KBRW interview brings border immigration to North Slope listeners

EARL FINKLER

April 25, 2008 at 10:21AM AKST

For The Arctic Sounder

In the past 10 years as morning host on KBRW, I’ve been doing 10-minute live interviews with folks from Barrow, the North Slope, the rest of Alaska and the Lower 48.

I also interviewed interesting people overseas, including some in England, Germany and Singapore.

No matter where the out-of-town guests are from, they almost often have experiences and insights of interest to our listeners.

One interview early in April brought that point home. It was with Emilie Vardaman of Naco, Ariz., a small town of some 750 people on the border of Arizona and Mexico.

Vardaman teaches at the community college in nearby Douglas, Ariz., and also volunteers on public radio station KBRP in Bisbee for a weekly show titled "On the Borderlands."

The morning I interviewed her by phone, she was out in her yard pulling weeds and listening to the birds, whose songs in the warm sunlight came through to Arctic Alaska listeners with temperatures around 10 below zero.

When asked about life on the border, she said some folks in her area feel closer to the rural areas of Mexico than they do toward rapidly growing urban areas to the north, such as Phoenix.

I sensed the kind of separation folks on the North Slope of Alaska sometimes feel with regard to the big city of Anchorage.

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had built a large fence along this section of the border," Vardaman said.

"Often that fence goes right through some residents’ yards," she added.

"As soon as the fence was built, folks were putting up ladders. And I was worried about animal mothers separated from their young by the fence. What happens then?" she said.

I asked her how people on the Mexican side of the border felt about such a fence and she said they often say, "Why does your country hate us so much?"

Vardaman said most of those illegally crossing the border in her area are just looking for some work, work that U.S. residents often do not want to do.

Despite the thousands of miles between Naco and Alaska’s North Slope, some local KBRW listeners said they were touched by feedback from a rural area along the Mexico-Arizona border.

Jay St. Vincent teaches at Ilisagvik College in Barrow but has also lived in Northern Arizona.

"Having lived in Arizona I was so interested to hear her (Vardaman) talk about the fence’s impact on the animals needing migration freedom as well as the impact on the people involved," St. Vincent said.

"The wall seems so foreign to American values to me," she said.

Attorney Eric Lindstrom and his family recently moved from Texas to Barrow, where he took a job with the North Slope Borough Law Department. He said in Texas he represented some illegal aliens who happened to get caught and that he found the interview to be very poignant.

"This lady lives on the border and clearly considers the people there, on both sides of that artificial line that marks national boundaries, to be her neighbors and friends. I also liked her description of the birds, which could be heard chirping away," Lindstrom said.

Vardaman said she and other interested folks helped establish a new Migrant Resource Center in Naco, Sonora in Mexico, which provides some basics, including decent footwear, basic clothing and even just a cool drink of water to Mexicans who have been turned back at the border.

Even on the coldest early mornings in Barrow, it is warming to hear about average rural folks, on both sides of the U.S, border with Mexico who reach out and try to related to each other as human beings – even in the shadow of a large, imposing border fence.

Barrow’s Earl Finkler is the morning host on KBRW.

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