We are all foreigners in most of the world, but we do not experience this strangeness with equal intensity. Fear and threat electrify borders, customs, immigration inspections. When you land, agents scrutinize your passport and your face like two mismatched forgeries. Around you, you perceive the tension in the slanted eyes, the turbans, the veils, the dark skins: the suitcases of the stereotypes are not checked in, but they take their toll. Something remains of the hostile western territory in the moors of these international terminals. You know that there is more terror in some airports than in airplanes, we have more successfully defied the force of gravity than that of prejudice.
In the 1940s, after the Civil War, the writer Ramón J. Sender took refuge in the United States. He knew the look of hatred well: his wife, Amparo Barayón, was shot, and he always thought that he had died in his place. The imprint of that terrible memory permeates his literature. Border Stories describes a bus trip through Texas. There he meets a sick girl with dark eyes burned by fever, and her mother. In a stop, the three enter a drugstore togetherto buy aspirin. Taking them for a Latino family, the pharmacy employee reacts as if they were not there. Sender writes: “I had never imagined what it is to be nobody. This woman refused to accept that we existed and she did so with a painful naturalness. We were not born, we did not move the air or occupy a place. She didn't see us. She refused to see us. (...) I could not exist, but the girl needed help. She did exist. " Ramón is furious, he screams: they have just been thrown onto the rough shore of humanity. Two police officers expel them from the establishment, without allowing them to buy the painkillers for Yolanda, the black-eyed girl. You remember the verses of the Mexican poet Jimena González, that today resonate with other echoes: "I raise my voice so as not to deny ourselves, / because we have a name / and we will not let them forget it."
Sender, like them, knew that racism does not emerge only because of the color of the skin or the features that draw a face. Nobody calls a millionaire foreign athlete or a prestigious executive from another country an immigrant. Money opens borders, while the homeless lead stateless lives in their homeland. It is easy to detect discrimination in others' eyes without seeing aporophobia in their own. In this world of giving to receive, those who apparently have little to offer are annoying: refugees, migrants, homeless.
All empires - including ours - are built on a mestizo foundation of civilization and barbarism. The historian Tacitus wrote about the campaigns of the Romans: “To prey, murder and robbery, they are called by bad name to govern; and where they create a desert, they call it peace ”. Along with the achievements of progress, we keep a memory crossed by racial wars, the scars of slavery, the appropriation of the poorest fur lands. Having lived it, being nobody to someone, changes the look. That is why Sender placed his novel The Teenage Bandit in New Mexico, a few years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that annexed more than half of the Mexican territory to the United States. There is the uprooting of those inhabitants who, overnight, became second-class citizens in a new country. They did not move, the border moved.
Sender traveled that Texan afternoon from the privileged shore to the badlands of the elements. In reality, we are all - without exception - descendants of the journey. Genetic data points in a clear direction: The ancestors of modern humans lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. We Europeans were Africans during a long period in the past. In this strange historical journey, the vagrant species developed a brain fearful of the different. Humanity shares this disintegrating paradox: our memory is both racist and foreign.