What is it About Beto?

Jose Z. Garcia

The most popular politician in Doña Ana County this year is not Xochi, or Michelle, or even Howie.  It is Beto.  Beto lives 45 miles from here, and is well known in our media market, so this is understandable.  But Beto is hot everywhere.  He is talked about as a presidential candidate.  Thousands have sent him donations, and hundreds more are making phone calls to Texas. Six months ago no one even knew his name.  What gives?

More than any politician in the United States Beto has come to embody the real US-Mexico border, tacos, sicarios, maquilas, tequilas, trade and commerce,Tigres del Norte, Border Patrol, the Wall, and All the fascinating things the real border is.  He offers a powerful contrast to the fake border of Donald Trump, a void teeming with non-white rapists, MS-13, job-stealing immigrants, a gateway from hell to the America of our fictional, all-white, "city on the hill" imagination.  Nor does Beto sound like the fake border of the Liberal imagination, where un-bordering the gates magically leads to dynamic "diversity," unleashes global prosperity for all, and leads us to a happy, prosperous world beyond the outdated nation-state.

Beto is the real border, warts and all.  He does business deals with maquila owners in Juárez; his family helped create the dynamic city that 'El Paso has become.  He knows who is laundering money for whom, which officials are corrupt on either side, and how to steer clear of the trouble you can get into if you don't know who you are dealing with.  Ok, but why is this such powerful stuff at the national level?

For three decades two visions of the border have competed in the national imagination.  One is the NAFTA border: Mexico is allowed into the hallways of American corporate power because she supplies cheap labor, we the technology.  Liberal America, uncomfortable with Republican-sounding trade deals, latched onto the cultural implications of NAFTA by celebrating the idea that borders are outdated.  Poets waxed about "hybrid" cultures forming at the US-Mexico border.  Transgenderism was seen a cool form of border crossing. Sin Fronteras became a popular slogan in fashion design, music, and academia.  Politically, this vision is associated with Bill Clinton, who sold it to Congress. All along there was a lot of pure hype in the sales pitch. Plenty of losers emerged as well as winners as corporate power tested the waters of NAFTA.  Clinton was not known as "slick Willie" for nothing. 

The second vision catered to the losers.  It's not just laptops and Corona beer crossing the border.  There is cocaine and heroin.  Trade with Mexico decimated the furniture industry and thousands of good jobs in the US South.  Mexican and Central American street gangs have taken over parts of inner cities.  While Congress and the federal government winked, illegal migration kept wages low in the hotel, restaurants, meat packing and other low-paying jobs.  And as Spanish spread throughout the country, so did resentment.  NAFTA we don't hafta.  Politically, this vision of the border found a champion in Donald Trump.  He made the 2016 race (against none other than Bill Clinton's adorable wife) largely a contest between the two visions. By hook and by crook, and a little help from Vlady, the second vision triumphed, and Trump has been shoving this version down our throats ever since.

While there is a grain of truth in each vision, both are fictional. Implementing NAFTA mindlessly was a sin; demonizing the most vulnerable of those who rode that wave is even worse.  The world is complicated.  Tilting at Imaginary windmills does not change this complexity.  Beto asks us to pop the bubble of emotionally satisfying fables, talk to ourselves honestly, and roll up our sleeves and get to work.  That millions of Americans have been moved by him is a tribute not only to his charismatic personality, but also to the deep need we feel to move beyond Lyin Ted, Slick Willie, and Liar in Chief.  Millions of Americans have begun to wonder if Beto might just be the one.

I don't know how long Beto's star will ride high, but right now, a day before elections, I cross my fingers, hoping he will win.