99% Invisible - 294- Border Wall

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

When current President Donald Trump took office, he promised to build an “an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall." The first part of this episode by Radio Diaries tells two stories of what happens when, instead of people crossing the border, the border crosses the people. Then, in part two of the show, Avery Trufelman takes a closer look at eight current designs that have been turned into prototypes near the border in California. Border Wall Learn more about Radio Diaries

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. You're going to build a wall. It's going to be a real wall. See that ceiling up there? I mean, this is a wall that if you get up there, you're not coming down very easily. True. True. One week into his presidency, Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Trump says it will be, quote, an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful southern border wall. But campaign slogans are easy. Reality is harder. That's Joe Richmond from Radio Diaries, and on this episode with the help of Radio Diaries,

we're going to tell a few stories about the physical border on the southern edge of the United States. And what happens when instead of people crossing the border, the border crosses the people. Joe Richmond will take it from here. In 2006, President Bush signed a law to begin building an 18-foot high fence, along a few key parts of the US-Mexico border. The project went by different names, Operation Gatekeeper in California, Operation Safeguard in Arizona, and in Texas they called it Operation Hold The Line.

Today that fence looks like a somewhat random dotted line, covers about a third of the entire border. Now the border fence has always been controversial, but it's based on a very human impulse, to have an actual physical barrier that marks the imaginary one on the map. It's a simple idea, and like most things, it turned out to not be so simple. Hello. Hello, is this Pamela Taylor?

It is. So, can you tell me where you are right now? I'm in my living room. I'm looking out the window. I see my front yard and beyond that is the fence. It is huge. Iron about 20 feet tall. The fence was put in there by Homeland Security.

Pamela Taylor is 86 years old. You may have noticed she has a slight British accent, but she's an American citizen. After World War II, she married an American and they moved to a small brick house outside of Brownsville, Texas. That's the house she's in right now, and she's been there for more than 60 years. Now that house is technically in the US, but for the past six years, it's been on the wrong side of the fence. We're on the Mexican side.

The fence is in front of my home. So let me just go over this. For many people thinking about the border fence, they just assume it's on the border. No, it's not true. The Rio Grande River is the legal border between the U.S. and Mexico. But the border fence doesn't follow all the natural contours at that river. If they followed the river, it would be a winding fence, whereas now it is a straight fence, and therefore they did not need to install that much fence. And in the beginning, we were told this fence was going to go right through my living room.

Luckily they ended up building it about a mile north. Today Taylor has about a half dozen neighbors in the exact same situation as her. Down the road there's also a farm and a golf course all on the Mexican side of the fence. We've gotten used to it now. We just can't go on and be miserable about it. So how would you describe where you are living? Well, actually, it's a no man's land. And I firmly believe that I shouldn't be paying taxes.

A no man's land between two countries. That's what our next story is about. The United States is not as big today as it was at this time yesterday. President Johnson and President Diaz Ordas of Mexico made it the border today and ended an old dispute. The Rio Grande River has been the border between the U.S US and Mexico, ever since Texas became a state. The problem is, rivers can move, and that's exactly what happened in 1864. Tarental rains caused the river to jump its banks and go south. All of a sudden, the border was in a different place.

What that meant is that Texas had gained a square mile of land. It was called the Chamezal, named for the scrubby desert plant that grew there. The Chamezal was a thorn in the side of US-Mexico relations for a century, and then finally 50 years ago, the US gave the land back to Mexico. But by that time, thousands of people had moved to the Chamezal

and made it their home. And that is where this story begins. My name is Mario Heni Atrillo. I grew up in the Chamisal area during the 50s and 60s. I lived one street away from the river, which was the division between the two countries. The river was just more like a highway that you had to cross to get to where you needed to be.

There was a baseball team on the Mexican side, and then there was a team on the El Paso side and they would just signol each other through whistles and then they would cross. It was just life, life with a river between us. This is an interview as part of the Chamisal oral history project. So Mr. Inohosa, could I ask you to describe the neighborhood? Yes, they were a lot of tenements and a lot of small, I hate to say, checks, but that's what they were. They didn't have any electricity nor running water.

But you build one room and then you build another room and then you build another room, one room after the others, they become, I guess, better off. My name is Victor Guzman Garcia. Garcia Clan goes back to about 386 years in this area. A lot of Mexicans from the interior thought that Chame-Zal, which was basically just a square mile of land, they thought it was the largest California, and that it probably had oil and gold.

So every time there was an issue between two countries, Mexico would of course bring up the Chamisad. My name is Paul Kramer, and I'm an historian, advanced about university, researching the history of the Chamisad. In Mexico, the Chamisad represented illegally occupied territory but in the United States very few Americans had even heard of it and then in the 1960s

that all changed in a really unexpected way. And this is NBC News presenting today a new special crisis in Cuba. This government has promised as maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba within the past. With Cuban missile crisis, and specifically the fact that Mexico does not cut off its ties to Castro, the Kennedy administration becomes very concerned that Mexico could be vulnerable in the Cold War. Suddenly there's a real willingness to remedy the Chamezal dispute, to use it as a kind of bargaining chip.

And so the big question is, the residents of this tiny patch of land, what's going to happen to them? This is a letter from the International Boundary and Water Commission to Mr. Luis Rivera. Dear sir, we advise that the appraisal of your property would be undertaken as soon as practical preparatory to acquisition by the federal government. It's authorized by the government. As kids or kids, we were eavesdropping

and we heard there was going to be removal. We remember our fathers dumping around the kitchen, saying, but let's get no up wet and know they can't. We were Mexican by heritage, but we understood that we were American by nationality. People were given a choice of going back to Mexico, and only one man that we know of actually accepted to go back. Everybody else said, no, but we all had to be out by

October 1964. This is an interview with W.E. Wood, former government real estate appraiser during the Chame-Sah settlement. How did most of the people feel about leaving their homes? It was mixed. There's one case that I can recall This lady had a very nice home better than the rest of them in the neighborhood And she was not gonna let us in and she couldn't speak English Do you speak Spanish? Yes enough to get by and She told me that she was not going to give her house to those goddamn Mexicans in Mexico.

And that they can go to hell. And I'm going to keep my house. And I will get my guns out. And I will fight. And the day when it came to move, the United States marshals picked her up bodily and put her in a car and put her furniture and storage. My name is Angie Nunez.

It was a very big disappointment because they did not pay for the house. They paid us for the land. My father had just built four extra rooms in our house. We had central heating. He even had the the bricks made special Adolvi with the hay because the house was going to be that much thicker, that much warmer, that much whatever. And we had to leave all that. One by one the family started moving out.

And what was left behind were empty shells of homes and the windows were all boarded up and then yellow ribbon was placed on them so that we couldn't even go into the backyards. So it looked like a crime scene with this yellow tape all over until the only family left was ours. Hours historically was the last one. And I remember my dad said, don't look back. You are forbidden from looking back. And enthusiastic welcome at the U.S. Mexican border for President Johnson and Gustavo Diaz

Oda, arriving together to settle a century-old border dispute. I remember thousands and thousands of people on top of the bridge and I could see Johnson, I could see him sitting at the table and T.S. or Das. Mr. President of the United States of America, distinguished Mr. Johnson. Pretty much the whole of the White House with congressmen and senators and everybody was here. I mean this was a big thing. An unpredictable river has been converted into a controlled source of water for Mexicans and Americans alike. By December 1968, Mexico and the United States jointly sponsor the digging of a cement line channel that will make the river go where the authorities wanted to go in terms of maintaining

the boundary that they want. After speeches, the two men walked over to press the buttons that would detonate a retaining wall about a mile away and send the water down its new channel. At the appointed time, the two presidents approached this black box that's been set up on the bridge, which has these two red buttons, and they're supposed to hit the buttons and detonate these explosives to release the mighty Rio Grande into its new channel. In fact, there's just a puff of smoke, nothing happens. And so very quickly, technicians bulldoze the dam

and release the river completing the ceremony. It's taken a hundred years, but it's finally done. Next goal has its piece of scruff land back, though perhaps it hasn't decided what to do with it. And the river is once again the International Boundary. It costs $40 million, but it's very tidy this way. Jack Berkins NBC News, Nelfazzo. Well, I'll show you. The river is now encased and cement. That poor thing. encased and cement. That poor thing hits about five feet across. It looks like a muddy creek where we used to go. It was wide. Sometimes it had quite a bit of

water and that would ripple across. There's only so much control a man can do on a river. Sooner or later, I personally think that river is going to do what Mother Nature has taught it to do, to move. Well, I woke up this morning, to the door I did go. I found that I was living in old Mexico. I got the chummy's all blue. Tips and blue as I can be, because somebody came and took my house away from me.

Well, I was born in American El Paso, and now I'm a citizen of all Mexico. I got the Chameisole. The song you're hearing right now is called The Chameisole Blues, written and recorded by Bob Burns and the Teak Woods in 1963. A year before, the Chameisole was handed back to Mexico. This story was produced by radio diaries that's Joe Richmond, Nelly Gillis, Sarah Kate Kramer, Ben Shapiro, and Deborah George, with help from historian Paul Kramer. I love you.

Radio Diaries is one of the founding members of Radio Topia and one of the true gems of public radio. I implore you to subscribe to their podcast. It's really for your own good. They produce many historical documentaries, but they specialize in giving recorders to ordinary people with extraordinary stories and turning their audio diaries into unforgettable radio. They basically won every award in journalism, and when we started Reotopia, I was so honored that they wanted to work with us. So, Radio Diaries is not part of your podcast diet. You are missing out.

Find them at radiodiaries.org or at radiotopia.fm. At the tail end of 2017, our own Avery Truffman took a trip to the border herself to look at the architecture of the border wall and the new border wall prototypes. We'll talk to her about what she found right after this. Trump took office in March of 2017. US Customs and Border Protection put out a request for proposals asking private companies for designs of a wall that would divide Mexico and the United States. There were two different requests for proposals or RFPs. One RIP was a wall design made of concrete.

The other was for a design made of quote unquote, other materials. They were to be between 18 and 30 feet tall. From the submissions they received customs and border protection selected eight and turned them into prototypes. Last October, our own Avery Trouffman went down to see what they looked like. We're not live, right? Nobody's live here, okay? I found myself in a crowd of reporters from Reuters and the Guardian and Univision and Fox and we had all been given hardhats and neon yellow vests and we all piled into an air-conditioned van when we were brought out to a

construction site. Camera men unpacked and hoisted their video cameras like great mechanical carcasses, anchors applied fresh makeup and did warm-ups and then we swarmed around Roy Vrial, all of us jostling to get our microphones in his face. First name is Roy, R-O-Y, last name Vrial. V-I-L-L-A-R-E-A-L. Vrial was the acting Chief Patrol agent for the U.S. Border Patrol and the San Diego sector. He was showing us these eight prototypes for a new border wall between the United States and Mexico. The eight prototypes are near completion.

Seven of the eight have been completed, and the eighth one should be completed by the end of the week. These eight sample rectangles of border wall are massive, each is 30 feet tall. It's striking in person. If they were actually formed into one continuous wall, they'd block off the mountains in the distance. By now, you've probably seen pictures of these prototypes.

For our made of concrete, for our made of other materials, one is bright blue, one has molding on the side to make the concrete look like cobblestone, half of them have rounded tops to make it harder to grip. And the determination of the ultimate design is based on the testing and evaluation. We have three specific requirements, which are looking at the subterranean,

the ability to dig underneath the prototypes, the penetrability, the aspect of being able to breach or in some way degrade the prototype and scalability. The setup of the eight different prototypes certainly looked like a design competition. And so I asked Vierrial, will there be a winner here? Will there be a winner in the Miss? Well, ultimately the winner is the US government.

It is going to be us in that this is going to enhance our border security. Nicely played. Conceptually, what we may have is we could have a singular design that is going to be utilized in some segment along the border, or we may have a combination of the designs paired together and then applied to different areas along the border. It's not exactly clear what will happen with the prototypes. Customs and border protection never specified if they were intended for the entire border or parts of the border, or to fortify existing walls. Because, of course, the part that Trump didn't mention in his

campaign is that over one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border is already covered by a wall or a barrier of some kind. So now we are here in this administration which ran on the platform that said, I'm going to build a wall and everybody claps and says, yeah, finally, someone's come to build a wall. There's already 650 miles of wall in place. This is Ronald Raell, Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley, an author of the book, Borderwall as Architecture. In his book, he writes about the long history of the border wall. It has a long life, and it's been around for some time.

It's evolved from stone carons. These are just stones placed along the border to say where the border was, because it's just a frontier. Originally, where else is, no one knew where that borderline actually was. An engineer's from both Mexico and the United States went to this kind of no man's land frontier zone after 1848, just to figure out where to place these demarcation stones. Piles of stones were put up in later monuments. Fenses were constructed.

Mostly, the fences were to keep cattle out because they were ranches on both sides. But eventually, some of those fences became more aggressive, especially between cities, particularly between Senni, Siedro and Tijuana. In 1990, the Army Corps of Engineers came to that Tijuana border. They brought over 40,000 carbon steel corrugated planks, each plank 12 feet long and a quarter inch thick. These had been made for the Vietnam War as portable landing mats for helicopters. And these helicopter landing mats were turned

up on their sides into the first official border wall. More and more landing mats were added, and today there are over 60 miles of this landing mat wall. And then in other parts of the border, other kinds of walls and fences were built, of different materials, all varying based on the topography. There's pedestrian fences that allow for visibility on both sides, vehicular fences that are meant for cars not to cross. In his book, Real list, over a dozen types of border wall. One that's very expensive is called the floating fence, and this is here in the Algo Donets

dunes in California. The floating fence snakes over huge mountainous dunes and has these mechanical buttresses that keep it from sinking into the sand. So it's designed to be lifted and placed back on the dunes. Otherwise, if you just let it go, it just sinks into the dunes. It's amazing. The border wall is already a building project with significant weight behind it. It's unfettered by laws that regular building projects have to abide by. And that's particularly because of the Secure Fence Act, which passed in 2006 back when George W. Bush was president.

The Secure Fence Act of 2006 was created so that it could you serve any other law that existed in the United States. So any environmental protection laws, this is more important. Any Native American heritage acts, this is more important. Any wildlife act, the Skier Fence act is more important than any of those.

And so the wall can be constructed un-inhibited. Which brings us back to those new prototypes that are being considered. And the press junket I went to back in October. The border is very dynamic. It's fluid, it's dynamic. There's crime of some form happening every day here. The prototypes will help influence the future development of our border infrastructure system.

When their request for proposals went out, architects were like, what do we do? A number of architecture firms submitted some designs for border walls and other architects submitted blank sheets of paper to waste judges' time. But ultimately, customs and border protection didn't choose any architects at all. These prototypes, like the vast, vast majority of the built environment, bridges, tunnels, towers, houses, airports, luxury apartments, and prisons were mostly made by general contractors. These giant construction firms are very practical.

They safely erect huge structures on time and on budget. Their goal is to appease the client, which in this case is the US government. The eight prototypes were manufactured by six different companies. Would you mind walking us through who these companies are? I'm going to defer that to Mr. DeSale because I don't know them. Ralph DeSale is the spokesperson for Border Patrol and he wasn't quite familiar with the construction companies either. The best he could do was read them off a list.

ELTA North-A-Hess, Cadel, Cadlle, Sterling, KWR, Fisher, Sand. I mean, I'm telling you that. To be fair at the time, I didn't know these companies either. I had never heard of them before, but I've likely been in one of their structures somewhere in one of their tunnels or airports or office buildings. The companies that made these walls are WG8s and Sons from Mississippi, Elta, North America, an Israeli company based in Maryland,

Cadillac Construction in Alabama, Texas Sterling Construction out of Houston, KWR Construction from Arizona, and Fisher Sand and Gravel from Arizona. Now, because of the wall prototypes, people know these companies, and they're talking about their relationships to them. Weeks after I returned from the border, I went to an Oakland City Council meeting, where they were considering passing an ordinance to forbid contracting with any of the companies bidding on the border wall. for supporting our resolution on the border wall to make sure that none of our tax dollars are spent

being invested with any contract or any business that is building this divisive wall that will do nothing to make us safer. Similar measures have also been proposed in other municipalities around the country, including New York City and LA, and they've been floated on the state level in Arizona, California, Illinois, New York,

Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. This is a prohibition on the state level in Arizona, California, Illinois, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. This is a prohibition on the city of Oakland doing business with contractors who build the Trump border wall. And the city of Oakland should have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. But there are also critics of these kinds of ordinances. Like Sheree Smith, a representative from Associated General Contractors, or AGC, who stood up at that Oakland City Council meeting and testified on behalf of the Contractors Freedom of Choice.

AGC opposes any policy or regulation that prohibits a contractor from bidding a construction project because contractors should be able to choose which projects they wish to bid on without fear of reprisal or discrimination. But the ordinance passed. And now companies entering contracts with the City of Oakland, say to build a tunnel or a condo complex, will be required to declare that they are not a part of border wall construction and do not plan to be. And this goes beyond those companies already involved in the prototypes, because new border

construction is happening separately from those eight prototypes on the San Diego, Tijuana border. When I've talked to customs and border protection people, their thinking is that, you know, he's the president. This is what he wants. So we're going to, we're going to follow his orders. So they're going through the motions. They're building these prototypes.

But when it comes down to it, that's not gonna work. That's Melissa Del Bosque, a reporter from the Texas Observer. And according to an article she published last year, there are already plans and motion for the first new section of the border wall, which will run through a wildlife refuge in South Texas. It will be built by Michael Baker International, a construction firm who was not involved

in the prototypes at all. The proposed design will be a levy wall, which is not among the designs and the prototypes. In terms of the prototypes, what should we make of them? I don't know, I think they're going to sit there like stone hinge probably. You just view them as a symbol? Yeah, yeah, totally. I don't think they mean much other than fulfilling his campaign promise. So whether or not these particular prototypes on display will ever actually be built,

there will be more walls. I imagine what will happen is what has been happening for decades, and it's not special to the Trump administration at all, which is that some walls are gonna be constructed, because this has been happening through many presidencies, Republican and Democrat alike. Professor Raul Rael again. And so I imagine that's what's gonna happen. There's gonna be some walls built.

Rael has been studying the various border walls for years, and he's come to believe they're ineffective and inhumane. So, when he first saw the pictures of Trump's prototypes, he thought of the famous saying, show me a 20-foot wall and I'll show you a 21-foot ladder. And so Rayal got to work on a simple act of protest using his skills as an architect. Based on the images of the wall prototypes, he drew up some designs for ladders. 99% of visible was produced this week by Avery Trouffleman and Radio Diaries. Our composer is Sean Riel, senior editor Delaney Hall, digital director Kurt Colstead, Senior Producer, Katie Mingle.

The rest of the team is Emmith Fitzgerald, Shree Fusef, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Dexter Walcott, Ashton Ham, Patrick McAndreux, James Hurd, Peggy Deamer, and the rest of the Architecture Lobby, a group of concerned architects doing work around the border wall. Find them at architecture-lobby.org. We are a project of 91.7K, a.l.w. in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California. We're one of the founders of Radio Topia from PRX, a collective of the best most innovative shows

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