Episode Transcript
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Xorje Olivares, Host: So it turns out that JD Vance and I have something in common. We both paid a visit to my hometown on the Texas-Mexico border earlier this year. Surprise! Now the VP was in Eagle Pass doing the kind of political parade that my neighbors and I had seen for years. Because regardless of party affiliation, elected officials almost always do this kind of thing when it comes to these border stops. First, they take a tour of the area, which mostly centers on the incomplete border fence. Then they make some passionate remarks chock full of buzzwords tied to border security and immigration, cause you never know if the base is listening. And at some point there’s a photo op with border patrol and local law enforcement because y’all, these DC folks didn’t wear their good jeans and belt buckles for nothing! Now, if you don’t believe me, just comb through the hours of cable news footage that exists. Fox News, MSNBC, CNN– all of these news outlets have practically set up shop in Eagle Pass these past couple of years as my hometown has become more politicized. And honestly, it feels like they’re playing out this National Geographic wildlife documentary fantasy. Migrant caravans, undocumented immigrants, drug and human trafficking. Okay, given that we are talking about an international border, some of that is true. But I can only speak to what I know and what I see. And most of that is just mostly going to Kohl’s department store with my mother or grabbing a mango nada with my sister at our local paleteria. Not exactly a ratings draw, but which of these is a more accurate representation of the border?
I’m Xorje Olivares, and today I’m asking, is the border from TV, real life? This is Hyphenation, where conversation and cultura meet.
Xorje Olivares: Now, talking about the border, I’m getting very homesick and the best way for me to address homesickness is to listen to music. So I’m going to ask each of my guests what song reminds them of the border. Because for me, it is a song by Tejano artist, Gary Hobbs, and it’s called Las Miradas.
[Las Miradas by Gary Hobbs plays]
Xorje Olivares: It is fantastic. But excited to first welcome to the program, natalia ventura, who is a community organizer and an artist out of San Diego, California. Who uses her art as a tool for social change. So, natalia, thank you so much for joining us today. And I wanna ask you about what song reminds you of home or the border.
natalia ventura: Thanks so much for having me. My song is not a traditional borderlands song, but I think this kind of speaks to, you know, the many cultures that exist here. My mom is from Tijuana, but she was like an 80s New Wave fanatic.
Xorje Olivares: Love it!
natalia ventura: And so she very much embraced the music on the other side and loved New Wave. And so a song that really reminds me of home is Our House by Madness,
[Our House by Madness plays]
natalia ventura: Because I grew up on a cul-de-sac and just the lyrics just really remind me of her. She always played that one growing up.
Xorje Olivares:Thank you so much for joining us and for sharing that. Also excited to welcome to the show Robie Flores, who is a filmmaker. Her latest film called “The In-Between” is now available for you to watch and I highly recommend it, especially because it showcases my hometown of Eagle Pass because Robie is a classmate of mine and we’ve known each other for quite some time. So excited to have her and excited to see her and to know what her answer is to the song that reminds her of the border.
Robie Flores: Oh, my God, I’m so excited to say this because I think it’s going to take us all back to like morning pep rallies and cake walks.
Xorje Olivares: Okay.
Robie Flores: I think, is it Fito Olivares, La Vibora…
Xorje Olivares: La Cobra! Yeah, it’s called a Cobra and it starts with It’s called La Coba and it starts with…da-da-da, if it resembles a rattlesnake
[La Cora by Fito Olivares plays]
Robie Flores: Yeah, it’s so classic EP that’s like, it always was just kind of embarrassing to me because I felt so small town but then it’s just so good and every time you hear it we’re just like get up and dance.
Xorje Olivares: It makes me happy being around other border people. I feel like we speak a special language and I’m happy for us to share that language with everybody right now, especially because the border is such an expansive place. We are talking about two specific areas right now. Eagle Pass, South Texas and San Diego, but it spans miles upon miles. So I wanna start with you, natalia, about what your specific border experience was like, has been like, just so folks can get a sense as to how you’re approaching today’s topic.
natalia ventura: Yeah, so I think something that people who aren’t from the border don’t realize is that even within this border identity, there’s so many layers of privilege and experiences and intersections. I feel I grew up very privileged in my border crossing experience. I was born on this side as a U.S. citizen and I crossed with a global entry pass. I grew up visiting my grandparents every weekend, just being able to cross the border to enjoy like food and culture and life on the weekends over there. And then I would, you know, do my schooling during the week on this side and grew up on this side.
Xorje Olivares: Mmhmm, I want to ask you, Robie, because natalia hits it at a point that a lot of us understand, which is sometimes families on the other side, there’s a lot of cultural activities that happen on the other side that we want to show ourselves, especially if we don’t have those on the American side of things. So what was your border experience like growing up?
Robie Flores: I mean, similar to natalia, that it was, you know, it was like very lucky to be born on the American side, but it’s just, it’s such a, like on the border, it’s, just there’s resources that everybody on both sides that can cross back and forth use and do it. You know, people on either side go to school or work or, you, know, the doctor or like after school activities, every day. Ao like for me it was like I went to school in Eagle Pass but every day after school I went into dance class and piano class like my mom would pick me up and I change in the car and like put my medias on and like as we’re going over the bridge and um and it felt like I was just kind of like getting into this like different identity of like, now I’m a la bailarina and stuff. And so I’d like go to dance class every day after school and then like to my abuela’s house. And I’d wait for my parents to be done with their errands then we’d like take the bridge back home. And that was like every day. And then on the weekends, we go to, you know, my abuela’s house and then we do the carne asadas. You know, that was my border life experience. But with everybody that I was around, it was pretty typical. And so. I assumed that if you lived on the border you could just do that. And it really wasn’t until I started this movie that I was like, oh, you need a visa if you’re on the other side. Like, I didn’t understand that. I didn’t know that because the border that you and I had when we were kids, it was so fluid. And so that’s what I thought that it’s just on the border. This is just how it is.
Xorje Olivares: I was, I was trying to explain to folks here, I’d say, you know, some folks who lived across the the river in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, that they would come to high school and they say, Well, how would they do that? I don’t know, they would just come to school. And we knew that, you knew that they were the kids that lived in Piedras. And I still to this day can’t really tell you why that is. But I love that it was indicative of the porous nature. Like we were one very large community, the Piedra Negras-Eagle Pass community. natalia, would you say that the San Diego-Tijuana community feels like that or maybe a little different in your experience?
natalia ventura: It sounds like Eagle Pass is a little bit of a smaller town.
Xorje Olivares: It is.
natalia ventura: Here, San Ysidro is the busiest border crossing in the world. So it’s not as easy to just cross quickly. It takes time, you gotta kind of plan around it. But we still had such a cross-border community. I also had the kids in high school who crossed every day to go to school. My mom was one of those. She crossed every day to go school her whole life. So it’s very much a part of our lives as well, even though it’s a bit of a bigger city.
Robie Flores: And I’d like to also say that like kids in Eagle Pass for us also crossed to go to school on the Mexican side like it wasn’t just like Mexicans coming you know the people on the Mexican site coming for everything in the U.S. Like everybody on the Eagle Pass side was going to Piedras for also you know, the doctor, for school. So like, it’s just it’s super fluid.
Xorje Olivares: I appreciate you making the distinction that it’s not just one side always coming to the other, that it goes both ways. Because growing up, even though we didn’t necessarily have immediate family relatives that lived in Piedras, that’s where I would go to the dentist.Um, but one thing I have not had a chance to do on the border and it’s not part of my border experience just yet is to do work that showcases the border. And each of you are doing such great work that highlights the fronteriza experience. So I want to start with you, natalia about, uh your navigation of art on the border.
natalia ventura: Yeah so for me it really started like once I left the Borderlands for college. I went up to Orange County for my undergrad and I didn’t realize how much the border was a part of my life until I left. Like even just saying I was Latina or Mexican wasn’t enough like I had to talk about my border experience in order to really speak to my Latinidad. Um, and so once I graduated. I came back home with the intention of like really rooting myself even deeper in the borderlands and to do art that was focused on uplifting my community. And so I started doing a lot of workright where the border wall meets the Pacific Ocean. It’s like the westernmost point of the border and it’s also home to a place called Friendship Park where families traditionally are able– are supposed to be able to come together and meet each other, families and friends who aren’t able to cross the border because of their citizenship status. And this is a place that has been under attack over the last few decades because of our government’s opinions and stances on border crossers and migration. And so when I started working with them, the construction of 30-foot walls was beginning at the park under the Biden administration, but it was a project started by the Trump administration. And I did a lot of organizing work with them bringing art to their activism work and using art as like a tactic of non-violence to fight against militarization at the Park. Cause this is supposed to be a place that symbolizes cross-border unity and friendship. And it was very much not that anymore.
Xorje Olivares: Mmhmm
natalia ventura: Some of the interventions that I’ve done with others include hanging banners on the border wall. “Parque si, muro no” is one of our slogans that we use to say we want to park here, not a wall. And I climbed up on the border wall to hang that. And then there’s also a planter that holds white sage, which is a native plant here in Southern California and Northern Baja. And we hung it on top of the border fence to kind of signify the power of this, you know, native plant, native species, and how it overcomes borders. And there’s two sculptural hands that are coming from on top of those planters touching each other to kind symbolize the human connection that we hope will win over these borders. It’s really about reconnecting to our humanity, reconnecting the land, so that’s kind of what my practice is focused on right now.
Xorje Olivares: Mhmm, I wanna pull this word that natalia just used, reconnecting, because it feels like that was at the focus, it was a focus point for you in this film, “The In-Between”, Robie, which I wanna share a trailer for listeners…
[ Trailer ] I must have crossed this bridge a million times, but the first time I remember was when my brothers, the twins, Mars and Alex were born. But Mars is gone now, and all I’m left with is his camera. Now that I’m back here, can I find my memories of us? Can I find you?
Xorje Olivares: So Robie, tell us about “The In-Between”
Robie Flores: Ay güey, Well, now you’re making me cry. This is just so surreal because, um, uh, yeah, I, I wanted to go back and make this movie in 2016. I was, I was in New York working at Bloomberg at the time. Um, and I was uh, you know, in the newsroom, I was working next to the news editors while I was like editing on another show and it was just these constant sound bites about the border and how dangerous it is and how we need walls and all these things, and it just sounded so foreign to me.
And I was just like, what? It’s really chill. I mean, at least the one that I know. Like it’s like. It’s really not like they were making it sound like an action movie. And I was like, “No, let me let me show you like, I’ll invite you like come with me and I’ll show you the cool parts.” You know, and that’s, that’s what the movie was, I just wanted to invite people home and show that. But at the core of it, I wanted it to be, you know, a visit to the border for everybody that hasn’t had the privilege of getting to experience it yet. Like if you look up border on IMDB and all the movies that come out with border are always like the same stories. And I looked it up. They all are like. You know, like trauma and, you know, violence and carteles and like, you know, whatever, all the same shit. And like, we, we know that, but for us that are from the border, like we know. That border frontera, I means like carne asada means cumbia means like, you know. Like the identity crisis of not being ni de aquí, ni de alla. Yeah, it’s just like, that’s the real border crisis in my mind, you know? And it’s like, and no one’s talking about that.
natalia ventura: Yeah, like I think I didn’t realize as I was a child because there were other people around me who felt this too, but there also weren’t of just like leaving the walls of your house where you speak Spanglish to like going to school where It was discouraged to speak any Spanish. Learning from a really young age to cross borders, even when you’re not physically crossing the border or when you are.
natalia ventura: being from like two different worlds and not really seeing that in the media around you. I think maybe Hannah Montana was like the closest like
Xorje Olivares: Oh, duality like…
Robie: And she said the best of both worlds, which we are.
natalia ventura: Totally.
Robie Flores: But this is something that I’ve been like realizing, slowly realizing and is what our mission is with this movie and like the work that we do is that there isn’t like, if you think about like, for example, New York and New Yorkers and stuff, like there’s a culture and everybody knows it. Everybody around the world knows it, like we know the accents, like we the fucking baseball hats, Like, we know, like… You know, we know all the nuances of it. And like, yet when someone makes like a movie or writes a book about New York or like a song, no one’s like, but what about the crime? Like, why isn’t, you know, like, but isn’t New York dangerous? You know what, like we do that about the border all the time!
Xorje Olivares: Mhmm. We’re going to take a short little break, but we’ll be back with some more Hyphenación after this.
Xorje Olivares: So I still get a chance to go home, maybe two to three times a year and a couple of years ago, I went home for Thanksgiving and we celebrated at my primo’s ranch. He owns quite a bit of land, literally about maybe a few yards away from the Rio Grande. So we were pretty much at what you would call ground zero. And while we were there, my primo wife said, Hey, would you like a tour? Just since you haven’t seen it, we said, sure. Do you know, I saw some of the things that have been shown on TV. So saw the barbed wire, saw the dozens of national guardsmen, saw the mounds of clothing and the artifacts that have been left behind by folks making their migratory journey here into the United States. And even though I was a little bit taken aback, like, oh my God, I I wasn’t expecting to see all of this. My prima, asi como si nada, was just like saying hi to all the National Guardsmen that she sees every day and passing by all of these things that have now become, part of her day-to-day. So it does get into this notion of the normalization of what we do see on the border. And so I’m curious for you, natalia, since you do live still on the Border, what has become normalized for you of what you see?
natalia ventura: Yeah, as you just said, it’s very normal to see barbed wire, to see construction projects constantly at the border, um, border patrollers, um, multiple like law enforcement agencies. Um, it’s normal to see people making their journeys. And all of it is very much a part of our culture here. At this point we’ve accepted the border as such a permanent strong thing as a society when in reality it’s so, it’s been a blip in our human history and we need to remember that and we need to move towards that again. Like, for example, the border walls at Friendship Park in the 70s, when the park got inaugurated by the first lady, Pat Nixon, it was just a string of barbed wire and she had her Secret Service cut it so she could greet the people on the Tijuana side. And she said, “I hope there won’t be a fence too long here.” And over the decades, it’s become a 30 foot galvanized steel double wall. Most people are just used to seeing it at this point, which is sad because it shouldn’t be that way. It’s a place where so much of the world just kind of comes together because migrants who come here are coming from all over the world, not just Latin America. And so we have a real opportunity to have kinship with people from all over the world.
Xorje Olivares: I want to focus in on this word kinship, can you tell me about the beauty of working at friendship Park?
natalia ventura: Yeah, I have learned so many beautiful examples of how to care radically for each other, even when we are not family, even if we’ve only known each other for a split second. The way that people who live here really care for the people on their migratory journeys is so inspiring to me and it’s something that I’ve tried to like embody more and more. When I’m driving around near the border and I see someone walking on the street, I know they’re probably on their journey and I will stop and offer them water or food. You know, it’s just something that we need to ingrain more in if you are living near the border because this is a part of that life and really practicing like treating somebody like they are your kin. I think is like the answer to so much injustice and problems around us. And it’s how we like can survive these conditions.
Xorje Olivares: We also in Eagle Pass have a connection to this idea of friendship because there is an international friendship parade and day that happens in Eagle Pass where we do meet up with folks in Piedras and there’s this huge celebration and Robie I love that the in-between starts and ends with imagery that is at least to me because I know it happens for a friendship day and also for 4th of July but tell me about your reasoning for showcasing this particular moment and day. That we celebrate on the border.
Robie Flores: Yeah, I mean, it just like it was so funny it was the first thing I shot when I went home. It was so funny because everybody like back in New York and like this like the center of news is like freaking out about everything that’s going out on the border and like and so I’m like so like living in that for so long that I go home and I am being like, oh my God, how is everybody going to be like. I came back and they were still doing it, you know, and it’s like and they still do it now with all this shit going on. You know, like they’re still doing all the binational celebrations. Like to see the wide shot of this is like, this is what we don’t get to see, Everybody’s hanging out here under like the same beautiful sky. And like, and our river is so narrow that you can literally say hi to each other and hang out and stuff and and and it’s really beautiful. It’s just like, you know, this is our culture.
Xorje Olivares: I do want to just quickly say, I do, every time I bring someone home for a visit, I always take them during friendship week because of the Noches Mexicanas festival that you’re talking about, which interestingly enough, it’s called Noches Mexicanas on the American side. Just to further paint this picture that Robie was showing. It all takes place in a park that is beyond the border fence. So it is in this, like, weird purgatory section where it’s in between the border fence and the Rio Grande, but it has always been there. So it’s everybody with their puestecitos selling the funnel cakes, their espiropapas, the raspas, like the I was frescas. It all happens right there and it is such a beautiful reflection of community and just everything that We have. Again, this culture that we have to offer on the border, which I do want to end with this one question to each of you, which is, what is your favorite part about being from the border? I’ll say that for me, it is every time I go home, every time, I go to the border. I am allowed to remember the core of who I am and like I feel like I’ll never be able to lose that joy and pride of border identity. I want to start with you, natalia. What is your favorite part?
natalia ventura: Yeah, very similar. Just being able to go to Tijuana, get the world’s best tacos, eat some nieves, and just like really tap into those childhood memories, you know, just being a kid, visiting my family, enjoying life. There’s so much beauty and color in Tijuana and it’s hustling and bustling and I love it so much. And it’s such a privilege to be able to just go enjoy that.
Xorje Olivares: Nice. What about your Robie?
Robie Flores: I love just like the remix that like we create, like we’re like the hybridity, the hyphenación, you know, like I like for us, like, I think that we’re, like so beautifully defined. When I was like in New York, all my Mexican friends that were there from Mexico City were like, nachos aren’t a Mexican food. And then, I was always like constantly being shamed for not being Mexican enough. But then I’m like, no, they’re fucking Frontera food and you’re welcome because they’re amazing and everybody has them. And this is what happens at the border. That’s one example of all these amazing things that happen at the border when these two beautiful cultures collide and influence each other. And from there, we have margaritas and Caesar salad and burritos and so many more things. And that’s the beauty of the fluidity and that I’m so proud of.
Xorje Olivares: So I feel like the the greatest takeaway is that there’s four great exports from the border each of us and the nacho. Well I want to think each of you for for joining me for this wonderful conversation about home Because at the center of it it really is about home for for all three of us and for a lot of people who are. So thank you both for joining me today.
Robie Flores: Thank you. Thank you for having us, Jorge.
Xorje Olivares: And I do want to let folks know if you want to look at each of their works, just go to our show notes, you will have links to natalia’s work to how you can find and watch the in between Robie’s film and how you can support them in the efforts that they do. And if you are a border person, or if you have a question for us to address on hyphenation, all you have to do is email us at hyp@kqed.org. But until next time, Take care.
Credits: Hyphenación is a KQED Studios Production. It is produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral, Alex Tran, and me, Xorje Olivares. Chris Hambrick is our editor. Mixing and mastering by Christopher Beale. Jen Chien is executive producer and KQED’s director of podcasts. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.
Thank you to Maha Sanad for her audience engagement support and to podcast operations intern Alana Walker. Thanks to podcast operations manager Katie Sprenger, Video Operations manager Vivian Morales, and our chief content officer Holly Kernan. Special thanks to Megan Tan, Martina Castro, and Paulina Velasco for their development support. Okay mi gente, cuídense.
