The Tortilla Curtain: Nightmares about Possible Worlds

A lot of alternative-future fiction is nightmares about what could happen if we project current trends forward into the future. We could also call these alternative-fiction nightmares “prophecies,” because that is what Old Testament prophecies were: they were not predictions about what would actually happen, but speculations about what might happen if current (to the prophets, sinful) conditions continued.

Rolando J. Diaz wrote a collection of stories in 2007 called Tales of the Tortilla Curtain. In his stories, set in the middle of the 21^st century, the Tortilla Curtain was an actual very high wall that ran along the entire border of Mexico and the United States, like an unhealable wound. It had every imaginable type of technological gadget for detecting anyone trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico, and then eliminating them. This would include land mines and automatic machine guns that would pulverize anyone crossing the border without prior authorization. Most of the border enforcement was coordinated by Dusty, the name by which the Data Systems Tracker was known. It was an artificial intelligence that pretended to be friendly. (Diaz wrote before AI became an everyday term.)

 

 

In story after story, the reader starts to get inured to clouds of blood and piles of torn, rotting corpses. This was a nightmare reification of the animosity that conservative Americans felt, then as now, toward immigrants from Mexico, originally walled wetbacks because they would swim the Rio Grande. American seldom felt animosity against the equally illegal, though extremely rare, frostbacks from Canada. Rolando’s stories pose the question, just how far would we go to lash out against people we with would not come to America? Would we be willing to kill them and to leave their bodies for work crews to shovel into trash trucks? To (if we were Hispanic Americans) shoot our own relatives?

The immediate cause of Rolando’s nightmare was the reaction of white Americans against Arabic people after nine-eleven, as we now call it. If white Americans could so passionately hate Arabs, then might they also hate Mexicans?

Note that Rolando wrote and published these stories not only before the first Trump administration but before the first Obama administration. Rolando could not have imagined (or maybe he did, but could not have actually foreseen) that Trump would campaign on the promise of actually building such a wall—thousands of miles and billions of cubic feet of concrete, with advanced technology. Such a project was always impossible and unaffordable, and once Trump got what he wanted—election—he conveniently forgot his promise. It became a metaphorical wall, at most consisting of extra electronic surveillance along existing fences.

And now, during Trump II, the reality may be less violent than Diaz described in his nightmare—not as many piles of dismembered body parts—but is more pervasive. The anti-immigrant hatred is not just along the border. It extends throughout the country, even most infamously in Minnesota, where ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in case any of you do not know) considers detaining even legal immigrants, and shooting and killing even white American citizens, to be an acceptable cost of their war against illegal immigrants. The federal government, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, pays ICE agents very well, gives them lots of benefits, allows them to wear face masks to hide their identity, and then lets them do whatever they want (though pretending to disapprove), up through and including killing people. Diaz’s wall was bleeding violence along the Mexican border; the real Trump wall cuts right through the heart of America.

It is possible that part of Trump’s Wall includes hostility toward other countries, not just our possible enemies, but also our allies. It seems to be part of his policy to make wild threats (We will take over Greenland! We will annex Canada!) against our friends. He backs off from them, but our allies have not forgotten. European leaders are still meeting to make preparation for a possible American takeover of Greenland, for example. This week, Marco Rubio is coming to France to discuss European support for the Iran War, which America started without even consulting our European allies. At the time of this writing, I do not know what might come from these meetings. It would be justified if the European leaders told Rubio, you started this war, you finish it, if you can.

In one of Diaz’s stories, an American citizen of Mexican origin was detained because he did not carry his passport with him when he happened to be arrested by federal agents. This raises an important question: do all Americans need to carry proof of citizenship (a driver’s license won’t qualify) at all times? Or, maybe, only if you have dark skin? (Which, incidentally, Diaz does not have.) This is starting to sound like the old Soviet Union, Comrade Trump.

Throughout Rolando’s book I found empathy. I would like to add one real story to Rolando’s fictional ones: the story of the little girl Josseline Janiletha Quinteros, who died in the desert in 2008 while coming to America to look for her mother. Alas her photo is no longer available.

Reading Diaz’s collection of stories made me shiver because his 2007 nightmare has elements that feel frighteningly like today’s news. An Old Testament style prophecy.