The Border Fence Will Wreck the Environment and Destroy Families

By Mary Jo McConahay, Texas Observer. Posted September 15, 2007.

On hot summer days I would sit atop the water tank on the west side of the stone cabin ... watching turkey vultures climb invisible thermals, listening to the soft cooing of white-tipped doves, and gazing at the mosaic of greens that rippled into the distance. Something told me that I should swallow every angstrom of this beauty, commit it to memory, and hold it firmly in my heart.
-- Arturo Longoria, Adios to the Brushlands

Exhausted, a party of birders slips down the last few feet of a dry arroyo and collapses onto flat, cool stones near the spot where the water begins. Three sleek kayaks and a lumbering canoe sit beached just beyond reach of the licks of a lazy stream, near the tiny town of Salimeño. "We could secede again," says one of the birders in a tone that sounds only half-joking. He doesn't need to explain, because all present know the history of the short-lived, combative Republic of the Rio Grande (1839 to 1840). On the floor of the limestone arroyo, giant, fossilized oyster shells shine bright and curvy-edged in the sun. When a song comes from the brush, one of the birders automatically identifies it as "green jay," and the others assent without missing a beat in a conversation threaded with anger and frustration.

Up and down the Lower Rio Grande Valley, rebellion is in the air. Residents like the birders, and civic officials, are receiving top-down orders from Washington to accept a border fence many do not want, walling off their river. It will reverse new economic ebullience, opponents say, change their border culture, and bring down the curtain on rare critters of which they are stewards, including some found nowhere else in the world.

In Washington, anti-terror legislation is invoked to convince locals they have no choice.

McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez doesn't buy it. "The law gives them a lot of power, but not total power," he says. Relations with the Border Patrol, historically friendly, are strained because residents feel deliberately left in the dark about fence plans. The secrecy rankles. "We're fencing with ghosts now," says landowner John McClung, president of the Texas Produce Association. "Farmers are opposed because we irrigate almost entirely with water pumped from the river, and need access 24-7."

If you are envisioning the fence as a high but simple chain-link affair, think again. First, anyone on the river will tell you a "permeable" fence becomes solid in hours as it catches windblown flotsam and detritus. The law says the Department of Homeland Security must install "at least 2 layers of reinforced fencing," which means clearing a swath some 150 feet wide, locals reckon, to make room for fences, access and maintenance roads. "Think of bulldozing your house," says Sierra Club representative Scott Nicol, who teaches art at South Texas College in McAllen. "Then bulldoze the ones on either side, too, to get an idea of the width needed for the barrier. Then extend that for 700 miles." Nicol and others who live along the border know the fence won't work. They see the undocumented workers who have already braved deserts and jungles and bandits to get this far. "We could have a wall from sea to shining sea, and it wouldn't make a difference," he says. Even DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News in July that the border "is a much more complicated problem than putting up a fence, which someone can climb over with a ladder or tunnel under with a shovel."

Tensions grew in May when a government map of the proposed fence emerged at a community meeting. The map shows the wall cutting through a protected wildlife corridor, national refuges, and the University of Texas Brownsville-Texas Southmost College campus (leaving part on the "Mexican" side). The fence slices off public access to historic sites and runs along flood-control levees already in need of repair for lack of funds. (Funds are available, one landowner offers dryly, "at $3 million a mile to build a fence.") There is no way now to calculate exactly how much U.S. territory will become inaccessible because of the fence. In the Lower Rio Grande Valley alone, the course of the river is one of infinite curves, loops and omegas. A physical barrier that runs for miles must be relatively straight, so in the end significant acreage will be left on the far side of any "border" wall. Is that land effectively ceded to Mexico? Will it become a no-man's-land? A wall on just one levee in Mission would throw to the far side two restaurants and at least two homes. "I wouldn't know what country I lived in," one owner says. The wall would cut off boat docks, a boys' summer camp, and a small park with picnic tables. It would block access to the La Lomita Mission, after which the town is named. The 19th century wooden chapel was a stop on the historic Oblate Fathers Trail, a small jewel of a place where the faithful leave burning candles at a white altar and the local community is known to pray for rain when it does not come.

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Mary Jo McConahay is an independent journalist. Her last feature for the Texas Observer was "They Die in Brooks County" (June 1).

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