The Canadian & Mexican Borders

This story map tells the story of Mexican and Canadian borders by exploring how their territorial demarcations came to be and how certain border communities are still impacted by the history of colonialism and border implementation. I argue that colonialism and policies that exclude populations from their ancestral land still circulate today, whether it be in Mexico or Canada. Specifically the deterritorialization of populations and their reterritorialization as "intruders" into a landscape has profound effects on language and the environment.

The story begins with a brief introduction into Canadian border rhetoric and issues in border towns for Canadians that are typically associated with Mexican borders. The history of both lands and how some parts of the border came to be are next. While the rest covers how Tejanos of South Texas and the Akwesasne Mohawks of territorial Canada suffered language loss and environmental damage through the creation of the border.

Although there is a 2,000 mile difference between the border regions of Mexico and Canada, there are similarities in more ways than one. Across the borders, similar stories and voices can be heard. In addition, the Tejanos of South Texas and the Akwesasne Mohawks of territorial Canada highlight the commonalities shared between the two.

“The White Man put that there, not us. I don’t know why we have to put up with this bullshit” — One Mohawk man speaking to another about border issues over dinner at a Red Lobster in Lachine, Quebec, during the late 1990s (Sampson, 2014).

The case of the white man creating the border, and thus splitting the land and culture of a community, extends to both regions of Canada and Mexico. Although thousands of miles separate the border communities of the two, the weather is radically different and the cultures do not share much in common, division by force has deeply impacted both communities in more ways than one can imagine. Beginning with territory disputes and eventually territory loss with the United States, the people of Canada and Mexico have legacies underscored by loss of their land. The Tejanos of South Texas found themselves separated from Mexico with the induction of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, while the Akwesasne Mohawks had their territory split between Canada and the US. by a multitude of treaties signed between 1783 and 1850.

A  Bloomberg poll  released in September showed that 41 percent of respondents, Americans over the age of 18, agreed with the following statement: “If a wall is good for the Mexico border, it is good for the Canada border as well.”

The discussion and idea of borders within North America is mostly sided to the south, and the experiences Mexicans and other Latinos face when crossing or experiencing the border. Yet the rhetoric surrounding a Canadian-American border has increased and in the decade following 9/11, the United States has spent $3 billion per year securing the northern border.

One place in the Canada/US border discussion especially demonstrates the evolving security and manifestation of laws to the north. Stanstead, QC, Canada, and Derby Line, VT, US. highlight the heightened security of today.

This library is a minute example of the term "rajando", which exemplifies how a border wall that is placed onto a landscape can be an otherworldly type of intrusion, that is cutting, splitting, tearing, and scarring (rajando) the landscape (Díaz-Barriga & Dorsey, 2020).

The term can apply to the broader historical context and how a border intersects and reshapes the life of border communities.

Drugs entering from Mexico is a common perception, yet the same exists for Canada to an extent. The southern border of Mexico may have gotten all the attention during Trump's tenure and his call for a wall, but the northern border has it's tensions as well.

In the past two fiscal years, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has logged a 400% jump in apprehensions of people crossing illegally from Canada. In addition within that same Vermont-Quebec border, Fernando Beltrán, a retired Border Patrol agent points out the area is a smuggling route used to move potent, hydroponically grown Canadian cannabis across the border. CBP seized more than 2 tons of marijuana this year — a 362% increase over 2017 seizures (Burnett, 2019). 

Although Canada is not often compared to Mexico and faces less extremities in terms of security, there have been times where the northern border was painted as a code-red terrorist threat to the United States. In 2011 a US watchdog agency discovered that the world’s largest border, Canada, was mostly undefended.

This report prompted American senators to state that the US is facing grave danger of terrorists coming in from northern borders of Canada. At the time Senator Joe Lieberman, chairman of the U.S. homeland security committee, called the report "absolutely alarming," and suggested an urgent call for action by both countries (Weston, 2011).

Another point of view from the US government was provided by Republican Senator Susan Collins who offered the analysis that terrorists wanting to enter the U.S. would "go for the weak link," and therefore would be more likely to enter from Canada than from Mexico (Weston, 2011).

 Despite the strong political rhetoric not much has changed at the national-level when it comes to border security. Even after the 9/11 attacks most of the border has remained open for commerce, with more restrictions at the local level, such as with the Vermont-Quebec border. 

“In 1844, President James K. Polk ran on a Democratic platform that supported manifest destiny and the last act of Polk's predecessor, John Tyler, had been to annex the Republic of Texas in 1845." Polk wanted to lay claim to California, New Mexico, and land near the disputed southern border of Texas. Mexico, however, was not so eager to let go of these territories (PBS, Mexican American War, 2018).

From there, Polk attempted to purchase the land and sent American diplomat John Slidell to Mexico City with an offer of $30 million dollars. However, the Mexican government refused to even acknowledge a meeting and Polk grew frustrated.

Determined to acquire the land, he sent American troops to Texas in January of 1846 to provoke the Mexicans into war” (PBS, Mexican American War, 2018). After Mexican troops fired on American troops in April 25, 1846 the order for war was sent on May 11.

The war ceased in September of 1847 after the capture of Mexico City and The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo sealed the American victory in 1848.  In return for $15 million and the assumption of Mexican debts to Americans, Mexico gave up its possession of New Mexico and California. The vast territory included present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming. With that, Mexico also agreed to relinquish all of Texas, including the disputed area along the border.

For Canada and the US, the history is a bit different. According to Brandon Dimmel, “The Canada– US border changed dramatically during the First World War. Prior to August 1914, the international boundary had been – for the most part – porous, a fluid zone of friendly economic and social interchange”.

After the war however, the border slowly became a high security surveillance area, something citizens of Canada and the US had never experienced before. This was in large part because of the need to protect the nation from potential threats, specifically the general German-American population. The changes that resulted from this resembled a more typical Mexican border crossing today, specifically in Canadian borderland communities like Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan.

 Tracing back even further and exploring specifically the history of Indian Reservations in Canada, many legislative decisions attempted to eliminate the First Nations culture and territory.

 “In 1890 the reserve status of the community was cemented when the Indian Act was accepted by male vote, and inaugurated a lot of dissension within the community” (Reid 2004). However the Indian Act had been introduced for the first time in 1876 with the goal of forcing First Nations peoples to lose their culture and become more “Euro-Canadian”.

The Canadian government then began implementing a land tenure system and appropriating land. For the Akwesasne Mohawks the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway canal in 1957 was the first interaction to severely impede and destroy Mohawk identity and culture. This construction of the seaway, “is the first interaction perceived to jeopardize Mohawk identity and culture as it tore through the site of Mohawk economic and cultural activity: the riverfront” (Phillips 2000).

As seen, both borders were created out of intrusion into land that was already occupied. Beyond relocating groups of people into other spaces, these populations were expected to change, either becoming more "American" or "Euro-Canadian". The next section of this Story Map will explore the impact the border and colonialism on language for two specific populations near the borders; South Texas Tejanos and Akwesasne Mohawks.

Due to the marking and rearrangement of land that the Mexican borderland has endured, the mother tongue of many Tejanos, Spanish, was severely affected and at times brutally detained. For many Tejanos there is a point in their family lineage that Spanish stopped being passed down and it can be greatly attributed to the South Texas public education system in the 1950’s.

For many Mexican-American children at the time school was segregated, and it was not until 1965 that in the majority of schools segregation was ruled illegal. From 1909 to 1965 linguistic diversity was suppressed (Bagigalupo, 2019).

One town in South Texas named Marfa even had a ceremony for their elementary school called “the burial of Mr. Spanish”.

“School faculty enforced the language ban, even organizing activities like the “Burial of Mr. Spanish,” where students were asked to write their favorite words on slips of paper that were then placed in a cigar box and buried at the base of the American flag” (Bagigalupo, 2019).

For many children, territorial disputes from the past, affected their voice and ability to express themselves. All across Texas, towns were stipulating segregated schools for Hispanics. One town, Alpine, “built its segregated facility and named it Centennial School, apparently without irony, to honor the one hundredth anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico” (Butcher, 2019).

The history of the land and ramifications of the war extended to language and transcends a simple border. Schools across Texas during time period are a source of pain for many, school was not a place to learn, it was a place to be separated from those that did not speak or “look” like a language. The border between the USA and Mexico minimized a population and othered them into segregated schools.  

In a similarly tragic way, the Akwesasne Mohawks (as well other native tribes) began losing their language. With the border created and a vision by Christian Churches and the Canadian government to make Mohawks more Euro-Canadian, more and more children were sent Residential Schools.

Residential Schools, most of the times, took children away from their family, locked them in their dormitories, and even forced them to clean the entire school (Mohawk Tribe Weekly, 2016)

The Residential School system deprived indigenous children of their ancestral language. Other punishments to prevent the children from speaking their native languages included forced isolation, withholding of meals, and washing the child’s mouth with soap.

One man who grew up in the late 1950s on the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake, Que., Kenneth Deer, shares what his thoughts on the legacy of federal Indian Residential Schools.

 I don't speak Mohawk, and I absolutely blame the system for that," said Deer (Deer, 2019). "You were always hit with something: straps, pieces of wood, rulers, yardsticks, chalk thrown at you, erasers thrown at you, you were pushed around".

Through both borders, there was a targeted and overarching pattern of targeting children to erasure language and eventually culture. By ancestral land being cut in two, people of these communities were at greater risk to be subjects of assimilation.

And as author, Stephanie Elizondo Griest said in her book "All the Agents and Saints" we should really be "Considering what these communities have been through, the headlines we really should be reading are how these cultures survived at all. Our languages might have been scrubbed out of our mouths with soap, yet they are somehow still spoken today" (Elizondo Griest, 2017).

In South Texas, all along the US-Mexico border colonias – cheap plots of land outside city limits without basic infrastructure such as water and sewage systems, electricity and paved roads, have been struggling with decades of environmental issues.

A News21 analysis of census data indicates that across the United States, the average income in predominantly Latino unincorporated areas is 40 percent lower than the average income in predominantly white unincorporated areas, making it harder for these communities to deal with water quality issues. Colonias exemplify some of these problems (Esquinca & Jaramillo, 2017).

The health issues facing colonias are complex. Due to the lack of residential infrastructure, many homes lack insulation, suffer from mosquito or pest outbreaks, and have no access to sanitary drinking water. 

Certain health conditions, like diabetes, are commonplace in colonias due in part to difficulty residents face when trying to purchase healthy food options (mhpsalud.org)

Colonia territory exists because of corporations taking advantage of cheap land plots to dump their waste, affecting low-income border communities. Waste dumps can open anywhere yet the families living there for generations struggle to challenge corporations.

Prior to the US and Canada constructing the St. Lawrence seaway canal, the aforementioned river was a key source of nature that the community relied on.

In "All the Agents & Saints" by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, one Mohawk man explains how, "just two generations ago, this river ran thick with sturgeon, bass, walleye, eel, and pike—plenty to feed your family and sell extras on the side. Wild game roamed the region too: deer, elk, rabbit. Beavers kept the fur trappers busy, while black ash trees offered up splints to basket weavers. Well into the twentieth century, Mohawks could subsist off the land" (Elizondo Griest, 2017).

Now, the Mohawk community faces an environmental battle, where much like the colonias of South Texas, industrial waste dumps greatly affect water quality and the abundance of fish and wildlife.

Akwesasne is downwind, down river, and down gradient from one federal and two state Superfund sites, one of which, General Motors (GM) was placed on the National Priorities List (Hoover, 2018).

At first glance, the borderlands often only make headlines for violence, crime, and death. Everything becomes the stereotypical image of border towns.

Language loss and environmental issues may appear to some as cases of populations not wanting to "learn a language" or "not caring" about their living space, however, the proliferation of borders and boundaries, and the disconnect between overlapping agencies and identities, demonstrates that the history of fence-line communities is much more than that.

The loss of land, the loss of language, and the loss of culture can be attributed to the forced treaties, the rajas of communities and the creation of security checkpoints that target border citizens. History may have occurred hundreds of years in the past, but the present shows there are ramifications border communities are still dealing with.

References

Bacigalupo, C. (2019). No Spanish allowed: Texas school museum revisits history of segregation. Public Radio International. https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-04-29/no-spanish-allowed-texas-school-museum-revisits-history-segregation

Brooks, S., & Olive, A. (2018). Transboundary environmental governance across the world’s longest border. University Of Manitoba Press.

Bruns, R. A. (2019). Border towns and border crossings : a history of the U.S.-Mexico divide. Greenwood, An Imprint Of Abc-Clio, Llc.

Burnett, J. (2019, November 21). U.S.-Canada Border Community’s Culture Changes As Security Tightens. NPR.org. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/21/781138076/u-s-canada-border-communitys-culture-changes-as-security-tightens

Butcher, S. (2019, January 3). Marfa’s Blackwell School Has a Painful Past. That’s Why the Town Wants to Save It. Texas Monthly. https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/marfas-blackwell-school-has-a-painful-past-thats-why-the-town-wants-to-save-it/

Deer, J. (2019, May 12). 120 years of Indian day schools leave a dark legacy in Kahnawake Mohawk Territory. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/kahnawake-indian-day-schools-1.5127502

Díaz-Barriga, M., & Dorsey, M. (2020). Fencing in democracy : Necrocitizenship and the US-Mexico border wall. Duke University Press.

Dimmel, B. R. (2017). Engaging The Line. Univ Of Brit Columbia P.

Elizondo Griest, S. (2017). All the Agents and Saints : Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. University Of North Carolina Press.

Hoover, E. (2018, February 21). Fighting toxics in a Mohawk community. EHN. https://www.ehn.org/mohawk-akwesasne-environmental-justice-superfund-2537159934.html

Hoy, B. (2021). A Line of Blood and Dirt : Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands. Oxford University Press.

Jaramillo, A., & Esquinca, M. (2017, August 22). Colonias on the border struggle with decades-old water issues. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/22/colonias-border-struggle-decades-old-water-issues/

Mahaffey, B. (2018, May). Inside Texas’ Border Communities: What are Colonias? | MHP Salud. MHP Salud. https://mhpsalud.org/inside-texas-border-communities-colonias/

Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus : political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press.

Weston, G. (2011, February 1). U.S. discovers the undefended border | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/u-s-discovers-the-undefended-border-1.1063439