85000 Children Unreachable
*I encourage you to watch this film first without sound or context.
And then, if moved to - please add the layer of context/words (transcript below).
"Bones have no borders..."
This poetic film invites us to ask questions about young migrant labor in the US and see how the US-Mexico border exploits us all.
I collected the pieces of this film after moving from the Northeast to Bisbee, Arizona during the pandemic. As I drove along miles of the fence, the borderline became so much more to me than a headline or colonial political boundary to debate over.
While I filmed from each viewpoint you see, I took three breaths in that place - to literally ingest what I saw and let it affect me.
Through connecting these collected breaths - from Douglas, AZ/Agua Prieta, Sonora to Nogales, AZ/Sonora, I invite you to witness how the border fence literally divides the land: an action which affects thousands of human, animal, and plant lifetimes in every moment.
I out the images together with the song and poem you’ll hear after reading the following two articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-child-workers-exploitation.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/16/woman-us-mexico-border-death-update
Thank you for watching and wondering more deeply how to move through the contradictions of our time and into an age of justice with me...
FILM TRANSCRIPT:
Bones have no borders/Only a body that holds/Every memory/Each story untold/Reaching up toward the surface/Screaming unearth us/And if we hold our hands down to the ground/We can sing it all out…
There’s twelve-year-olds roofing in Tennessee
A 14-year-old young slaughterhouse employee
Whether cleaning floors or picking fruit - repeat, repeat
All to transfer funds back home
But first, pay-off the smuggler’s fee.
Yes.
While we naturalized citizens get our beauty rest
Migrant child labor debones our chicken breasts.=
And why are all of these field and factory jobs short staffed?
Cause how many US passport holders
Do you know stepping up to do this kind of work?
But when we grab our red grocery store meat and party ice cream
Why don’t think to ask who ran the overnight milking machines?
Or who might have built that auto-part
Just arrived for our car?
Or who packaged those dinner rolls
Sold to us at Whole Foods or Walmart, aisle four?
“Migrant minors are slaving at Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom”
You probably won’t see this headline anywhere on Fox News.
But it’s true
They’re delivering overnight meals throughout NYC
They harvest tomatoes in the Carolina’s and our coffee beans in Hawaii.
In this very moment
Right now and now
Thousands of undocumented teens are picking up a broom
To start their 12-plus-hour shift
Before showing up to then pledge of allegiance at school.
They pack our breakfast cereal.
They fold our satin hotel sheets.
They perhaps even stitched in the JCrew label
Of your overseas button-down shirt.
So how then are all we fooled…
Into professing ourselves so rightly just?
When however we want buy…
Whatever we want to own…
We cannot trust
That we aren’t just reenforcing their doom.
85,000 children unreachable?
The Hearthside Food Solutions website does vouch for safety-first culture
But is this precisely the code upholding yet another system-greasing vulture
Interconnected with greedy capitalist sponsors
Lurking around every Grand Rapids street corner.
If all this - let alone social security numbers go unchecked
Dear Child Labor Laws… whom exactly are you aiming to protect?
Day in and day out - these young ones
Work and walk home
Work, school, and walk home.
To where, I do not know…
Unacknowledged
On an illegal wing and a prayer
They’ve somehow overflowed
Into our long-lost dream
Without being told
That the United States of America is a purposeful scheme
Counting on them
As another number who will conform and believe.
Nunca mas.
Nunca mas.
Never more…
No more innocent victims of our oppression - or supposed drug obsessed wars
Nunca mas.
Nunca mas.
Never more…
Because this massive debt isn’t theirs
Don’t you see?
It is ours…
We are indebted to them incredulously.
In every step we take,
We must succumb to this fact.
The underpinning of all
Is stacked for generations now upon our backs.
Because it’s this us -
The entitled me and the privileged you -
We’ve made a business of their suffering
An assembly line of their loss
While their impoverished family far-off,
Who may never see them again,
Await instead for Western Union payments
To come through from some invisible boss.
“Exactly what future are they all fighting for,” I ask.
And how does ours relate?
Before creating new ways
We must first understand
That at the dawn of every day
We continue to profit from centuries of injustice:
A steel borderline
Built upon stolen land
A young Mexican mother
Dangling in the palm our hands.