Blog written by Elizabeth Shaw and Steven Dampf, Class of 2022

El Paso is Spanish for “The Pass,” and the city is now behind us in the scope of our SRS journey.

Today, we had the chance to speak with Professor Dulcinea Lara from the New Mexico State University Criminal Justice Department. Dr. Lara’s presentation was entitled “Colonization’s Long Term Effects in New Mexico” and she began by offering a new perspective on assimilation. She argued that assimilation is fundamentally a denial of self, and that, on a mass scale, it is achieved through a combination of genocide and epistemicide (destruction of cultural knowledge). In our class we discussed assimilation from the perspective of economic success of immigrants. Immigrants will earn more money if they learn to speak English and follow other cultural hallmarks of life in the United States. Dr. Lara asked us to examine the issue with more complexity, to question whether economic success or being “American enough” is the ultimate goal. During the question and answer session, she shared a story about her eight year old daughter, who would often come home with stories of dichotomy. She told us that she gave her daughter a penny and a marble to encourage her to move away from thinking about situations in terms of two sides, and instead to consider how there are an infinite number of perspectives to each problem – just like a sphere. We kept this image of a false dichotomy in mind as we crossed from the American side of the border to the Mexican side to eat lunch.

We visited The Pink Store in the town of Palomas. The establishment is a fusion of restaurant and souvenir store, with particularly tasty beef tacos, we must say. The owner, Ivonne Romero, inherited the shop in Palomas from her parents, and travels across Mexico in search of unique and talented artists with products with which she stocks her shelves. After lunch, we had the opportunity to speak with her and, when prompted about specific artisans, she went around the room and named the creators of each piece. Expectedly, the flow of customers has a 70 percent return rate. The town of Palomas, being located along the border, is in a peculiar situation. For many years, telephone lines and water system was all run through the United States and many Mexican residents cross the border daily for school and work.

As we embarked on our four-hour interstate migration across the Wild West, ultimately ending up in Arizona, we encountered tumbleweeds scurrying across the road, with a tautological motive. We realized parallels between the cross-road migration and our own migration, as well as the inter-country migrations about which we are learning. As Professor Lara might question, did the tumbleweed cross the road, or did the road cross the land of the tumbleweeds? What significance do the arbitrary lines drawn by our disconnected governments from centuries ago hold? Today was a time for deep reflection concerning these questions, and so much more. Most importantly, our SRS bonded through love, laughter, and hopefully not laryngitis from sharing our water bottles. We are excited to unravel what the rest of our voyage holds.