Virtually On the Border – By Whitney Eulich (usnews.com) / May 14 2018
As the U.S. presses for a higher border wall with Mexico, an exhibit conveys the risky experience of migration.
MEXICO CITY — The experience begins in a cold room with metal benches – and shoes. The cement floor is covered with them: loafers, high heels, running sneakers, flip-flops and even a handful of baby shoes. Each one was recovered from the taxing terrain along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Participants enter the room alone and are instructed to place their shoes and socks in a metal locker and wait. It’s all part of the lead-up to a virtual reality exhibit created by Mexican film director and Academy-Award winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu, known as “Carne y Arena” (“Flesh and Sand”).
Although participants enter into the installation willingly, leaving the freezer-like room when an alarm blares and a red light blinks and then stepping into the sand-covered, dark room where they’ll be equipped with a backpack, virtual reality headset and headphones. Headsets on, participants are transported into the desert, where a group of exhausted migrants come into view.
“Carne y Arena” made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival last year, traveling to Los Angeles and earlier this year opening in Washington, D.C. But the show’s current run in Mexico City carries a particular weight for the thousands of visitors who walked barefoot in a sandy room at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center. For roughly six and a half minutes, attendees learn what it’s like to be a migrant apprehended by the U.S. border patrol.
At a time when U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly calls for the construction of a border wall to keep out migrants from Mexico and Central America, the exhibit’s conveyance of the dangers in the trek to the U.S. has special resonance. In Mexico, where an estimated 5.5 million compatriots live in the U.S. without legal documentation and nearly 200,000 were apprehended along the two countries’ border in 2016 alone, many say there’s a gap in understanding.
Using photographs of the Sonoran Desert and testimony from migrants who crossed the border on foot, the exhibit offers a visceral and nuanced opportunity to walk briefly in the shoes of someone risking their life to make it to the United States.
“Mexico is classist,” says Ricardo Gonzalez, a 49-year-old graphic designer in Mexico City after exiting the installation earlier this year. “It’s easy to dehumanize a really common thing like migration. If I travel to the U.S., it’s with a visa and on an airplane.”
The virtual reality installation “allowed me to live, to an extent, the migration experience. It made the reality of this phenomenon really tangible for me. It made it human,” Gonzalez adds.
That’s Iñárritu’s hope, after working on the project for nearly five years and interviewing dozens of migrants who traveled tens, hundreds or thousands of miles to cross into the United States. “Understanding is another word for love,” he said at the installation’s launch in Mexico City last September. “If you cannot understand, you can’t love.”
Migratory patterns between Mexico and the U.S. have changed dramatically during the past two decades, says Jorge Bustamante, professor emeritus from the College of the Northern Border located outside of Tijuana. In the 1980s and ’90s, those heading north were doing so with the expectation that they’d move in a circular pattern: the U.S. for work, back to Mexico to spend time with family, and then back to the States again. The Mexican migrant population was almost entirely men.
“In Mexico, people understand better the push and pull of migration, because it’s a historical phenomenon,” says Bustamante, who also teaches sociology at the University of Notre Dame. The intimacy of this understanding varies, depending on where one lives in Mexico and in comparison to the U.S. border, he says.
Today, Mexican migrants heading toward the U.S. are almost evenly split by gender. U.S. immigration policies tightened in the late 1990s, and the risks of migration have become so extreme with the entrance of drug trafficking organizations and criminal gangs that once a migrant successfully crosses into the U.S., they aren’t likely to return home any time soon.
Additionally, individuals fleeing poverty and violence in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – now make up a larger proportion of people apprehended along the southern U.S. border than Mexicans. The majority of the people participating in the recent “migrant caravan,” which traveled thousands of miles and is now stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border, came from these Central American countries.
But “Carne y Arena” supporters say it focuses on humanizing the act of leaving home for a new country, and the importance of understanding and love.
The emblem of the show is a giant, anatomical heart with a jagged line dividing “U.S.” and “T.H.E.M.” On both sides of the border of this human heart are descriptors, like gay and transgender, teachers, artists, migrants and citizens. After studying the arteries – or rivers and mountains – on both sides of the divide, it becomes clear that the same categories of people live in both places.
“We’re all human,” says Josué Salvador Vásquez Arellanes, a 32-year-old film blogger in Oaxaca of the installation, which he ranked as the No. 1 film to see in 2017, despite Iñárritu saying he doesn’t consider it cinema.
“I live in a state where there’s a long history of migration to the U.S.,” Vásquez says. He often sees Central American migrants passing through Oaxaca, a southern state in Mexico, on their way to the U.S. He has a cousin who crossed the border illegally more than a decade ago, as well, but says that generally he’s grown up without firsthand knowledge of the perils of going north.
He took the roughly seven-hour bus ride from the city of Oaxaca to Mexico City multiple times in order to go through the installation twice.
“I had to go back (a second time) because I felt like I missed so much,” Vásquez says.
When the installation begins, the participant is transported into the desert at dusk. The silence is pierced by a man calling out to hurry up. He’s threatening to leave people behind. Over the horizon, a group of migrants – women, elderly, a child – comes into view amid cactuses and tumbleweed. Some are limping, though they all look like they’re in bad shape. The participant can walk toward the migrants, around them. It feels like they’re making eye contact.
“When you run into someone, you can see their heart beating,” Gonzalez says. “You can see their blood pumping. They’re human, just like you.”
Suddenly the wind whips, sand is kicked up, and the migrants scurry to hide behind cactuses and each other. A booming male voice starts yelling in English to get down. Hands up, on your knees.
“My English isn’t very good, and I really felt the fear of not fully understanding what he was saying,” Vasquez says.
María García Morán, who crossed into the U.S. without legal documentation last winter and was deported back to Mexico in March 2017, says by phone that she tries not to think about her experience trekking through the rough terrain in south Texas during her border crossing.
“I have no interest in reliving that,” she says of attending the installation here. She finds it surprising her countrymen are willing to pay 300 pesos (roughly $16) and set alarms for the online ticketing system that opens only once a week and sells out in minutes when they “could just talk to someone like me.”
“There are a lot of us.”
