Excerpt from Notes From No Man's Land

Excerpt from Letter to Mexico

I am sending you a photocopy of a passage from the book Shame and Its Sisters. This photocopy was sent to me not long after I returned from Mexico, by the man who was my traveling companion there. It begins, “If I wish to touch you but do not wish to be touched, I may feel ashamed.” If you were to ask me now, “Why did you go to Mexico?” I would not be able to answer you honestly. I might say that I went to learn a language I have been trying to learn for a decade and still cannot speak.

Shame and Its Sisters continues, “If I wish to look at you but you do not wish me to, I may feel ashamed….If I wish to look at you and at the same time wish that you look at me, I can be ashamed. If I wish to be close to you but you move away, I am ashamed.”

As we drove across the border I saw a long line of people waiting to go to work in San Diego, their bicycles locked on the fence near customs. In the months before leaving for Mexico, I took a Spanish class at San Diego Community College taught by a woman who commuted from Tijuana. Sometimes, she told us in class, it took her more than two hours to get across the border. That Spanish class is the only course I have ever failed. Once across the border, there was a wall of corrugated metal that we drove along, and razor wire, and a ditch, and a lone man carrying a plastic bag in the sun, and a sudden change in the surface of the landscape, which I did not anticipate, because San Diego and Tijuana are close than sisters, almost two halves of the same city. But San Diego is green along the highways, and Tijuana is not. In San Diego, dusk brings the rhythmic sound of sprinklers, but here it does not.

The Colorado River is split down its deepest channel by the border. So much water is drawn off by both countries that the river rarely reaches the ocean anymore. Every day, a good part of the Mexico’s share of that water is used to cool the turbines at two new power plants in Mexicali. The plants are owned by American companies, and most of the power they generate is sold to California and Arizona. These power plants and two thousand maquiladoras, American-owned factories along the border, are the fruits of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has been in effect for more than a decade. The ten-year reports on NAFTA reveal that Mexico, like the United States, now has a small number of billionaires. And the real wages for everyone else have fallen. One of the promises of NAFTA was that it would make Mexico more like the United States. And it did—in that it widened the gap between the richest people in Mexico and the poorest.

From Notes From No Man's Land. © 2009 by Eula Biss. All rights reserved.