Leaping into the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, El Paso-Juarez
Leap into the river with two names
Leap Day in the Leap Year 2008. Let’s all take a leap. Come on…why not!
This boy and his friends use the river with two names as a playground, a swimming pool, a back yard.
Why not.
What else is it good for? Irony? Absurdity? Separating? Harassing? Drowning? Insulting?
In the old days, in the Spring, that river ran wild and wandered back and forth between Juarez and El Paso, between Mexico and the U.S. It ran wild and took out parts of both countries, rearranged the land, and put it back where it wanted to put it. The river set the boundary and the border, la frontera, was still unpredictable and free. Now it’s channeled and the tension between the two sides is as rigid as the concrete that now entombs its banks.
The dance between the two sides is pretty solidified too, and, the games on both sides of that river are seriously absurd.
One side plays like it’s wounded by the “foreign horde (who, before 1848 were the rightful citizens of both sides of that river),” that’s “invading,” its shores, illegally, winking while using that horde as underpaid labor, object of ridicule, whipping boy.
Reading a history book could be really dangerous here.
The other side mugs people coming through its southern borders (particularly its immediate neighbors, Guatemalanos), but hands out maps to el norte to its own people, shocked, absolutely shocked at the cruelty of the gringos.
A joke. A sad one-liner that cynics profit from.
No fixin’ it.
This boy has it figured out. What else can you do?
Leap!
