Look Again
As the raven flies, our colorful and quirky rental house, with terra cotta lighting fixtures and woven blankets, is less than a quarter mile away from our northern neighbor, the Ajo Border Patrol Station.
Our neighbor to the west is the Pozo Redondo Estates (also known as a trailer park). To the south, there is a junkyard of old broken-down vehicles, including an ambulance and a large boat, as well as a pyramid built by a couple who is living their dream in a retrofitted bus. To the east, a corner of the Tohono O’odham Nation Reservation dominated by saguaro and cholla as far as the eye can see, gordo Gambel’s quail, raucous cactus wren, and wary jack rabbits. In other words, this house is at the intersection of the banal and the horrific, the absurd and the sublime.
The news release about the 2012 ribbon cutting ceremony for the Ajo station emphasizes that the multi-million dollar project will serve 500 agents (up from just 25) and, most notably, it incorporates many sustainable features: low-water use utilities, energy-saving lighting, advanced dynamic glass, native and drought-resistant plantings, solar-heated hot water, and photo-voltaic panels. Initially, the designers intended to apply for the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Silver Standard, but the project earned enough points to attain the higher Gold Standard.
All this talk of sustainability draws focus away from the actual purpose of the expansion: “Buildings at the new station include an administrative and training facility, a detention area and fueling stations for the vehicles assigned there. The agents also have a helipad on the new facility.”
If you were just skimming this story, you’d likely miss it. The point of the entire news release, and this excerpt in particular, is to de-emphasize the true purpose of expansion, which is detention.
Locally, the station is known as the “processing facility,” a term that sanitizes the activity of the station even as it belies underlying attitudes toward those who are detained.
People are not processed, but meat is.
I learned recently that migrating people are often called pollos and those who smuggle them across the border are known colloquially as polleros. The terms could be interpreted as light-hearted jibes, except for the fact that you wouldn’t call a live chicken a pollo, but a gallina. The term pollo is used for chicken that you plan to eat, as in that delicious dish, arroz con pollo.
On my walk into the hillsides to the east, through blooming ocotillo and accompanied by nesting black-throated sparrows, it was easy to forget, for a moment. But then the thwump-thwump of an approaching helicopter served as a reminder.
It’s illegal to photograph a government building and I did not, but I did take a picture of a beautiful ocotillo blossom. If you look closely, you can see the green roof of the station. Farther still, you can see the green hillsides of the massive and unremediated copper mine. If you look closely, a picture can tell the story of the beauty and the decay, of the prayers for rain and for freedom. Look again.