I LIKE BORDERS. Borders are places of connection, clash, and blend. They define cultures — languages, arts, cuisines, habits — by exhibiting, testing, mingling and breaking their distinctiveness and insularity. Borders are where humans trade in goods, ideas and beliefs. They are places of ingenuity, mezcla, neologism and entrepôt. Borders mark difference and possibility: As sites of beauty and definition, alloy and creation, they spark vibrant and unexpected harmony. “Something only is what it is,” as the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel put it, “in its limit and through its limit.”
Infamously, however, regimes of crushing violence and dispiriting exploitation sully the creative and polyphonic potential of borders. As we deny, cast out and crack down, we have turned our thresholds into barricades.
Given the proliferation of such walling off of human beings, of human decency and of human potential, how do we respond?
living in the world’s borderlands experience what scholars refer to as a . In such an encounter, you meet someone who has crossed the border despite being legally barred from doing so, in which moment you’re presented with a choice: You can help the person with water, shelter or a ride — but if you do so, you risk being arrested, prosecuted, and even imprisoned. Where I live, in Arizona within an hour of the U.S.-Mexico border, offering such help may constitute a class 1 misdemeanor (or a felony) carrying a fine of up to $1,000 and possibly months in prison. Or: You can obey the law, do nothing, and take no risk. You decide. Not deciding isn’t an option.
