Adios a la Frontera... hola Borderlands.

The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands,the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.

Gloria Anzaldua, Preface to the First Edition, Borderlands/La Frontera

The Borderlands Witness Drive departed la Frontera this afternoon—a bittersweet passage. The footprints we made from the Arizona desert to the Rio Grande Valley have left a palpable impression on my spirit… even as the pull toward Capitol Hill gains momentum.

Behind us the migrant death toll climbs, as a body a day is being recovered from the torrid Sonoran desert. In Texas the Department of Homeland Security has just announced plans to expand the Raymondville immigrant detention camp—already the largest in the country—by 1,000 bunks.

Ahead await the internal borderlands… migrant communities, labor camps, poultry farms, more detention centers. These are the borderlands that criss-cross the U.S. like the arteries and veins of one large integrated human body…"where the space between individuals shrinks with intimacy." (Anzaldua)

--john heid, Beaumont, TX, 15th July 2007