By Anonymous
The following article offers a first-person account of a visit to the anti-border camp that has been disrupting border wall construction near Lochiel, Arizona for over six weeks. Much of the coverage of camp thus far has rightly focused on the moments of conflict, theoretical reflections, and major victories. These stories, however, risk eliding the reality that the vast majority of time at camp involves people simply living their lives together--cooking for each other, chatting, playing, taking walks. This short narrative captures that reality, while drawing connections between the struggle in Lochiel and other struggles for liberation across space and time. For another look at the slow work of camp life, check out this early account by Emelina Rosa.
I'm feeling a little goofy on the drive down, horsing around with the friends riding along in my car. We had heard warnings about the road being rough, but my sedan is handling it fine, and it's pretty and green out here. When Judy points out the border wall visible a mile or so away, the mood shifts. It's been a while since I've seen it and I'm reminded of something a friend who had been down to Lochiel last week said to me, "It's like they know how evil the thing they're building is, so they just decided to make it look evil too."
I'm walking into camp: I hear a little about how things have been the past few days, I see the beautiful banners ("From MN to MX, Resistance is Fertile" hits hard; I visited Alex Pretti's memorial a few weeks earlier), I get a big hug from a friend I haven't seen in months. Then I'm approaching the grandmother tree, getting my first glimpse of the treesit, when a Border Patrol truck pulls up. I had told myself I was going to stick to low-risk activities for my first visit, but as those camped nearby make moves to put themselves between the vehicle and the tree, I pull a mask over my face and follow. The confrontation is brief and the BP agent drives off.
A friend I've known for a long time introduces himself with a funny name to protect his anonymity while he's at camp and I laugh. Someone I've just met introduces themself with a name that's kind of confusing and I'm not sure if I should laugh or not. The person in the treesit is known by "Tree." I want to be friendly and curious about the people around me, but I feel a little funny asking some of the people I'm meeting the series of questions I'd normally ask, "Where do you live?", "How did you end up there?", "Where did you grow up?", etc. I content myself with listening to the cicadas, sounding off in brief but intense bursts.
A friend who has been holding it down at camp for a while tells me about some of the difficulties of camp life. The kitchen needs better food safety protocols, there needs to be a way to pass along knowledge and routines even as lots of different people come and go, there need to be regular big-picture meetings, but it's hard to get everyone in the same place... It's hard to add another meeting on top of everything else that needs to get done. She seems overwhelmed and energized at the same time. I go into "fix it" mode for a sec: "We can get in touch with people with protest camp kitchen experience, we can create working groups." Then I remember that I just got here and that I should probably just take it in for now. We lapse into silence and for a minute it's just the ambient sounds of the wind and the grass. Then, from high up in the canopy, we hear, "I'm going to remember this moment for the rest of my life." My friend cries out, "Awwwww, Tree!!", and Tree begins to sing a cute song and play guitar.
In the late afternoon I try to make myself useful. I have experience working with community tech projects, and a group of us at camp are trying to extend the range of the internet — used to coordinate supply runs and communicate with regional support networks — to the entire camp. Before long, one group is moving the solar rig powering the existing router to a nearby field while I call out internet speed test results to them. As the sun is setting, I teach a new friend how to crimp ethernet cable (never done this standing in a field of four foot tall grass and wildflowers before!) while others finish up raising some of our equipment on a pole to extend its range. There's a bit more to be done, but it's getting dark and dinner is ready.
People are having fun at dinner, dancing and playing charades, but I'm feeling uncharacteristically anti-social, so I wander off to find a place to read. I've brought with me a dense post-68 philosophy book by some French guy, and I wonder if this camp would have been legible to him. Right as I'm thinking this, I walk by a book that someone left out in a common area, Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman. I try to imagine how she would feel if she knew her words were resonating with people in resistance here more than 100 years later. Now I'm just browsing. There's a zine about the Kurdish struggle and I think about Azad, who I met in Athens. He had to flee to Greece after facing political repression in Syria, but he was coordinating solidarity efforts from abroad while scheming how to get back to his home. "It's all connected," I think, and then I laugh at myself for how trite it sounds. I say it to myself in a stoner voice and giggle a little more. It is true though. And there's something about spaces like this that can make it feel obvious: the time and the distance separating us melts away, our words and our deeds transcend us. And I think about Emma getting deported to Russia under the Anarchist Exclusion Act even though she was a U.S. citizen, and about my friend Judy being at the epicenter of one of the recent waves of struggle in North America, and about the Cananea miners strike, two hours southwest of here and 120 years ago, that was the precursor to the Mexican Revolution. I think about how in the grand course of human history, these colonial borders have barely been around for any time at all and how they will be a shameful little blip when all is said and done.
After a fitful night of sleep, I have early morning coffee with some friends, black because there's only powdered creamer. I walk west along the easement with a small group to scout for construction equipment. We pass a Border Patrol truck and the agent inside is so engrossed in whatever is on his phone that he doesn't notice that masked anti-border protesters are within five feet of his car. We don't find any equipment; they're not attempting any work today. We finish up the camp internet project (a mesh router is dangling from the branches of a tree), and I pack up to leave. After I say a few goodbyes, I'm walking past the grandmother tree and I hear Tree, "Oh no! I forgot to pay rent! What day is it?" Their friend tells them it's the 8th and Tree sounds both alarmed and amused. Their friend comforts them, saying "We'll get someone to handle it," saying, "You don't need to think about anything outside of here. You don't need to think about anything outside of here."
Photos: Ryan Fatica