What's that under your nose? It's a border; Made you look.

The Yuma 14 died, but they obviously did not believe that they would, not until their situation became desperate. Logical, yes, but plenty of people are ignorant of the ax overhead. The coyotes leading them, meanwhile, were aware that the desert was something dangerous, but they were overconfident despite their incompetence because of their greed and their machismo. They were rather apathetic about their charges; They were "bad shepherds."
Everyone involved was trying to bust through some sort of financial ceiling that existed for them in their hometown. The coyotes, cleverly, actually made steady money by providing a service to the people who were willing to risk more than may seem sane. But the prospects portrayed by the coyote's middle man, Don Moi, were grand and potential clients were assured the risks were manageable...supposing you're manly enough (Urrea 49). And of course you would be manly enough just by being daring. Or so the broken logic seems to go. But this ain't Hollywood...not unless it's "The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre." Regardless of whether or not one believes in acknowledging a national or political border, the physical boundary of the desert should always be respected. The United States government might jail you or deport you for your audacity, but Mother Nature will kill you.

For too long, none of them wanted to give up, even though giving up meant survival. Granted, the promise to provide emergency care was sort of a trap, but it wasn't a lie. All the border crossers would be giving up was their potential life in the USA, which was a better option than losing the lives they had. Actually, they would have only been giving up their chance to die horribly and be made some sort of idolized characters. Sounds like a deal to me.

A national border serves to keep out people, groups, corporate entities, etcetera that do not adhere to the laws of the land, or do not share a common history with the inhabitants, or do not strive for the same collaborative goals, or do not hold the same values, or do not use the same language, or do not make the currently occupying group more prosperous, and so on. Is it then a recurring device of self-centeredness? In this case, the national border was in the same place as a physical boundary, but what if the national border was farther away from such a deadly environment? Would that demonstrate a greater openness to immigration? Was the border laid at the boundary to have nature do the dirty work of enforcement, or did the border stop at the boundary because the boundary wasn't worth "bridging"? The Border Patrol emphasized that they saved lives with every capture (http://sensoryoverload.typepad.com/sensory_overload/2004/05/the_yuma_14_aut.html). The Border Patrol agents will attempt to bring a walker in the desert back from the brink of death if they find them, giving the would-be border crossers water and trying to cool them down with air-conditioning in a vehicle headed for the nearest hospital (Urrea 124). While the Border Patrol are not international bridge-builders, it seems evident that being around the border constantly has created a bridge between them and the other people they find in the desert. They develop their own peculiar brand of sympathy despite the professional boundary established by their duty to apprehend anyone who attempts to enter the USA illegally. It is not a sympathy expressed in a deluge of words, but it exists nonetheless (Urrea 133-134). They recognize that the people they track and send back to Mexico are just people, which is the first footing laid down for building an interpersonal bridge. Perhaps a few years from now will show the Migra crossing borders themselves.

Derailed by Dialogue

*Please note that the following post is sort of a whimsical creative splurge that happened while doing the assignment due today. I realized that it was getting quite off-topic, so I'll have to do a re-write that looks nothing like this, but I thought this might be worth seeing.*

The original nationality of an immigrant is not of where s/he currently lives, correct? So sometimes those who were born'n'raised as local as fresh farm produce can become convinced that an immigrated members should still be considered "outsiders."
"What the heck is in salsa?" asks the cucumber.
"Idunno, but it can't be anything American," says the tomato.
"All I know," says the cauliflower, "is that it burns my tongue. Stuff like that can't be helpful to anybody. Gotta keep that crap contained, isn't that right?"
"Uhhh...yeah. Sure. Of course. Ha-ha," the All-American bottle of corn-syrup laughs nervously as he backs away as slow as molasses, hoping nobody remembers to trace his lineage back to maize.
...Um...
Okay.
Anyway...
People are not plants. I'm pretty sure most of you can grasp this concept fairly easily. But some people might not get it, so I gotta say it. When you have foreign people come into your country, you could decide to treat them like a kudzu invasion, but that wouldn't be quite right. See, humans are the same species. Sometimes we kill each other, yes, and there have been times when large groups of us have attempted to kill off entire groups of others of us, but simply moving from one country to another is not how we tend to go about such aggressive acts.
So if immigrants to America aren't after the lives of the average American citizen, then what are they after? Well, the Yuma 14 were part of a group that didn't want much more than the good green cash on the other side of the border.
"AHA!" exclaims the cucumber, the cauliflower, and a bypassing carrot, "BURGLARY!"
No, guys. What? No. Let me finish. Also, I thought I was done with using you for illustrative purposes?
Whatever. These guys were planning to earn their money.
"Our money," retorts the cucumber.
I'm not touching that issue here and now, cucumber. I'm just making the point that the Yuma 14 had planned to do whatever work was available to them in the United States to build a windfall for their relatives back home.
"Go home!" screams the belligerent carrot.
Careful, carrot, you are getting kind of red in the face. Your blood-pressure is already pretty awful. No need to get so worked up. It'll be good for your heart, if not for your brain. If you have an issue with some category of people, whether totally legit or so-totally-not, making them feel bad is not how you go about the business of dealing with it. Furthermore, as a figure of my imagination, it is unwise for you people to keep interrupting me. It's rather upsetting.
"Hey! What do you mean by "You people?" I'm not with them on everything," says the cauliflower.
Very well. Maybe I was being a little overly general there. I apologize. But now you have an obligation to yourself to keep yourself distinguished from the other people in your highly political section of the grocery aisle by being better behaved than them even when you all are sharing the same feelings of opposition towards someone or something.
"Of course," says the cauliflower, "after all, I'm a cauliflower."
Oh, geez...

I just...

I don't think this is getting anywhere. I shouldn't be talking to groceries, anyway. It could be a bad influence on my brain.

P.S.  In a stunning total shift in opinion, the tomato eventually married a large tub of salsa after discovering that they had a lot in common and after realizing he liked the spicy zing she added to everything in life.

Urayoan Noel's Statement

Urayoan Noel may be trying to bridge Puerto Ricans and people living in the USA in his poems "Ballade of a Boy," "Kool Logic," and "Barrio Speedwagon Blues." I think this is probably the case since his poems' subject matter concerns mainstream American Culture and the “outsiders” (like Puerto Ricans) trying to fit in or just survive in it.

Unless his poems are supposed to be a challenge for people to go expand their monolingual horizons by learning Puerto Rican, some of these poems appear to not be meant for English-speakers like me. But then again, Mr. Noel has expressed an interest in removing some amount of clarity from poems. A bilingual poem read by a monolingual person would certainly help the poem achieve ambiguity.

To look more specifically at the message made about Latino culture, Mr. Noel seems to be trying to express how oppressive of an atmosphere the expectations and lifestyles of the USA are. This could mean that Puerto Rican life is freer and less dull than that of mainstream America.

Mr. Noel uses rhyme to make his poems euphonic, to emphasize the meter for each poem, and to link the words he uses, which is all quite standard for traditional poetry. His insertion of punctuation into each line of his poems is not traditional, however. Mr. Noel's punctuation for these poems may be of importance, since it is somewhat unique: Many poets wouldn't bother with that much punctuation, preferring instead to rely on line breaks to indicate when to pause for meaningful dramatic effect. With Mr. Noel's poems, the reader must then figure out how the poems are meant to be read aloud, since all the commas and semicolons and such punctuation marks accomplish much of the same effect in prose as line breaks do in many poems. At least Mr. Noel keeps the thoughts in his lines from spilling into the next stanzas. Pulling off that sort of befuddling trick of "crossing boundaries" of poetic form could be done cleverly, but I have a sense warning me that I would dislike the way Mr. Noel might try it.

Even when Mr. Noel's poems contain no character in particular, they convey a personal tone, which carries a sense of a history of nearly relentless discomfort (I can't quite call it "oppression") with society. Because the poems are touched by emotion, which must come from a source (whether individual or collective), and because the emotion is being processed in words, the poems are windows to a heart fed up with a misguided dominant culture, one with such messed up priorities that it traps itself in a paradox of many trivial options and no solutions to real problems.
Mr. Noel has said that he prefers "unstatements" over statements, but I cannot help but think that he is using his poems to try to state that "something is rotten" in the United States of America. He seems to be trying to bring a focus back to what needs to be fixed, starting with the fact that modern America is more concerned with distracting itself from big issues than dealing with them. Although America is a place people try to get into, the poems I read seem to contain a soul's desire to escape the intangible exigencies of living in America.

In "Ballade of a Boy," the porch screen is an example of a border and boundary where there was supposed to be a bridge. The main character's "eyes trying to glean" indicate recognition that the border of the two meeting again had become a boundary, and implies a longing for a bridge to be built between the two. I do not know what the speaker's background was supposed to be, but apparently there had once been a bridge between him and the main character, a bridge which must have decayed. The poem's speaker had a chance to reach out to the poem's main character, but instead the two of them maintained an awkward silence, and from then on maintained a relationship no more. The section covering this brief moment is pne in which noticing the punctuation will actually contribute to the feeling readers should get from the poem, for it includes the consecutive use of periods in its lines, giving the scene finality.
The speaker probably knows it is too late to reestablish a personal connection with the "Boy" of the poem, but attempts to prevent another wall being built up around the character as a result of damaged reputation. To avoid smearing the main character of the poem, the speaker calls him a "normal teen." This good word should be helpful in reestablishing a bridge between the "Boy" and the bulwark of society. In saying this, the speaker implies that adolescence is itself a time-bound boundary for most people, since a "normal teen" will "make trouble" and "careen," behaviors likely to distance others. Maybe we, as individuals, are expected to outgrow the boundaries around us, because nobody, even in America, really lives in a Utopia.