BORDER IDENTITY

Since the 1500s, when the Spaniards came and displaced Native American tribes from central and northern Mexico into the Rio Grande Valley, there has been a mixing of people, a third identity sitting between what was in order to exist in the present and ensuring their future. And before that, a mixing of land and water created the Rio Grande Valley. Mixing of past soils collected from varying lands on all sides. Mixing of pressure, time, and force to create clay lands. Mixing of fast fresh river water and slow salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to create a delta. Mixing of four different climate zones to create natural migration routes. Mixing of death and life. Mixing of demise and survival. Mixed people living on mixed land. A third identity. A delta. Three sides pulling. Three sides connecting. Three sides balancing. Past. Present. Future. Mexican-Americans we say, but there’s a third. Spaniard-Indigenous-American. That’s what makes us Mexican-American. To be divided into three, and present ourselves as one. We needed a name. Mexican-American, Chicanx, Tejanx, there are many different names, identities. Beyond just Mexico and the United States, the Valley is home to any mixed person. Mexican Native-American Native, Filipino-Americans, Afro-Latino, Indian-Americans. Above all, we are all mixed. All migrants. A border. We are border people. Adding -American after our mother identity is to imply to others that we are mixed, that we are more. The Spaniards said neither Indigenous nor Spaniard. The Americans said neither Mexican nor American. The Mexicans say, ni de aqui, ni de alla. But we say, Spaniard and Indigenous, Mexican and American, de aqui y de alla. They try to erase our past and our future, only leaving us in this unmoving space without knowing that we are people of the Rio Grande.

We flow because the River flows through us. We are a liminal space, the transition. We are the soil after it deepens with water into a deep dark Brown, the clay before it solidifies, and the rearranged body that emerges from the muck. What is transition, if not being pushed and pulled in separate directions, and using that same force to move forward, to flow? To crack the ground and let the water flow into itself. To create a delta.