BORDERLAND RESISTANCE.

AuthorBernstein, Dennis J.

"We've had enough," Juan Mancias tells me. "They are digging up our people."

Mancias is the chairman of the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe of Texas, whose homeland stretches along the Rio Grande Delta, where the river that separates the Lone Star State from Mexico spills out into the Gulf. In the battle against a border wall, he and other activists have drawn their line in the sand a few feet from where the Trump Administration plans to break ground. "Anytime that you dig somebody up and you put them somewhere else," he says, "that's ethnic cleansing and all part of a continuing genocide."

Mancias and I met in Tucson, Arizona, in January, as he was preparing to speak on the deteriorating border situation before the United Nations. The intergovernmental body was holding a fact-finding mission at the San Xavier District of the Tohono Obdham Nation, another tribe whose culture and history spans both sides of the United States-Mexico divide. Specifically, the United Nations was seeking testimony and documentation of human rights violations experienced by indigenous and migrant communities. Less than a month later, President Donald Trump would declare a national emergency over border security, claiming that "walls work 100 percent."

Already fighting back against this claim and the looming construction of a wall is a broad coalition of borderland groups, led largely by indigenous peoples, staging acts of civil disobedience and working with bodies like the United Nations to assert their rights.

Mancias and other local activists, allied with U.S. farmers and cattle ranchers who have also lived for generations in the borderlands of Texas, have set up a resistance camp at the Eli Jackson Cemetery in the small town of San Juan, Texas. Established in the 1860s by the son of a reformed slave owner as a place where all races could be buried together, the cemetery--and the camp it now houses--is less than a rock's throw north of where the Trump Administration plans to convert a vital river levee into a thirty-foot steel and concrete barrier wall, including a clearing for a 150-foot enforcement zone.

The cemetery camp is part of a network of encampments along the border that seeks to protect sacred indigenous sites threatened by the border wall and various fossil fuel projects in the area. Indigenous activists have even accused Border Patrol agents of looting their sacred medicine and artifacts. Says Mancias, "We've seen them take loads of stuff and picking peyote, putting it in trash bags."

The cemetery camp allows the activists close proximity to keep an eye on things. "We want to take a stand to monitor the...

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