 2007 15% of families with children
depended on food programs nationally, 20% of Latino and Black
families, and a third of families headed by single women. In San
Diego County as a whole, over 300,000 people went hungry, and more
than twice that didn't always know where their next meal was coming
from. In the current recession, all those numbers are unquestionably
higher.
But to Willie Mills, numbers don't tell the story. "I can see
that even though there are fewer people living here than in urban San
Diego, they need this food even more," he explains. "That's why I
drive the truck out here every week. If I didn't come, I don't know
what would happen to them." The truck is a project of the San Diego
Food Bank and Feeding America, a national food program.
In some ways, the story of the migrants crossing the border
and the hungry local residents is much the same. Koppin says, "We
see the people coming up the road, or more often, walking cross
country from the border. It's not hard to see how hungry they must
be too. We see women walking through, and even children. I hope
they find what they're looking for. It's very hard to be poor and
hungry, whether you live here or you're just passing through."
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and
Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border
(University of California, 2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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