On Our Belonging to Each Other
The seventh episode in our Wisdom Season
We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us.
The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. In his writing and in this conversation, he complicates every dehumanizing stereotype of Mexicans, “migrants” — and border guards. A deep truth of our time, Luis insists, is that “we miss each other.” He offers a vision of the larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today: that we might evolve the old illusion of the melting pot into a 21st-century richness of “us.” And he delightfully models that messiness and humor will be required.
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Luis Alberto Urrea is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois Chicago. His books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction include Into the Beautiful North, The Devil’s Highway, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and Goodnight, Irene.
Thanks for this and for all On Being is doing. However, your emails and website are very difficult for screen reader users to access. Lots of unlabelled graphics, links with just graphic labels etc. It has become very difficult to find a way of downloading the episodes which used to be easy. I think there is a need to review accessibility to your platform.
I am deeply grateful for the work of On Being and all the incredible people whose work I get introduced to through your project. One of the things I am becoming more attuned to as I work to decolonize my heart and mind is the way we cast aspersions or assertions to all humans from inside our worldview (ie. “ We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and other …”). Statements like this break my heart because even though they are well intended, they disregard and discount the living cultures in that are so distinct from the colonialist economies that mask as cultures. In so-called Canada, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit cultures practiced sophisticated and sustaining treaty making with each other’s communities and with the more than humans for 8 thousand plus years pre-colonization. In fact they are still highly committed to the treaty process spending billions of dollars in court cases in their efforts to assert their sovereignty and keep their teachings and principles alive. I think what you’re trying to assert here, perhaps is that an inherent aspect of colonialist cultures is the movement to build walls and separate from each other. But this is not a human trait among all of our species And to assert that is to completely disregard those who have been fighting against colonialism for hundreds, if not a 1000+ years.