PHOTO OF THE WEEK: Jan. 25-Feb. 1, 2008
Roberta’s glued head (Head #14), Las Cruces, NM, Jan. 18, 2008
You can leave the border but the border does not leave you. My head snapped when I saw Roberta Flores, up in New Mexico.
“Terrific hair,” I yelled at her. “Gelled,” I asked?
“No,” she said with a sly and proud smile, “Glued,” she shouted back, with a grin that sort of said, “gotcha!”
“Did you get that done around here? ” I asked.
“They don’t know how to do that around here,” she spat, friendly but gently ridiculing.
I knew that tone and given that opening, I asked, “Where are you from.”
“El Paso.”
Aye, aye, aye. El Chuco. Mi casa. Por supuesto. They definitely know how to do that en la frontera.
Como no, hell yes! Of course.
“I live in El Paso, too,” I replied, immediately bonding, like strangers often do, when they are really really far from home, like being up in Katmandu or somewhere and you bump into someone in a market and you both are starting to feel those pangs for home, for chili, for espanol, for la cultura, for heat and sun that whites out the day, the odor of the gas and the tacos in the streets, the movement that is the buzz of la frontera, those border things that spew out of El Paso/Juarez, flow like stinky Pemex diesel through your soul and are in your head and heart forever. Not homesickness. More like displacement. Yeah, a longing for that homeland, so far away, forty five miles away, to the south.
Yeah, El Paso. Where they know how to glue hair, fix it hard, like steel, like la puente negra (the Black Bridge, a railroad bridge across the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, between downtown Juarez and El Paso, notorious for its skirmishes and smugglings), down in El Paso/Juarez.
Sometimes, increasingly, I have a feeling that the border is just a state of mind, maybe a dream and a refuge that is dissolving fast and a reality that the wise hands of the empire hate and have come to squeeze, again, ring it out, again, extract from it, again, pillage again with promises of eternal Christmas presents. Yeah, that big ole Grid is coming and coming fast and strong.
But…but… then, there’s that magic thing, that thing that makes two strangers, a photographer and a girl with her hair glued in place and metal all over her exquisite head, know that where we’re from is an entity, one up, muy precioso. Unique, but obviously unfathomable to those who don’t know its streets, its mysticicsm.
And, when this happens, I know there is hope. Maybe we’ll survive these desert sharks, after all. Maybe, if we think El Chuco enough, we’ll survive…maybe, as I heard a physicist say, once, thought transforms matter. Once you imagine it, there is no leaving it and maybe it won’t go away.
Maybe. Tal vez. Quien sabe compas?
I leave Roberta with her granite head on the chips of my memory card. It’s good to be home.
I think it. I think home.
