Word of the Year: Migration

The Long Walk, by C Ortiz. Bosque Redondo Memorial, Fort Sumner, New Mexico

 

So, yes, it came to me that I do have a word for this year: Migration. 

There is a massive human migration on our planet today. 

Millions of women, men, and children are leaving their homes, their families, their friends and neighbors, their rose gardens, their languages, their neighborhood sounds and smells, their food, their favorite shops, their local houses of worship - all that they know, moving toward a future they hope is worthy of this outrageous price they pay. Knowing, too, that the people at the endpoint of their journeys may greet them, not with welcoming arms, but stony resentment. 

Columbus - Puerto Palomas port of entry, New Mexico. April 2013. Credit: Mzuriana.

Some migration is forced, in the sense that oppressors intentionally push people out, escorting them out, even, with arms or threat of arms. 

• The Alhambra Decree of 1492, which expelled all Jews from Spain unless they denounced their faith, for example. 
• The 18th century Acadian Expulsion in Canada, for example. 
• The 19th century forced removal of American indigenous to reservations, for example. 
• The Long Walk, for example. 
• The 1940s concentration camps, mostly but not exclusively for Jewish people, in 15+ European countries, for example. 
• The 1940s concentration camps ("relocation centers") in the United States for Japanese-Americans, for example. 
• The "Negro Removal" in St. Louis in the 1950s (and since), for example. 
• The Israeli threats to Gaza residents to abandon their homes or suffer the consequences for imminent Israeli military attacks, for example. 
• Rwanda. Burundi. Bosnia. Brazil. Guatemala. The list seems endless. 

Since mass migration is, if one looks at history, inevitable, it would seem wise if nations through which the tides of humans passed: 

• Recognized such movement as an inevitability - as inevitable as the seasons that come and go - and did not treat each migration as a crime to be quashed or a one-off disaster that ends in forgetfulness until the next one-off disaster that ends in forgetfulness until the next one-off disaster ... 
• Built flexible systems that expand and contract as the forces ebb and flow, like the rise and fall and rise of seasonal floods, to work with the migration instead of constructing river channels that may control a stream in typical seasons, albeit with constant vigilance for cracks in the walls, but which will collapse like a child's little pile of stones when the inevitable 50-year or 100-year or 300-year flood comes. 
• Accepted that the mighty weight of human desperation to rescue ourselves and our children from the drowning waters rushing behind us will break through walls of wire, steel, stone, concrete; of desert heat, and killing thirst.

There is migration within our country today, a domestic demographic rearrangement as the pandemic and lack of affordable housing and "trauma tax" pushes or pulls Americans away or toward new home bases. 

The pandemic and the resulting bloom of remote work has expanded the choices of where to live, possibly breathing fresh life into small cities and towns in areas that are/were moribund as a consequence of decades-long brain drain to larger urban areas.

There is migration occurring in my internal map, as well. Will I redefine rootlessness for myself? Or en-root myself again?

 This is the year of migration, both literal and figurative. Both macro and micro.

La Virgen of El Paso and Juarez, mural in Segundo Barrio. October 2016. Photo credit: Mzuriana.