heart on both sides
Kayluh Ote, USA - Mexico
17 August 2022
Heart On Both Sides by Kayluh Ote Displayed in Chicano Park, San Diego CA - December 2020.
Never did I think that my most influential, toxic, ground moving relationship would be with a border wall. Yet here we are, in a space not our own.
I had grown up in rural California,exactly 0.702 miles from the US/Mexico border. It was a border town in the sense that the border was close, but there was no port of entry, just a wall. When I would look out from our front porch, there was a big array of nothingness.
From ages 5 to 13 I became familiar with the border wall. I would gaze at its rules and fear which it held. As a child I knew the only way of overcoming that fear was to run across it.
As first generation Americans, we were tolerated – people in the community liked us, but we were the exception to the rule.
One of my earliest memories is hearing a church across the border. The stereo system this church had, we must’ve been at least 5 miles out, but you could hear their priest or padre over the muffled sounds of the microphone, and my family would just listen, not to the sermon but the sounds that traveled to us.
My mother tells us a story, from a time before 9/11; the air was different, the border was just posts and barbed wire, and if you lost your dog, you could go looking for him and no one questioned it, because pre-9/11 it was “just” land.
In early 2001, Mexico and the USA came up with a new policy, one that would increase border security but also provide aid to those crossing, job assistance and legalization to unauthorized immigrants. After 9/11 that policy was shelved and what was created is what we see now: criminalization and concentration camps.
Heart On Both Sides by Kayluh Ote Displayed Tierra Alta Park, San Diego CA December 2020.
Then “minutemen” became an organization made up of white community members. Self funded, and hatred fueled. Minuetmen felt it was their “American Duty” to monitor those who crossed undocumented. Where once stood post and barbed wire, minutemen self funded and built a wall, way before Trump’s war cry.
How do you tell your kids that their coaches, teachers, neighbors, and assumed allies were minutemen?
By 2002 we had what is known as “homeland security” who have no problem tending America’s racist roots.
In 2010 Arizona SB 1070 law came into effect. What was nicknamed “Show me your papers” was a law that made you guilty of being brown. This law did not directly affect us, in the sense that we lived in a different state, but this political change stretched beyond Arizona. My family was no longer the exception to this rule; we now fell under it. The back of our neighbor’s truck, in tape and sharpie, applauded Arizona’s new law and lines were now drawn.
My parents were not ones who shared truths – rather if you discovered it, they wouldn’t deny it, they would just say nothing.
Fast forward a few years, under a new administration, I had hope. Hope for peace. However my nightmare happened under the Obama administration, when he deported over 2.5 million people, more than any other president.
Our family’s nightmare lasted a few hours, which was one of the quickest deportations I had witnessed. On my way to school at eleven years old, our car was stopped and by lunchtime they had released my father back in Tijuana, MX, an origin not his own. The trauma still lives in all of us. To call ourselves lucky, or privileged still does not feel right, when a trauma is preventable. In a lineup, I still believe I could tell you which ICE agents just “did their job.” There are men, women, and children who get caught in concentration camps and cages for years, fighting for their nightmare to be over.
I learned the practice of crossing countries every weekday morning. My father got the chance to visit a home he hadn’t been to in over a decade.
Heart On Both Sides by Kayluh Ote Displayed at Chicano Park, San Diego CA December 2020.
Heart on Both Sides is my rendition of the US border wall, spray painted and holding a portrait of my abuelita on both sides of this installation. Heart on Both Sides is made up of a metal post and sheet metal, and was torn down and rebuilt in a different neighborhood located in San Diego, CA. Before Trump’s wall, sheet metal and barbed wire were a version of the border wall that can still be seen in some parts today.
My abuelita has spent more than half her life traveling between Mexico and the United States; she has children on both sides of the border, and has learned to navigate both sides, for her children. Her heart is separated by a border wall. Since her first child’s migration.
Love should know no borders, and it is from previous generations that teach us how to love. Mi abuela has taught me how to love sin barreras in the name of familia. This piece is in honor of her and her sacrifice, standing tall on whichever side of the border she is called to.
To quote DACA – “home is here.” Your family, your friends, your home, and your possessions. Kids and grandchildren. If you were to be taken to another country with nothing but a cell phone, and $20 of a different currency, what outcome are you drawing? What success or lack thereof?
I continued to adapt and grow, with ever-changing risks and circumstances. To call the USA’s immigration policy shitty is putting it nicely. The nightmare of immigrtions policy has continued. We have over 1,500 kids “unaccounted” for. We have case after case of forced sterilization of women. We have kids in cages, stripped of every human right. ICE is a terrorist group on home soil. It always has been. Our immigration policy doesn’t just change when the president does.
Our immigration policy changes when there is abolition.
References:
Julissa Arce, December 16, 2021, The Long History of forced sterilization of Latinas, https://www.unidosus.org/blog/2021/12/16/the-long-history-of-forced-sterilization-of-latinas/
Alejandra Salazar, October 27, 2020, Breaking Down The U.S. Deportation Machine, Latino USA, https://www.latinousa.org/2020/10/27/deportationmachine/