Station to Station

“¡Aguas, mija!”

This was how my father made me aware of danger. Aguas before taking my hand as we crossed a busy street together. Aguas before I took out my wallet to pay for candy at the carnicería. Aguas before putting the key in the ignition—look out for bad guys in the backseat or, worse, cops. My father grew up in Pachuca, the capital of the Mexican state of Hidalgo—a city where, as a boy, he earned his hard knocks selling everything from huaraches to live turkeys. He recalled street scenes in which neighbors shouted ¡Aguas! before dumping the morning’s bathwater out their second-floor windows. Aguas became shorthand for “watch your back”; it was a social contract everyone in my father’s community abided by to ensure peace. But my father also learned to distrust people in Pachuca, and in the microcosm of our family, that lesson became an education of la calle. Imparting his knowledge of the street was how my father consistently showed care for his two daughters. And he did so in surprising ways. As I got older and my queerness became something I thought I could hide, heartbreak pulled me out into the open where my father could see.

“No llores, mija, te vas a encontrar a otra,” he told me.

Suddenly, my breath returned. As did a calmness. I saw him and the state of being his child with a newness I didn’t know was possible for people like us. He was a parent born in one country raising children born in another. During my upbringing, I learned from outside influences—mostly from our Catholic priest, Father Duran, and from the purportedly gay Jack Tripper on Three’s Company—that our differences would break us. I feared the day both my parents would reject me. But it wasn’t as though they were fundamentally religious; my dad was an avowed atheist. His true idol was the walking thin man on the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.

Maybe because my father passed away last fall, these memories, hazy with grief, feel more generous in my posthumous portrait. Or maybe his absence helps me realize that my father had been paying attention the whole time—our time together when he was alive. He knew what my dilated pupils meant when I was 19. He heard the clanking beer bottles in the converted garage where I practiced with my punk band. These were the transgressions he tried to rein in, empowered by laws he upheld in his role as the father. As my masculinity became more legible, so did the similarities between us. When I saw photographs of him as a young boy, I saw myself as a twentysomething, our round faces and laughing eyes nearly identical. It was indisputable that we belonged to one another. Even after a life preparing myself for the inevitable disowning, I was still a daughter who looked like her father’s son. And he was a father who made it known after a few rounds that he longed to be fathomed in a country that insisted on his erasure.

With my grief has come the defamiliarization of my father, an uncanniness that recently surfaced for me in Eduardo C. Corral’s sophomore collection, Guillotine (Graywolf Press, 2020). The father figure exists on different tiers within the same overriding patriarchy that casts a shadow over Corral’s work. Who is the father if not who we call out to in our most frightened states? He is also our first introduction to control. He plants the seed of self-policing as our suspect desires take root.

“Ceremonial,” the book’s first poem, opens with the words Delirious, touch-starved—lines that resonate with many of us living in the isolation that social distancing has imposed this year. But what does it mean to be touch-starved while under a father’s pervasive surveillance?

This invocation of the paternal gaze sets the collection in motion. “Ceremonial” is an unsettling queer benediction for warding off the body’s quotidian humiliations. Lines such as “prayer will not melt my belly fat, will not thin my thighs” signal a wish to undo the body before the speaker comes undone. The poem’s lines move as quickly as whispered petitions on rosary beads. I am familiar with how paternal energy commandeers what would otherwise be consensual surrender. There is that carnal energy that pivots into full-fleshed memory of surrender. The interruption of the poem’s seething self-abnegation lives in this line: “I can still feel his thumb—warm, burled—moving in my mouth.”

The poem finishes on an end-stopped line, a delivery to the spiritual father: “Oh Lord, here I am.” Sometimes self-possession manifests as an ontologically exhaustive utterance—Oh Lord. As in “take me, Oh Lord,” I am done facing a self that is formed out of screaming hunger.

The Lacanian tensions between lack and desire have long underlain the relationship between fathers and their queer children. Guillotine pivots away from that default configuration by initiating readers into new rites—such as how a gay Mexican son, like Corral, might leverage the ache of desire to usurp the patriarch’s magnetic hold. It’s a cathectic inversion against the idea that queer wanting is a substitute for paternal love and affection.

In Guillotine, gay desire becomes another object inscribed by and divided between God and Donald Trump, the dictator of the border wall—the two other father figures who loom over the book’s deserts. The physical terrain brings into relief the ways these contestations bask in, and complicate, the masculine anxiety of unbelonging to either God or land. The binary logic that accompanies a colonizing drive refers to parts of this borderland country as feminized. In an oft-cited quote, Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas, describes the United States as an embodiment of femininity. “If you go to war with the United States, you will never conquer her, as she has the money and the men. If she does not whip you by guns, powder, and steel, she will starve you to death.” This is reflected in the idealized figure of Columbia floating over the hills and valleys of the West, leading pioneers toward the promise of Manifest Destiny.

A means to disrupt the binary imposed upon the deserts of the borderland is to remember that these two nations settled on the land of the Tohono O’odham people in the mid-18th and 19th centuries. This disruption echoes in Corral’s weighty “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel,” an anarchy of voices that shepherd us into the desert. It is a series of speculative messages as fevered as desire:

Sometimes a wolf leaps out of a lion         last winter
I almost eloped with my second cousin           plastic
barrettes        in the shape of the Eiffel Tower
keep her bangs from her eyes      newer footpaths
are rigged with sensors       which track
& identify          the first time I saw flowering
ironwood I remembered        the inside of oyster shells
lilac shuddering through ivory              deep in
my guts        there's a delicacy       dozens of condoms
crammed with cocaine       Mexican caviar
on the flatbed of a pickup I greased      my throat
with cooking oil       then swallowed

This panoramic poem is a sweeping, nearly 30-page ekphrastic exegesis of Humane Borders Water Station, a photograph by the inimitable New Mexico–based artist Delilah Montoya.

The water stations are provided for, and stewarded by, the Tucson-based migrant advocacy project Humane Borders/Fronteras Compasivas. Since 2000, volunteers have driven over harsh roads to tend each of the more than 80 water stations, often traveling no more than 5 mph to avoid flat tires and, in the hot summer months, overheating. I volunteered with Humane Borders one Sunday and was struck by the time—nine hours!—it took to traverse no more than 10 square miles. On this journey, I marveled at the indomitable landscape, worried about the 110-degree temperature, and wondered if we would encounter travelers in need. We were five volunteers, veterans and newbies, traveling in a dual-cabbed Toyota truck with a bed large enough to carry several hundred gallons of water in plastic jugs. If we broke down, we would recover. The same could not be said for the migrants who crossed here. Climate-wise, this swath of the Sonoran Desert is one of the nation’s most dangerous, but it is also sacred land for the Tohono O’odham people. The water stations in Montoya’s photograph exist because of their largesse.

In a podcast the Smithsonian produced to accompany its 2013 exhibition Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, Montoya narrates the tension behind the water barrels in this part of the desert. She explains that in the early 2000s, as she and her collaborator, the artist-ethnographer Orlando Lara, were researching for a larger project titled Sed: the Trail of Thirst, they learned that Border Patrol agents were expected to respect the sovereignty of the tribe, which meant not patrolling near the mountain range that is at the heart of Tohono O’odham’s spiritual beliefs. That sentiment swung in the same direction for humanitarian projects. As much as the Tohono O’odham nation is able to enforce its own security measures, federal agencies continued their surveillance of border entry points (as well as of tribal members) just outside the small tribal towns of Sells and Sasabe. That’s when Tohono O’odham activists such as Mike Wilson stepped in to broker efforts to bring water to the regions that migrants passed through. Meanwhile, Humane Borders negotiated with the Border Patrol to bypass the areas directly around the stations, which was how the barrels came to be.

In Montoya’s image, the water station shares the frame with the solitary dirt path that leads toward the Baboquivari Mountains in the distance, crowned by Baboquivari Peak. It is said that the peak is the navel of the world and at the base of the mountain lives the creator deity I’itoi, who brought the Hohokam people aboveground from the depths of the underworld. “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel” indexes these cartographies and brings the disappeared into view. The poem is a spiritual dowsing rod that retrieves memory from loss on the crisscrossed paths of settler-resistant lands.

From this vantage point, Corral’s speaker calls out a metronymic familiar to those of us with working class Mexican fathers: Apá.

            Apá, dying is boring. To pass las horas,
                                                               I carve
                                                 our last name
                                                              all over my body.

What does it mean to summon our first protector to our most desperate moments—of death, of orgasm, of being thrown back to a path more dangerous than the one on which we find finality? A purple barrel in the purview of one of the most environmentally impacted topographies in North America—an underworld unto itself. What does it mean to be a compass for these ethereal missives authored by a chorus gathered around the water station, intentioned according to basic need and ideological function? One of the most haunting sections of the poem evokes graffiti or what you might see scrawled or scratched into the metal of road signs or on the body of the water barrel itself. Competing typographical choices underscore the tension in lines such as BUILD THE WALL STOP DRUGS and hey illegals ICE / is coming alongside other lines such as I <3 Brown A$$ and ay México / ven por tu gente.

Arizona has never been home to quiet opinions nor a state for dog whistlers. This is how people greet each other out in the open and have since former governor Jan Brewer attempted to empower law enforcement to “determine an individual’s immigration status” during routine stops or arrests, as stipulated in Arizona Senate Bill 1070. The bill was signed into law in 2010, although portions were later struck down by the US Supreme Court. The social custom in Arizona toward dehumanization existed long before Brewer’s attempt at enacting a formal law. But the governor, like many before and after her, was emboldened to police and persecute immigrants by Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio, a long-time lawman, opened the notorious 7-acre open air Tent City jail in Phoenix in 1993 to offset overcrowding in the city’s jails. Born in Massachusetts to Italian immigrants, Arpaio came west in the late 1950s, where he climbed the ranks from beat cop to the upper echelon of the DEA. Shortly after retiring from his 25-year career, he ran for sheriff of Maricopa County, thinking it would be a one-term gig, but he stayed on for six terms and turned the carceral system inside out. He resurrected chain gangs, touted Tent City as a concentration camp, and forced inmates to live outside in the sweltering heat, wearing pink underwear and striped prison jumpsuits. Arpaio became a darling of the GOP as well as the state’s most popular politician. He demurred running for governor because he preferred to retire as a law enforcement officer.

As I dig deeper into the man behind the toxic myth, I am troubled by a photograph I encounter. It is a blunt file photo of Arpaio walking through the women’s section of Tent City, handing his autograph to a young white woman in a striped jumpsuit beaming at his recognition. She is flanked by other female inmates, their collective gaze soft in deference. Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt of court for ordering his subordinates to continue unlawful detention of undocumented migrants, forced these young women to live in harsh conditions. Yet, in this photograph, they emanate the respect reserved for a patriarch. Arpaio, whom President Trump subsequently pardoned in 2017, has been the Great Santini for many in Corral’s home state.

Corral is a son of Casa Grande, a small city between Tucson and Phoenix, and his book is set in the terrorized psychogeography where Arpaio systemically tracked poor and working-class people in metro Arizona. Analogously, in 1994, the unpopulated terrains of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arizona became the environmental accomplice to a set of federal policies designed to deter illegal crossings from Mexico. “Prevention through Deterrence,” as the scholar Liz Kinnamon wrote last year for the New Inquiry, in a piece about the felony trial of humanitarian aid worker Scott Warren, “closes off urban entry points and pushes migrants to walk through the deadliest parts of the desert in hopes that death and hardship will deter migrants from crossing.” Warren was arrested for harboring two Central Americans at a camp in southern Arizona but was acquitted. Guillotine constellates around these historical and contemporary wounds of deprivation, heightened by the dangerous aridity of the desert. In the spiraling environmental collapse ahead, water persists in its preciousness, a resource that is the replenishing elixir for such lack. Water inside a plastic 1-gallon bottle or a 100-gallon barrel laid on land often cast as barren becomes an accessory to a crime. Corral writes

                                                If I don’t cut into cacti,
                        if I don’t chew the pulp to draw water out,
            my shadow will
                        wander away.

This is the maddening logic behind laws that divorce people from their humanity. It is unsettling to spot correlated power in the laws of desire—laws that discipline or unravel the individual. I imagine the difficulty queer Latinxs face in avowing or untethering from these metaphors rife with material implications for Black and indigenous asylum seekers shadowed away in the nameless for-profit detention centers that dot the US-Mexico border. But as children of the land, we can’t cleave ourselves from the selves formed in the haze of such dehumanization—at least not until we can inhabit the language of metaphor and then shed its skin—the language of how desire’s first impulse is to correct its errant paths without the presence of a policing agent, be it the father or the state or the father as the state. It is unsurprising to center the axis between sex and death in the plutonian setting of this desert where, in Corral’s hands, sex and death become the other’s familiar.

To miss a lover feels like death, and this longing suffuses the world of Guillotine. As a queer child, I find comfort in the language of my chosen brethren as well as in those poets who contour my grief. I, too, have walked this desert through the portals of shame, searching for some relief from my damning desire. I have long been cast out of the Eden my blood family tried to build. 

It was worth it.