This is Democracy – Episode 106: Beyond the Wall: Cross-Border Cultures

[0:00:03 Speaker 2] This

[0:00:05 Speaker 0] Is Democracy, a podcast that explores the interracial

[0:00:09 Speaker 2] inter generational and inter

[0:00:11 Speaker 0] sectional unheard voices living in

[0:00:13 Speaker 2] the world’s most influential

[0:00:14 Speaker 0] democracy. Yeah, welcome to our new episode of This Is Democracy. Today we’re going to discuss cross border cultures in North America. How do we understand the relationship between peoples and cultures on both sides of what is a very artificial, contested and problematic border between the United States and Mexico, a border that in many ways does not reflect the history of the cultures and the peoples on both sides? Uh, we have the special privilege today of discussing this issue with not only an expert on the topic. We often have experts on the podcast, but someone who is not simply an expert but someone who also rights deeply and reflects upon these issues as as an individual as well as a scholar and a political activist and a great teacher. It’s Ilan Stavans. Uh Ilan is one of the preeminent essayists cultural critics and translators in the United States. Today he is the Louis C. Bring Professor in Latin American and Latino culture and the five college 40th anniversary professor at Amherst College and Amherst is one of my favorite places. A number of my PhD students actually teach there as well as wonderful students, so it’s really nice to have an amorous connection here. Uh, Dr Stephens is a native of Mexico. He has his PhD from Columbia University. He has written so many books, and again it’s impressive because their academic in some cases in some cases their political, in some cases, their literary, uh, he runs the gamut, his most recent two books that I want to recommend that I’ve had the good fortune to read in the last few days. One is a book length poem called The Wall on the Wall between North America in North America between United States and Mexico. And then he has a graphic novel called Latino USA, which is really wonderful, wonderful illustrations and discussions of what it means to be Latino in the United States. Uh, Ellen, thank you for joining us today. My pleasure. It is. It is a joy to be here before we turn to our discussion with Dr Stavins. With Ellen. We have, of course, Zachary Scene setting poem. What? What is the title of your poem? Zachary, where the River once unfurled and and before you read it, I should tell our audience that you and Dr Stephens have actually worked closely together through the great books uh, Summer program, which is a program for high school students who are interested in the great books. It’s a summer program and is a program that Dr Stephens created. So So you have a connection not only to the subject matter, but to our guest today, right? Zachary? Certainly. Okay, well, so let’s let’s hear your poem Where the River once unfurled my father’s They were born with borders Long, my mother’s forged within the Russian pale. The words they chose to speak. We’re nation lists. The tongues were rivers and the rivers tongues, the water old live for long past worlds, and I have rafted down the rivers pronged and felt the desert breathe and storm and hail. The trees were wilted, dragged from a joblessness, signs speaking English from their Spanish lungs and seas of sand that sing of rhymes, not twirled. And when the poets sing of Rubicon or Moses, watching Jordan from a Dale one cannot help but think with shameful nous of all the prince left in the border. Deng, the ones still where the river once unfurled. What is your poem about Zachary? My poem is really about my personal experience with cross border cultures and with borders in general. My my family history goes back to Jews in the Russian pale, as I mentioned in my poem. But I also live in the American Southwest. So I experienced the border and cross border cultures on a very routine basis. Uh, Ellen, I understand from Zachary that these are also very personal issues to you. And that, of course, is evident in your work. How do you approach these issues? What draws you to thinking about cross border experiences? Hi, myself. I’m also a Jew, the product of many diasporas. Jeremy, I come from Poland and the Ukraine and further back other parts of that pale of settlement. Uh, the generations have erased their identity and I cannot trace them completely enough. The Jewish experience has been about migration. My great parents tried to come to the United States. Immigration quotas made it impossible. They were stationed in the Caribbean in Central America and eventually settled in Mexico. Part of the family eventually did move north and my immediate family just stayed there, very grateful to the country that had opened its arms in moments of fear and desperation for Jews the beginning of the 20th century. I grew up in Mexico with that sense of gratitude, but also with the feeling that I was there by accidents the way Jews are by accident in many places. And the Jews travel from one country to another, often oblivious of the of the borders that differentiate those countries. They make those countries, they are home mostly as rentals, never fully as the owners of the house. That is the feeling that I had when growing up in Mexico, that the house was mine, to the extent that I would stay there and that if I would move onward, then I would be somewhere else. And I feel that that, uh, attraction magnetism through our borders. But the desire to jump them to turn them upside down is ingrained. It’s deep in my blood. Eventually I moved to the United States. I feel I have built a home here for me and for my family. But I see that U. S Mexican border as a crucial if slavery is the original sin of this country. I think the Mexican border is the the unavoidable mirror where we see ourselves reflected with all our limitations with all our handicaps. And it is a mirror where dreams crash where they collapse a border, a mirror that keeps people out, that they offers a false sense of exclusiveness in, uh, for that reason, a border that is a constant reminder of the of the continent where we are placed, the origins that we have that we might have betrayed along the way and the possibility to because hope is the American currency by and by and large, the the possibility of a breaching beyond that border In finding that there is somebody waiting for us on the other side. Mhm. It’s such a compelling personal account and intellectual journey that you describe your lan. Uh, most families have that kind of experience. Why does it remain so hard for us to imagine our way outside of borders? Why? Why does this mirror, as you put it, Why does it remain so resilient? Despite the effort of so many generations and scholars like yourself and Edward Side and others seeking to break it down. Why is it so hard to break it down? It is hard, Jeremy, because at at at the core, humans are about turf. They are about finding a place called home, claiming it in the defining it by not only stating who is in but emphasizing who is out. I wish that borders could be raised, but it’s a It’s an elusive possibility. The dream of having a neighbor is actually much more civilised. The question is how to engage with the border in a constructive, humane, a a harmonious way. It is not about erasing that border, but it’s about realizing that we can be peaceful with with the person that is on the other side and also humanize that that person, finding that the culture that they have is as legitimate as authentic as ours is in the end, the for that reason that they will also breach out in in our direction and recognize that we are not only fluff, plastic dollar science, but there is much more and and how do you How do you get young people at Amherst College and elsewhere and your readers to see that? I mean, I struggle with that. Here in Texas, we’re so close to the border. But yet Austin can feel so very far from from the border in many ways, and the ethnic and geographic and cultural inter mixing is so evident but also erased every day. And the way we define our scholarship are writing our politics. So how do you work through that with your students and your readers? I will answer that question, Jeremy, by telling you that at close to 60 I never really dreamed of being a teacher. I wanted to be an adventurer. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to be a writer, but a teacher, a teacher felt to me in my young age, confining. Why would I want to imprison myself in indoors? And why would I want to be repeating the same thing? Year after year, I realized now that there is no better activity, no better endeavor that I could do and probably others as well than teaching from of all the things that I do, writing and publishing and the I find teaching the most the most humbling in the most consequential to the point that I I think that I was. I was born to refuse it, but eventually to acknowledge it in that if any, if I can have any contribution, it is in the classroom as a lab, as a as a test testing place, where, together with the young generation, that is curious in looking to understand its own role in the world. I can explore all sorts of ideas, all sorts of possibilities, all sorts of challenges. I love teaching. I find that I learned much more than I teach. I find that I get the pulse of the country and the world by being in touch with the 12 year olds. I sometimes teach middle schools or 16 year olds. In high school. I teach undergraduates and teach graduates. I teach also programs for senior citizens. And in the past 10 years during I’ve been teaching in prisons in upstate New York, in different places in Massachusetts and in teaching in prison is even more rewarding because there are wolves that are built for the inmates, not to not to leave, and you have to literally bring the world into that. That habitat I teach Shakespeare in prison and, you know, the the the usual response is to they understand Shakespeare’s language. Can they really identify with Hamlet or Macbeth or or a fellow or Prospero? No population approaches Hamlet with such passion in my experience. Wow. Like the ones in jail, they they can see him as a window. And I think that teaching for them and for the other populations that I have is really the key to helping move forward in a hopeful way. All I can say is I’m in. I I feel the saying that the exact same way I feel privileged to be a teacher every day. Zachary, you have a question? Yes. So I know that in particular, you study how language and literature is affected by these borders that we erect for ourselves. How in North America, particularly between the United States and Mexico, has language been defined by this border? Zachary, that that’s a That’s a terrific question, and I I am really grateful to you for asking it to me. The most important important feature of an intellectual life is are the words the language that we use as bricks to build the edifices that are our books or our class classes or the lectures that we give. And I am. I’m fascinated, maybe even hypnotized by how language unites us, how language separates us, where language is born, how language dies. What are the new words that are? We are constantly incorporating to our lexicon. How big is our lexicon? How many words do we have at our disposal? In what way? The words that we use are similar to the words that those that can be for us and using the language? Yes. Or did words change? Meaning? Do they change inter nations? Do they do they become something that they was not seen for them at the beginning? And I am particularly attracted when it comes to borders with the concept of a new languages that emerge in the border. I’m interested, for instance, in the border between the Israelis and the Palestinians on something called Hi bria that is neither fully Hebrew nor Arabic, but a hodgepodge, a mishmash. And in between, I’m interested in frankly, the mix of French and English portrayal the mid the mix of Portuguese in Spanish and the border between Venezuela and Brazil or Portugal and Spain, and I am absolutely stunned in in the committed to Spanglish. The that encounter that that marriage and maybe that divorce between Spanish and English in the US Mexican border in in Puerto Rico, in inner cities in New York, in Miami and Houston in L. A and Chicago. I love how the rhythms of Spanglish are neither Spanish rhythms nor English rhythms, but something in between. I love how it borrows. Maybe it steals from these two languages. I love the fact that in the US Mexican border there are 25 million Spanglish speakers. I think that that is a nation unto itself, with its own official tongue. With it. That means with its own identity, and it is a nation that is creating its own literature and literature is memory. There are poems written in Spanglish in in El Paso, in in Ciudad Juarez, in Brownsville. In Tijuana, there are there’s tons of lyrics, their place. There are novels that are written in Spanglish that now need to be translated either into English or into Spanish, because Spanglish is neither one again nor the other. So I am. I’m really strong by the fact that in this border in this mirror that I was telling you about, and no civilization is emerging with its own way of communication. And it is not unlikely that maybe in 50 years somebody’s going to win the novel price for having written, uh, work in Spanglish. That will change our perception of how to see reality as a whole, not only on the border, but in general, right? Well, I mean, just coming back to your analogy, to Shakespeare or two to Dante. I mean, these are figures who took languages. You’re not supposed to write in, uh, and made them made them a vernacular, made them a written vernacular, and the same should happen. You’re right. For Spanglish or for many of these other new mixes, these new hodgepodge is, as you put them so well, it seems to me that’s crucial to democracy, right, providing people with words and allowing groups to create their own words to describe their experience. Do you see that as one of the roles of literature as sort of providing a democratic outlet for that expression? And how do you see that working? I absolutely do. Jeremy and Zachary, I believe that literature is, uh, the glue that brings the participants in democracy together. Democracy is by definition a very rowdy, very chaotic, very messy system of government. It exists by by screaming to one another, or at least by trying to make an argument, to convince those across the aisle that our ideas are better or or that we can find a compromise. And I think that the glue that brings democracies together is the dialogue. The literature is dialogue, but it’s not only dialogue in the present tense. Literature is dialogue across time, but we are in conversation with the dead and with the unborn. When we open leaves of grass or wrap a Chinese daughter by by Hawthorn or a poem by Emily Dickinson. We are in conversation with each of those authors the way we are in conversation with others that are not yet with us, that our our Children or grandchildren and whose words are already in our dictionaries. But they will appropriate them. They will turn them into into tools to say something that we can’t even imagine. We live at a time when literature is losing ground, or at least that’s the perception. Less and less people read complete books. Attention spans are short and elusive. the whole publishing industry is in a state of crisis. And yet for me, it is essential that we recognize that literature is the the the the question mark that we throw to the person that is just in front of us to ask them. Who are you? How is it that you arrived here? What makes you my neighbor and in what way we can, we can collaborate. I think that literature is the most exquisite and the most complex of those endeavors in democracy. And you take it out in democracy as an edifice collapses well, and that’s so well, settle on. And and it also seems to me everything you say about publishing is correct. The challenges we face you and I and others as authors. On the other hand, I’m always amazed at how my students get access to literature in ways that are different from how you and I did when we were younger, listening to audio books, listening to podcast. That’s why we do this. This podcast, in fact, uh, through rap through the spoken word I mean, it’s almost as if in some ways we’re more surrounded by poetry than ever before. Just often in non traditional forms. No doubt about it. In fact, I could argue we could argue that people read more today than ever before. Or at least more people read more today than ever before. Re tweets read Facebook posts, read the other forms of messaging that we text one another. We are of the written word, and we have figured out a way to make that written word coexist with the icon with a visual image. To the extent that we love graphic novels, we love comic strips. We love videos and in Netflix and in in Hollywood movies. But there is something that you will agree with me. Jeremy. There is something that literature, the plain, old fashioned written page that sorts itself out in front of our eyes. The moment we engage it can do that no other form of communication can do, and that is the capacity to go deep into the complexities, they and ambiguities of human behavior. Other forms might communicate, but they but they are more superficial. I think a novel will tell you not who is good and who is bad, but how good and bad are negotiated it by in the characters and in each of us. And I think that that that that instrument that we call the novel or the poem allows us to feel that our our daily endeavors are more than simply slogans that we vomit so that others might see where you stand politically. I love when a poem doesnt undress fully in front of the reader. It requires 234 readings before it surrenders its message, if it ever does. I love when a poem actually actually has more than one message where it can be perceived in a number of ways. That’s what a tweet doesn’t do. A Tweet wants to tell you in very simple and direct words with very limited vocabulary. What the author thinks the author of the novel or of a poem or of a play will will wonder and wonder, as they right and will not be fully a represented in single, straightforward, straightforward terms. And I think that that’s humanity. I think that that’s what matters. After all, that’s what connects us with the Greeks and with the Israelites and with the Phoenicians. With the Middle Ages and with the Renaissance complexity, the capacity to doubt not to be sure of ourselves, to question to one day think one thing and the other day probably think something different. I think that’s so well said, And there’s definitely a difference between immersing oneself in a in a large work, a novel buildings, Roman work of history versus what can be very motivating. But but be more like a short meal rather than the long meal, the long marination. Uh, on that point, I think Zachary wants to ask you about some of your work in particular. So you’ve recently written a book length poem, as we mentioned earlier about the borderlands of the United States and Mexico entitled The Wall. How does poetry allow us to to see this border and these cross border cultures in a way that is very different from how we traditionally see them? How does it bring us beyond the political rhetoric, I start my answer, uh, secretary, by telling you that I love the poem that you really thank you. It’s very powerful. And, uh, you know, a good poem to me is one where the words not simply say what they are supposed to say, but the right words sit in the right place on the page, and even without seeing, but only listening to it, it felt to me that that poem had the right words where they should be in. Congratulations for that, uh, I was I was struck as a Mexican American when around 2000 and 15, President Trump began denouncing those that come from south to north as bad hombres as criminals as the impostors ready to take classroom spaces from innocent Americans, stealing the medicines in order to help their families from innocent Americans and ultimately undermining the entire American experiments from innocent Americans. And I felt it very personally, and I at one point I just couldn’t handle it anymore. And I asked for a month leave from my teaching job, and they bought an old car and literally traverse the US Mexican border from one end in the Gulf of Mexico to the other in the Pacific. In the I came as close to touching the border when I could eyes exacted, jumping with my Mexican passport to the other side, and then with my American passport to this side, to talk, to immerse myself with the various communities to see what they think of one another and to smell and listen and taste the tastes and smells and sounds that exists on both sides. I tried up and coming back writing an essay. I thought it could be a book longer, say, in the poetry kept on infringing itself on me. It appeared to me that it was begging to be used in order to talk about the US Mexican border and that, in fact it wanted. It wanted me to use it in the most minimalist way possible by creating a poem where a single word, sometimes a preposition or a noun or an adverb, can take a line. When you open the book and read it the world you see that everything is so thinly shaped it’s almost like a thread. I wanted through words through language to recreate the pattern that the U. S. Border has as if you were walking on it or added side. And I I felt very satisfied when I completed the book. I wanted it to be a kind of journey of an epistemological journey and journey of, of of knowledge, of recognition of this wound that is, that separates the two countries that have defined me, the one that is also in the middle of my chest and that we will never fully heal. And the poetry poetry was the medicine. Poetry was the instrument to be able to survey that that U. S Mexican border as frightening as the border is as exhilarating as it is as well. In the feeling that I had was of a of satisfaction of realizing that all the dogmas, all the pro pronouncements and denunciations that we hear all the time on both sides on Mexican on the Mexican side on the American side have little to do with the people that live in the US Mexican border. They are humble. They are dedicated to raising their kids, finding meaning in life, being happy the way the rest of us are in the in that they are often upset by how much energy, the sense on them, trying to push them in this direction or the other. I think that poetry can do something that that no other form can do, and that is explore the rawness of, uh of a wound in as vivid a way as possible without being scientific. I have to say, having read your your po, your book length poem, The wall that you’re referring to. I had exactly that feeling it it captures in the in the Ortho graffiti in the presentation. It has a very tactile feeling to it, and and before, before you even think. I think reading your words gives gives one a feeling of just the journey you describe Dylan and I can’t think of. I can’t think of a form that would replace that would replace that, and and I think that that transitions us to to what is always, in a sense, our last question. Every week we asked this question of of our experts. What can we do? How do we go forward? How do we take this knowledge and experience to actually do better going forward? What? What is it that we can do as a society, particularly young people? Many of our young listeners? What can they do to embody, uh, the lexicon? As you said as well as the feeling of this cross border culture and and bring it out more in our society? How how can we make progress? I believe we are. We are living at a crucial, decisive turning point. Every generation has the impression that it is called to do something that the generations before didn’t do or didn’t finish. But such are the changes that are happening right now that it feels as if that responsibility is all the more demanding of us, of the old and of the young changes happening, happening at a very rapid speed, sometimes almost dizzying. I think there’s a big gap between the young generation and the old generation. Sometimes the language, the language is that each of these generations have don’t really communicate with one another. It seems, as it’s a dialogue of death, death people. The answer to your question is to always from my point of view, no matter how exhausting and exhaustive it might feel to know that the democracy is an imperfect system of government. But it’s the best possibility that we have and that democracy cannot be. It cannot be imposed. Democracy has to be reinvented every day by its own citizens, and I think that it is crucial for young people to feel that this democracy is dares, that they have a voice in that it is important for them to read as well and to look at a shelf and find out what What book has not been written, what voice has not been included and to write that book and to include that voice in the vast, most complex possible way. And finally, I would also say Jeremy and Zachary that that we are not going to this mantle borders. We are going to live with them for forever. It is a feature of the human mind to compartmentalize space to divide property, I hear invoke a line from a poem by by Robert Frost mending wall that I love. You know the very first line of that poem is something there is that doesn’t love a wall. It seems as if the nature itself doesn’t like walls. But the last line of that poem, Good fences, make good neighbors, and we need to recognize that within borders there is much that can happen. That’s very powerful. Zachary did. Does this inspire you? Uh, do you see the power of literature and poetry and helping to remake what happens within borders and across borders in the way that that Ellen has laid out so beautifully here? I think so. I think what makes this moment so powerful, even amidst all our divisions, is that we are redeveloping that poetic language we are. We are redefining how we think about poetry and how we can use poetry to rethink these borders. And these divisions well. And I loved the metaphor that Ellen use, which is the same metaphor. We used 100 and six episodes ago when we started our podcast, and that we refer to a numerous occasions. It’s from Franklin Roosevelt when he talks, just as Ellen did, about how every generation must write the next chapter of our democracy and and we’re writing it every day, often in Spanglish and various other new forms. Uh, and I think that’s so crucial. I think the work you do Ilan inspires and models exactly that behavior and and and maybe that’s that’s the best we can do is to inspire and model and get out of the way for another generation, right? And the best that you can do. You’re doing Jeremy and Zachary having a podcast that can go deep into thought in the Explorer democracy in all its limitations and in all its hopes, it is in and of itself a sign of a better future. I appreciate that so much. And and I’m so grateful, Ellen, for your work, Uh, and for your teaching, for your being a scholar and a public intellectual at the level that you are But also taking the time to to go into prisons and to speak at community centres and to speak to young people. Like like Zachary through the programs you create. It’s been a real pleasure having you on Ellen. I hope we can have you on again. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to both of you. A much admiration for what you do. Mutual admiration from our our side. And Zachary. Thank you. As always for your poem and thank you to our listeners. This is democracy.

[0:35:30 Speaker 2] This podcast

[0:35:31 Speaker 0] is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke. And you can find his music at Harrison Lemke dot com,

[0:35:45 Speaker 2] Subscribe and stay

[0:35:46 Speaker 0] tuned for a new

[0:35:47 Speaker 2] episode every Thursday featuring new perspectives

[0:35:50 Speaker 0] on democracy. Yeah,

[0:35:56 Speaker 2] Yeah