Commentary: Borders have been on my mind throughout my life, many dictating the actions of my family. The thoughts bumped up again recently in listening to a new podcast, "Forgotten: Women of Juarez," when co-host and journalist Monica Ortiz Uribe discussed her feelings about being on one side of a border versus another.
"I identify so strongly with the victims," she said. "There are women there that look like me who are my same age but confront a completely different, horrific reality."
That reality, addressed in the podcast, is the femicide of women over decades in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a town tied economically and by heart to El Paso, Texas. A strict border cut through that heart, a border that can change the fates of those on either side. It's a straight shot down Interstate 10, about 47 miles from me. My husband spent most of his life there; his brothers, uncles to my children, live there. Before COVID-19, we'd join them and my in-laws for family dinners every few months.
With my husband joining me in the United States and our children being New Mexicans by birth, how did our choices impact the river of ancestry? How did it change the trajectory of my children's lives? And how did my grandfather's trip when he was just a child change my life? After all, the border had crossed my family, too.
When my grandfather was about 10, his family was relocated after World War II. The land he had lived on, whose town crest he hung in his hallway until he died, changed from being Germany to being Poland. He was moved to a small town, which, for a time, was West Germany, where he met my grandmother.
What if his family hadn't relocated? Would iterations of me, pieces of my genetics, now float around in Poland?
My father, a young U.S. airman, crossed his own borders on a tour of duty to what was then West Germany. He met my mother. Through no fault of my own, I came along. We went back to the States, went back to Germany a few times and then got orders to the remote Texas-tinged side of New Mexico, where the plains stretched in all directions.
A decade later, in college, I drove an Austrian friend and exchange student through the empty plains near my parents' house. We got along well, and I thought perhaps she was similar to how I would have been if I had been raised in the density of a Germany ecosystem.
However, as we drove along the farmland miles you could see in 360 degrees around the car, with no other cars in sight for up to a half-hour at a time, the loneliness and space scared her. She was used to the cover of trees, the safety of towns and people. While those plains didn't exactly feel like home to me, the stretch of land felt safe because of the time I had spent there.
There had been an offer on the table for us to go to Arizona instead of New Mexico. The threat of heat likely influenced my father's decision, but for years, I reflected on how my life might have been different had I grown up in the metroplex of millions instead of the empty plains of a few tens of thousands. For one, I probably would have been a better driver.
My father left the density of Detroit for the United States Air Force. He told me at the end of his life that he left because of poverty, because he knew the choices available to him there limited what could be in not only his future but those unknown futures that might branch off from his — mine, and now, those of the grandchildren he never got to meet.
He saw a horrific reality for himself, a reality that kept and continues to keep others tied to that area. Poverty like his had spurred on similar military enlistments, especially from people of color whom he came to work with and see as friends.
Recently, I have thought of the borders and the realities that were set in motion for black people due to redlining. My father, too, came from poverty, but he had the ability to make choices unhampered by where he came from and to create a middle-class life. By depressing the opportunities of black people from neighborhoods set up in redlined borders, the government diminished the black community's ability to create similar wealth, an effect that still lingers. Those borders came for them, limiting their choices and the futures of their children. Those borders, however, can be changed and, in changing, will divert the destinies of those who may help shape a better future for our country.
Cassie McClure is a writer, wife/mama/daughter, fan of the Oxford comma, and drinker of tequila. Some of those things relate. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.