YOLANDA CHAVEZ LEYVA
  • Home
  • Fierce Fronteriza Blog
  • Callegrafias Fronterizas
  • What I do
  • Publications
  • Comunidad
  • Connecting
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • South Central - Alameda Street
  • Untitled
  • Callegrafia
Fierce Fronteriza
Picture

Looking beyond borders

1/31/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
I live and work en la frontera, on the border between the United States and Mexico. From my university campus, I see Ciudad Juárez, across the traffic of I-10 and passed the border fence that sits just this side of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo. I can see the two-story green buildings that were once the officers’ quarters at the old Fort Bliss.  The Sierra Madre Occidental rises in the distance. Thousands of homes fill the landscape, some painted yellow, green, pink, white. Others are unpainted cinder block. 

In 2008 when the government began building the border fence, one man stood there day after day with a sign that said "NO WALL." The late Justo Rivera, a Vietnam vet and community activist, believed that the wall was inherently racist and unnecessary. 

Living on the border, on the periphery of two nations, border people know that we can never separate ourselves from the community just across the highway, the fence, the river. Families move back and forth from generation to generation. Daily, thousands cross to work and to shop. Right now the lines at gas stations in south El Paso are long because of the "gasolinazo," the increase in gasoline prices in Mexico. Juárez drivers cross the international border to save $1 or $2 dollars per gallon. Because of NAFTA, trucks line up at the ports of entry to transport goods, so many that south side school children suffer the effects of heightened contamination from the truck emissions. The recent peso devaluation has had devastating effects on El Paso's economy because Mexican shoppers can no longer purchase what they could just a few months ago.
 
Sometimes we make fun of each other’s' language or customs. Mexican American kids tell immigrant students to "speak English." It is not uncommon for my students to aspire to work for the Border Patrol; it is one of the best jobs in El Paso. Sometimes I meet people who have never crossed the border to visit Ciudad Juárez. I don't have illusions that we are “better” or “more compassionate.”

But I do know that fronterizos have something to teach others.
​
On the border, the connections among us are clear. We can see them, feel them, experience them in the most visceral of ways. In these times of increasing fear, suspicion, and “America First,” may we remember that we are all connected.
 

 

 


0 Comments

Two cities, one cause

1/30/2017

0 Comments

 
In 2008, people from both sides of the border came together to support each other. Two communities,  El Segundo Barrio in El Paso and Lomas de Poleo in Ciudad Juárez, expressed their support at the Mexican Consulate in El Paso and at the U.S. Consulate in Juárez. Facing tremendous danger, these fronterizos stood up to developers who planned to displace them. Today, we continue to stand together with barrios under siege.

#fiercefronterizos
#DuranguitoSeDefiende
 
0 Comments

The courage to reach across borders

1/29/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Photographs by Luis Hernandez, January 2017.

A week ago, Donald Trump signed an executive order to build the wall he had been promising for months as presidential candidate. The order stated that wall “shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier…” Three days after his announcement, fronterizos responded with “Hugs not Walls/ Abrazos no Muros.”
 
Organized by the Border Network for Human Rights, which was founded in 1998 to advocate for human rights and immigration reform, Hugs not Walls brought together hundreds of families who had not seen each other for years. One group of family members had been separated for 27 years.  The separation of families arises from many sources: poverty, immigration status, immigration policies, or fleeing violence, among others. Each family has its own story.
 
At Friendship Park on the border of Tijuana and San Diego, families also have had the opportunity to see each other for a few minutes. First Lady Pat Nixon inaugurated Friendship Park in 1971 when only a small barbed wire fence divided the two nations. She asked that the fence be cut so she could visit with a group on the Mexican side. It is reported that she said, “I hate to see a fence anywhere.”
 
In the succeeding years, fences have been built.
 
Donald Trump’s executive order comes 100 years after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, a bill that was the harbinger for an increasingly closed border. The legislation called for a literacy test and an $8 head tax. Although meant to keep out Europe's poor during the First World War, its effects were felt on the southern border as well. The creation of the Border Patrol in 1924 was a second step in tightening the border.

By the 1990s, Operation Hold the Line and Operation Gatekeeper increased the surveillance of the border by Border Patrol officers, leading to increasing deaths of migrants trying to enter the United States through the deadly Sonoran desert.

For a century, we have found the courage to reach across the border to connect and reconnect. I know that in the painful days and months and years to come, we will continue to have the courage and the corage to remember each other's humanity.
 


0 Comments

Las dos hermanas

1/29/2017

0 Comments

 
PictureSister Cities/ Ciudades Hermanas by Los Dos (Photo by Michelle E. Carreon)
Yo soy fronteriza/ I am of the border. I know that I am and always will exist on both sides of the dividing line.  I have lived on the U.S. side for over sixty years and for an equal amount of time, mi cuatita/ my twin sister Elisa has laid buried in an unmarked grave in the municipal  cemetery in Ciudad Juárez. Identical twins cleaved from the same egg, nourished in the same womb, and brought into the world together, we have mirrored each other our entire existence. Death/life. Juárez/El Paso. Newborn/ elder.
           
For most of my life, I expected my sister to find me. Every time there was a knock at my door, I thought it could be her. In my twenties and thirties, I daydreamed that one day I would find her while I walked down the streets of El Paso or Juárez. I knew that I would recognize her because I would see my own face reflected in hers.  I knew since I could first understand words that she had died as a baby, but I couldn’t believe it.  I was always searching for my other half.
 
Elisa and I were born in the mid fifties to a teen-aged mother, Lupe, in a small clinic in Ciudad Juárez. It was one-floor square building that epitomized the 1950s “modern” look. I remember it sat on a small street surrounded by Chinese Elm trees. It was painted white. Or that is what I remember from my childhood visits to Juárez.
 
Elisa and I were born prematurely at two pounds each. I don’t know if the idea of having two tiny babies who weren’t expected to live was too much for Lupe or if her suffering depleted her of her maternal connection to us.  From the beginning, our future held so many possibilities that I often wonder what would I be now if my life had taken one of the different paths that opened when I was born.
 
Lupe could have kept us and had we survived, we would have been raised by a single mother who had survived a traumatic childhood of abuse. I learned as an adult that her father had been so abusive to her and her mother that she stopped using his last name in order to sever any connection to him. She couldn't even bear to have his name.
 
The doctor who delivered us asked Lupe to give one of us to him in payment for the C-section he performed on her. I always wondered if he wanted a daughter to raise as his own or if he wanted a criada, a child to raise as a servant, a custom going back to the colonial period in New Spain. Instead, Lupe asked her great aunt and uncle to adopt us. They said yes but only to one of us. My adoptive mother, who had experienced nine miscarriages and longed for children more than anything else, couldn’t bear the thought of taking someone’s children away. So she agreed to take one of us and leave the second with Lupe. She chose me, she said, because I had more life in my eyes. Elisa went to our grandmother in Juárez, Cruz.
 
My abuela Cruz lived in a small house on the periphery of Juárez. I remember driving there with my mama and daddy when I was five. Like a dream, I remember sitting in the back of my daddy's car driving along dirt roads smelling the creosote and watching the mountains in the distance. This is where Elisa spent her short life. Elisa died at about a month old from gastroenteritis, one of the major killers of poor children worldwide. In my forties, I found her death certificate in the civil records office in Ciudad Juárez and finally knew what had happened to her.
 
In El Paso, my great aunt and uncle became my mama and daddy. My mama barely slept for weeks, sitting next to my crib day and night making sure I lived through the night. At first, I was so tiny that they put me to sleep in a shoebox. My godmother made miniature shirts for me to wear. There weren’t any photos of me until I was six months old because they were so afraid I would die that they didn’t think to document my early months.   By six months, I was a fat happy baby smiling into the camera, held in my daddy’s or mama’s arms. They beamed, holding their daughter who had lived.

That was my beginning.
 
There is a mural in El Paso on Father Rahm Street in El Segundo Barrio, one of the most historically significant Mexican American barrios in the United States. Named “Sister Cities/ Ciudades Hermanas,” it opened my heart as soon as I saw it. Created by Los Dos, talented artists Ramon and Christian Cardenas, the mural pays homage to El Paso and Juárez, The mural’s sisters, their braids entwined like the DNA that my sister and I share, reminds me of this beginning, of being fronterizas in life and death.
 
Sometimes in the evenings, I look southward across the now-dry river to see the lights of Juárez.  I think of my sister, my other half, buried in the soil of the Chihuahuan desert, and I remember that I am of the border. And that to survive on the border I must be fierce.


 
 
 
 
 



0 Comments

    Archives

    September 2019
    August 2019
    November 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017

    Categories

    All

Picture
My father used to tell me about sneaking into this theater to watch movies as a kid in the 1910s. It showed Spanish language films. In the 1940s, it was transformed into a "whites only" theater but that didn't last long. By the 1950s, it was headquarters to the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union, a radical labor organization. Before it closed, it housed the Mine and Mill Bar.
Picture
Picture
This message is painted on the east side of the old Mission movie theater.
Picture
The bell tower of Guardian Angel Catholic Church, built in the 1910s to serve the growing Mexican immigrant community in what was then the "east side" of El Paso.
Picture
This pinata shop caught my attention as I was driving west on Alameda Street on my way to work.
Picture
Hawaiian dancer, Alameda Street.
Picture
Unicorn pinata on Alameda Street.
Picture
Proud graduate pinata.
Picture
Love message on the east side exterior wall of the old Mission Theater.

Segundo Barrio
Father Rahm Street
​July 2022

Picture
Looking into Padre Pinto Plaza, Sagrado Corazon Catholic Church.
Picture
Treasures on the window sill.
Picture
La bici
Picture
Tres vatos.
Picture
Esperando el bus.
Picture
Two generations.

 La Virgensita en la frontera
Picture
Woman reflected on la Virgencita, Segundo Barrio, 2021.
Picture
La Virgen de Guadalupe, 12 de diciembre 2017, Centro de Trabajadores Agricolas, El Paso
Picture
Protecting Barrio Duranguito 2019

 Cd Juarez downtown
​December 2017
Picture
Raramuri father and son musicians, downtown Juarez, 2017.
Picture
The smell of copal, downtown Juarez, December 2017.
Picture
Ciudad Juarez limpia, downtown, December 2017.
Picture
Selling at the mercado, downtown Juarez, December 2017
Picture
Telcel payaso, downtown Juarez, December 2017


 La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, 2017

Picture
Dos perros, La Mariscal, December 2017
Picture
Mujer con cabello verde, La Mariscal, Juarez, December 2017.
Picture
Beautiful death, La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, December 2017.
Picture
Tin Tan, La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, December 2017.
 
Montana Vista 2019
Picture
Red high heels in the desert 2019
 El Centro July 2022
Picture
A tree reaches out to Oscar Zeta Acosta (mural by Lxs Dos), El Paso, Texas July 2022
  • Home
  • Fierce Fronteriza Blog
  • Callegrafias Fronterizas
  • What I do
  • Publications
  • Comunidad
  • Connecting
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • South Central - Alameda Street
  • Untitled
  • Callegrafia