i.          

 

Useful choreography for crossing.

 

Safety first.

 

Remember that your body will be perceived as a potential threat before it will be perceived as the home where you reside. That is to say, you will be thought of as hard and machine-like and capable of violence before you will be thought of as irreverent, kind, funny or complicated—the things your body is capable of will be overdetermined by the fear of your Otherness.

 

This is why something like break-dancing or the moon-walk will not do. Ballet Folklorico and Danza Azteca either. To be certain, none of the great dances of the world are safe in this setting. They are too dexterous. The feet have inherited and accumulated too much practice. We try not to reveal the full potential of our steps outright.

 

Props can help. If you are a femme, carry a purse. If the sun shines brightly, carry a parasol. If the game is on, wear the right jersey and know the score. If you’re a student, carry books. If you are old and grandmotherly, walk with a cane.

 

For this interval of time perform what is expected. That is to say, view yourself from outside of yourself: from a mediocre perspective on the world and the capacities of its peoples.

 

In general, a right step then left step will do. Dexter, sinister, dexter, sinister, dexter, sinister. Toward another state.

 

ii.      

 

We’re driving East on the 8 freeway toward the Imperial Valley. Sofia, our 19-year-old cousin, a bright spark of joy, intellect, and deep feeling, rides with us. We drive toward El Centro to visit our grandmother who is receiving hospice care there.

 

From the back seat, Sofia asks us to tell her family gossip and to explain pieces of family history that she doesn’t have context for. She wants to know how we ended up here and why.

 

We tell her family migration stories; we tell her how after moving from Sinaloa to Mexicali with her sister our grandmother worked in a pharmacy. We tell her how our bisabuelo was a traveling merchant. “That’s such an old-timey job!” she laughs.

 

The chatter in the car stops when we see a group of migrants detained in an open-air camp in the distance. They are huddled and dwarfed by the horizontality of the landscape and the shadowy mountains looming in the distance. We fall completely quiet.

 

We break the silence to acknowledge the guilt we feel for being able to travel freely with people we love. We tell Sophia about how the 8 freeway is called the Kumeyaay Highway because it was built over ancient Kumeyaay routes used for seasonal migration and trade that linked the desert, to the mountains, to the ocean. And, how these routes were connected to trade networks linking Indigenous communities in the US Southwest with those in central Mexico – cultural and economic links fostering movement, connection, sustained by traveling merchants that were part of the pochtecayotl.

 

We tell her that when we drive along this route, we can’t help but think about this history, and, how the border is a colonial tool for severing.

 

“Like driving along the edge of a blade,” she says.

 

iii.          

 

We made fleeting friendships at the improvised humanitarian aid center set up by mutual aid organizations in San Diego to receive hundreds of migrants who had recently crossed the border to request asylum. To broker such friendships, we became adept at circumlocution, speaking around lexical gaps, in Broken French, Broken Chinese, Broken Arabic, Broken Portuguese.

 

Before the city or any other governmental entity mobilized, we were among many community members who volunteered as first responders to a crisis manufactured by the State in the Fall of 2023. The dehumanizing treatment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) required various forms of triage, field hospital(ity) work.

 

One morning we arrived with a cooler filled with egg, cheese, and potato breakfast burritos that we made so people arriving at the trolley station could have something warm to eat. A trio of young Senegalese men approached our table. We pointed to the sign that we’d printed with line drawings of an egg, cheese and a potato and explained that this was a Mexican breakfast food, “Burrito. Petit déjeuner!” They each took one and thanked us in a mixture of French, Spanish and English, but looked at the burritos suspiciously.

 

Later, as we sat with another group of compas from Colombia who discussed how San Ysidro looks and sounds a lot more similar to Mexico than they expected – in a mostly amused tone with perhaps a touch of disappointment – we saw one of the Senegalese travelers wave to us. “Muchas Gracias! Mexico is best breakfast!” he shouted. To our delight we saw that he’d taken another burrito for the road.

 

“De rien, amigos. Bienvenidos!” we shouted back across the parking lot, as they departed to continue their journey, with an end of the line in sight.