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Unsettling Boundaries:
Interview with Gilberto Rosas
By Carin Chea
August 3, 2019 was an unassuming, sweltering summer day in El Paso, Texas, a city close to the Mexico-U.S. border.
Shoppers swarmed the Walmart inside the Cielo Vista Mall, not knowing that their lives would forever change. And how would they know that, on that lazy Saturday morning, a gunman would enter the store and enact one of the deadliest and most savage slayings in Texas history?
It was nothing short of a massacre that left 22 dead and another 23 injured. The shooter, a 21-year-old far right extremist, was later apprehended.
Let’s pause and gather ourselves. Mass shootings (despite its uncomfortably commonplace nature) is not a topic you’d find yourself discussing over Sunday brunch.
However, Gilberto Rosas (an anthropology and Latina/o studies professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) faces these painful issues, and more, in his newest book Unsettling: The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border.
It’s not your typical summer vacation beach read, but it is undoubtedly necessary in today’s tense and uncertain social and political climate.
How did you first get introduced to the field of anthropology and Latina/o studies?
In the early 90s, I had just finished my undergraduate at Loyola Marymount University, and swore off school.
I went to work in Nogales, Mexico and ran a non-profit working with marginalized youth. I’m also from El Paso, Texas.
My aunt (who was a writer) sent me a book that made me reconsider my choice. I saw the kind of writing that could be done in the field, and the call to action that was being put forth by the intellectuals.
There were other anthropologists that also got my attention. Some time after that, I got into UT Austin and got my doctorate.
What was the impetus that led you to write Unsettling, which is a very smart title, by the way?
I had gone to El Paso to write about refugees, but I was asked by respected people to write about family separation.
I met Diana Martinez who spoke about family separation, and she urged me to think about it as an important thing to explore. I met with several respected individuals during that time – Diana Martinez, Crystal Massey, and Reverend Bob Mosher.
There are parts in Unsettling about family separation, in particular a chapter called The Lloronx, where I wrestle with the figure of La Llorona to illustrate the magnitude of family separation happening in El Paso.
La llorona is a figure in Mesoamerican folklore, who haunts the border, she’s accused of losing or killing her children.
That being said, one story was told to me by a public defender in El Paso and it’s about a woman who was captured. She was an elderly caregiver for a child.
They took the woman into custody and she was told that that child was taken to be given a shower. The child was never brought back. Everything about that story spoke to the migrant experience. Even the shower was a term of subjection.
That’s terrible. Did they eventually get reunited?
I don’t know. I made it a point to not talk to migrant refugees directly. They’re already going through enough. I think that’s part of the training of anthropology, to recognize humanity and not exploit.
I have tremendous respect for that, especially in this day and age where it seems like marginalized people get exploited every day online.
Crystal Massey told me stories of fathers who lost their children to the authorities and breaking down.
There are chapters in the book that wrestle with family separation as one of the conditions that led to the El Paso massacre. That, and my deep research in the convergence between which white nationalism and intensified border enforcement.
The killer [Patrick Wood Crusius] wrote a manifesto published online where he talked about the Hispanic invasion of Teas as fueling his white nationalistic sentiments.
In the book, I trace those sentiments and how they infiltrate border and immigration policy. I also speak to the ramping up of migrant policing which began well before Trump. It began during the Clinton administration.
A lot of these operations channel migrants into the deserts where they die. There have been tens of thousands of migrant deaths in the past 30 years. That sets the stage for this massacre.
Back to the original question: In 2019, my partner and children and I drove down to El Paso where my family is at.
I’m having conversations with activists whom I respect, I’m interviewing people, hearing stories about family separation, and I find I’m not wanting to speak about what I hear because it’s so terrifying. I’m also observing the immigration courts firsthand.
On July 31, we leave, and we drive back to Illinois. Then, August 3rd happens and I felt I had to link them up in the book.
When the shooting happened, I remember running to my cell phone and calling my parents and I couldn’t get through. I kept calling and couldn’t get through for hours.
There were rumors of other mass shooters out and about. I finally got through. They were on the highway. My father (former military, former M.D.) is a strong man and his voice was shaking.
What are the key takeaways you’d like your readers to glean from your book?
One, there is a link between the mass shooting and how borders are seen as sites of racial invasion.
Two, Trump administration drew a forceful exercise of measures against asylum seekers and migrants. This gravely deepened border enforcement.
Three, I issue a call to re-think and re-consider borders. Border crossings go back in history in Africa in the Americas and they do not need to be sites of cruelty or policing or spectacles of migrant suffering.
Most border crossings are inconsequential. I’m from El Paso. Growing up there, you’d have lunch in Mexico. I used to cross the border casually, to have drinks or to have a coffee. Granted, it was easier going north to south, than the other way around.
I suggest in my book that the knowledge about the border has been lost in the dominant discourses. I conclude that we have to re-think what “border” means.
What is one piece advice you think our lawmakers need to hear?
They need to hear the voices of people who cross borders every day and recognize that there are long histories of inconsequential, banal, routine border crossings. It’s harder to cross now than it used to be, but people still cross every day.
I’m from El Paso, and my family goes back many generations. My great grandparents crossed during the Mexican Revolution to El Paso. I’ll tell the story of my great aunt.
She lived with us when I was growing up. She was deeply conservative; she always wore black. She was in her 80s. We called her Lobito, or Lone Wolf. My mom told us a story about her. The story speaks to the refugee migrant condition.
My mom witnessed my great aunt perform whenever she’d babysit them. Great aunt would put on a hat and walk by the windows so people outside would assume she was a man. I used that to talk about how the border has become a site of refuge for people.
My great aunt and others crossed the border during the revolution, built a life in El Paso, but my aunt was haunted by the revolution so much that whenever the other seniors left the house, she’d walk around the window with a hat on so that the house would be regarded as protected.
She’d also say aloud, “Hey Jose, you watch this window” or “Juan, you watch that other window.”
For me, it was very telling, that someone who fled the revolution felt the need to perform this masculinity to show that she was protected.
Here you have a woman who fled the revolution, who made it into the US, but is so haunted by what she experienced that she has to perform this masculinity.
That underscores the vulnerability of the migrant situation.
For more information on Gilberto Rosas and his book, please visit hfsbooks.com/books/unsettling-rosas/
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