Eagles & Borders

If you had asked 8-year-old me “What is your favorite song?”, I would have immediately responded “On the Border” by the Eagles. It was spunky, catchy, and an excellent soundtrack to my many treks across countless acres on our ranch in Sour Lake, Texas. The beginning of the song goes like this:

"Cruisin' down the center of a two-way street

Wondering who is really in the driver's seat

Minding my business along comes big brother

Says, 'Son you better get on one side or the other'

Oh oh, I'm out on the border

I'm walkin' the line

Don't you tell me 'bout your law and order

I'm try'n' to change this water to wine"

You can check out the song here:

Years later, I found out this track was inspired by the Watergate scandal, privacy rights, and questions of identity. As a kid, I knew the song was seeped in resistance of some kind, but I couldn’t put a concrete name or border around what caused the resistance in the first place--and who was suffering because of it. I just kept playing the song on repeat on my Walkman because, like I said, the song is catchy. 

But isn't that the secret to great rock songs from the 70's? To blanket the violence, fear, and secrets with words and tunes that are gentle on our ears? Unfortunately, I think this is the same way the process of negotiating new meanings of border and diaspora has been carried out decade after decade. 

Although "On the Border" is a lesser-appreciated Eagles track, it's recurring imagery of a listener being out on--or forced to the side of--a physical, emotional, or mental border is worth mentioning. We can shift that idea of changing "water to wine" into finding more cohesive ways to explore and understand diasporic narratives. First, we have to get to one core issue: 

Avtar Brah brings up an important point in the book chapter "Diaspora, border, and transnational identities"--in order for us to wrestle with how to define border and diaspora we have to re-analyze how we approach and define the location and authors of diasporic narratives: where and when is travel taking place? Who's moving and why are they shifting from one location to another? And, after all of that, how does power ebb and flow with each mile traversed? 

If we don't start tackling the bigger questions impacting physical borders and migration, more and more debates on immigration, border patrol, and migration will continue to sound like the bridge to "On the Border":

"Never mind your name, just give us your number

Never mind your face, just show us your card

And we want to know whose wing are you under

You better step to the right or we can make it hard"

Sound familiar? 

Brah writes that "...multiple journeys may configure into one journey via a confluence of narratives as it is lived and re-lived...through memory and re-memory" This multiplicity, this converging and overlapping of narratives is what I'm looking for when I approach novels like Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing or Zadie Smith's White Teeth. My history and English education thru high school was filled with one-sided, incomplete, and jarring narratives of travel, conquest, barter, and control--the re-memory was controlled by the victors. 

While we continue to wrestle with the power of defining borders and diaspora, refugees, migrants, and natives are all working with rise and fall of diaspora--and the power that surges within the struggle. Susan Friedman draws research from Michael Keith and Steve Pile to demonstrate that our location is intertwined with how we identify and present ourselves to others; forcibly tearing this pairing apart only further splinters the literary expression of migration and diaspora. In "World Borders, Political Borders", Etienne Balibar explains how "...we are dealing with 'triple points" or mobile "over- lapping zones' of contradictory civilizations rather than with juxtapositions of monolithic entities". In other words, as much as we want to we cannot remain stagnant in our approach to outlining physical borders and migration narratives. 

There is great power with being able to move freely as opposed to having that choice ripped from you; right now, we need to collectively rethink and restructure our approach to borders and diaspora. Our re-memory of what has truly happened across the globe--and what is continuing to happen--will be fractured if we don't do something. 

The conclusion of "On the Border" is short, but to the point: Don Henley is sick of the "law and order", yet still stuck on the border. My hope is I can get unstuck from the negativity surrounding current news on migration and create new borders for myself--and not be forced to go one way or the other.