Speaking Through Walls

August 27, 2018
Last week, Sierra Club presented comments to the Texas Parks and Wildlife  (TPWD) Commission at a meeting in Austin, opposing border wall construction in Bentsen Rio Grande State Park and the park’s World Birding Center in Mission, Texas. Betty Perez, representing Sierra Club’s Lower Rio Grande Valley group and Evelyn Merz, Lone Star Chapter Conservation Chair, described how the proposed wall would divide the park, disrupting wildlife and visitor's enjoyment of the park. Betty also recounted how the proposed towering structure of concrete and metal would also include a continuous 150 foot wide strip of cleared vegetation and floodlights.

You can read the full letter they read aloud, urging the Commission to take action to stop the "immensely damaging and expensive levee-border wall" that "threatens not only Bentsen but the National Butterfly Center, the historic La Lomita Mission, the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, and private farmland as well" here.

Also last week, Sierra Club Volunteer Clarissa Riojas and Jordan García released a powerful short documentary spotlighting the beauty of borderland identity.
 

 
"The continued construction of the border wall affects EVERYONE in the Rio Grande Valley. The border wall poses a threat to hopeful families in search of liberation and refuge. It presents a danger to our region's remaining native plant life and endangered wildlife species. It harmfully impacts a bustling South Texas economy. It calls for increased presence of CBP/ICE agents and technology in what is already a heavily militarized area.

We must keep telling our stories; oral testimonies are critical in writing our histories. Now, more than ever, it is important to amplify the voices of fronteristas as we are forced through these trying times.

The threat of the border wall has loomed over South Texas since the passage of the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Since then, the people of the Rio Grande Valley have witnessed an unprecedented increase in militarization along the southern border-- a phenomena that has intensified since the Trump Administration took office in 2016. Amidst the promise of additional border fencing and the enactment of a zero tolerance immigration policy, border communities hold strong to teaching tolerance, compassion, and agency. In Speaking through Walls, fronteristas discuss what the border wall symbolizes to those with identities split between countries and how security infrastructure harms transborder migration, the cultural landscape of the borderlands, and the existence of the American Dream."