The picture below has been making the rounds as of late, and to be honest, the first thing I thought of when I saw it was exactly what the picture was intended to conjure up: the history of Texas in the 19th century. And buddy, that history is bleak.
So, pictures like this conjure this history up in a way like no article or reporting really can: it’s a visceral picture, of Hatians carrying boxed lunches, getting away from another devastating earthquake and the collapse of their government with the recent presidential assassination. And it’s a picture of a border patrolman, reins flying, pushing Hatians back over the border. At this point, let me say that asylum law has real loopholes and problems: people have a right to seek asylum, but countries are not under any legal obligation to accept asylees. The definition of who counts as an asylee is fuzzy, and has changed over the years, frequently in accordance with political aims. All of this is in the background, but none of it pops quite like a picture which conjures up an ugly past in manifold ways.
Part of the reason that icons work the way they do (aside from God speaking through them) is that they invite us to move around inside the image: we notice details, contemplate shades of meanings, and dig around in connections between this image and others. They’re a chance to slow down, not to glance at and move on. And pictures like this do the same thing: they capture—in one image—complexities which invite us to ask longer questions rather than short ones, and to mull over bigger questions rather than small ones.
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Since moving back to Texas in 2016, immigration has been one of my relatively under-the-radar interests, for a variety of reasons. My work, since my dissertation, has been on the Christian ethics of war and peace, but around 2014, as I was teaching in Florida, as the Syrian crisis was just beginning, I began to connect the dots between violence and migration: most mass migrations in the last century were due to wars of some sort, and when we knew were moving back to Texas, I knew that immigration had to be a part of my future.
The history of the Texas border, particularly with respect to Latinos and black persons, is complicated one. The straightforward stories go something like “Texas emerged as a revolt against a legitimate government” (true), coupled with “Texas was settled by cotton farmers looking to expand their holdings” (mostly true). The less straightforward stories are the ones which speak to the tenacity of people building something out of nothing, or those who, knowing that Texas was probably their last chance, go anyway.1 Texas mythos routinely omits black and Latino persons from the history, both as integral to Texas becoming a republic, or as the slaves who made Anglo cotton plantations profitable. What I’m saying here isn’t disputable: there’s a reason why, when Texas joined the Confederacy, it explicitly named “protection of the institution known as negro slavery” as one of the reasons, and that reason was that slavery was deep in the roots long before the 1850s. The Texas border patrol was borne out of these same dynamics, but I’ll let you read that history another time.
But there’s another history here as well in the picture: the history of Haiti. It’s a picture of American involvement and of internal collapse. It’s a story of colonial cooption and of lack of protection against natural elements. Digging deeper into the particulars of this picture, we’re invited to ask how it came to be that men from an island country came to be crossing the southern border of the U.S. Like an icon—and like many of Jesus’ parables—, a picture, well-inhabited invites us into the complexity of the image without offering any quick resolution to the questions at stake.
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One of the key ways in which violence persists in the world is by remaining hidden from our attention: more overt instances—a man shot in the street unarmed, a bloodied face, a broken body—grab our attention, and in the desire to end the suffering, we look away from the image and try to do something. We pass a law, join a march, read a book, change a Facebook profile. It’s a natural response: stand up from your prayers and walk in this way.
But what I want to suggest is that this is precisely how violence continues to persist: by forcing our gaze into action. In this picture, multiple histories of violence coalesce, such that the question it poses isn’t as simple as “Should the U.S. accept refugees?” or “Should the U.S. accept these refugees?” or “ Should the border patrol as it exists be abolished?”. It invites, if we stay with this picture, and let it do its work, to begin to ask other questions about the histories it surfaces, about the mystery of how a man from Haiti and a cowboy in South Texas even came into the same camera frame, and what kinds of deep forms of violence have pushed them to this place.
And those, I think, are the real questions worth asking: ones which can only happen if we resist the impulse to turn away and act quickly. There is more to see here, and hopefully, staying with the image rather than trying to solve it lets us see more of the violence which remains obscured when we, ironically, leave the picture in order to respond to it.
Davy’s Crockett’s well-known aphorism “You may go to Hell and I will go to Texas” was of this vein: Crockett, a two-term Congressional representative, said this of his congressional constituents after he was voted out of office, and saw Texas as his only option to starting his life over.