On May 31, I went to the U.S.-Mexico border in Lochiel, Arizona, for a cross-border celebration called the Binational Border Happening. When I arrived, in the shade of two immense cottonwood trees split by a metal fence and vehicle barrier, there were musicians singing, there were people—including children—reciting poems, and others passing burritos from one side of the divide to the other. There were artistic bird cutouts on the ends of long sticks held by people on both sides of the line to create a murmuration of resistance. A large sign draped on the border barrier read “Re-Envision No More Division,” which described the event very well. At least for this day, a joyful subversion contrasted omnipresent fear and danger narratives that have become the most prevalent way to describe the border in 2025, especially in the national sphere.
The primary reason for the gathering was, however, because more wall was on the way. Reporting by the Tucson Sentinel in late April uncovered that the Donald Trump administration would be constructing almost 25 miles of border wall across this riparian area known as the San Rafael Valley. Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security waived several environmental laws to accelerate the process, so the new wall’s construction seems imminent. And on June 13, Customs and Border Protection awarded the Trump-connected company Fisher Sand & Gravel a $309 million contract for the job. At the gathering, I sought out one of its organizers, Kate Scott, the executive director of the Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center, and asked her, “What’s going on here?”
Kate: OK, you’re at the scene of a happening in Lochiel, Arizona, a beautiful historic town that will no longer be a beautiful historic town when the 30-foot border wall comes through.
As you can see, here are the beautiful, majestic cottonwoods that are at least 100 years old, towering over us. And the beginning of the Santa Cruz River is another two and a half miles up the road, to the west of us. And so a few of us got talking together. Zach Palma [of the Sky Island Alliance] called me up and said, “Kate, I have this idea. We should celebrate the land before the wall comes. What do you think?”
Then we started talking, and we talked to a few more people and formed a team. And we said, “Let’s do it.” Because we wanted to show the United States that we’re standing up for you all too: to protect the land, the water, the wildlife, the cultural beauty, the people.
The border is ripping through the land. It’s a made-up boundary. It was something carved out by people. There were many questions about why they built it this way. Why don’t you go with the terrain? Why don’t you understand the land first? Or that we don’t have to have this borderline at all. Or that no one wants it.
Do you know what the people on the Mexican side think about the border, the new wall construction?
The people from Santa Cruz [a town five miles to the south of where we stood] are very upset by this. But look at this [she points to the people sitting around tables across the border]. These are our neighbors. We are having such a good time here.
What we have here is celebratory activism. You show up. You share your joy and your love and your conviction and your compassion, and you keep it in your heart because no tyrannical regime can take that away from you. They want to divide us. They want to have us hate each other. And we don’t. At all.
What do you hope happens because of this?
When we got this going, I thought that maybe we’d get 20 or 30 people. And, I don’t know, maybe we have 50 or 75. And look at where we are. We are out in the middle of nowhere. But we are in the middle of the most beautiful part of southeastern Arizona, with the San Rafael Valley that runs for 27 miles west of us. And this area hasn’t been touched in years. It just has a Normandy barrier [a type of vehicle barrier], and … my heart … we just had to do it, we had to show up. I hope we can set the laws in motion to bring the wall down. It’s kind of like, if you’re witnessing it now, and you’re protesting it, and you showed up, you are going to keep showing up. This could be our staging area. We could slow the construction down. We could show people, show the world.
Would it be fair to say that not only is this a front against the wall but also that you are conceptualizing a new way to live?
Exactly. We did a happening last year called Jaguar Rising in Nogales, and I was doing a performance piece. In my piece I said, “I don’t accept this reality. This is not my reality.” So how do you go about creating a new reality? Well, you first get people together, and then in their own hearts and minds, they come up with a way of fighting it and creating something new. Everyone here will do it a different way. Some people will paint, some will dance, make art, music, poetry, plays.
So we create these events to show people that there is no “invasion.” There’s border militarization. That’s all there is. And all that money, those billions and billions that you see at the expos [referring to The Border Chronicle’s reporting on the Border Security Expo], they can completely wall us all in. They are walling us in. They are caging our minds, our hearts, our imaginations.
Yes, tell me more about that. How are they caging our minds, hearts, imagination?
The first time I saw the wall was in July 2020. I went up to it and started banging on it, and I was like, “Go away. You are killing me. You’re robbing me of that vista. You’re stealing that way forward for that mule deer.” All those horrible, horrible images about the animals. So they’re caging us with our hearts. They are compartmentalizing us all. They’re saying this is how it has to be. And I resist it. I resist it until the day I die.
I think of the bear down there who was pacing for three hours in that one particular spot. You know that something important had to be over there.
Can you say more about the bear?
The Sky Islands Alliance got the bear with all their wonderful cameras. He just paced for three hours in front of the border wall. It brought tears to my eyes. Every day I cry a little, then I get mad, and then my husband makes me a strong cup of coffee, and then I think, Now what can we do?
And I think, We can use joy as a strategy and use hope as a strategy, and that’s gritty. Like Russ McSpadden, I heard him giving a speech for saving the Santa Rita mountains, and he said, you know, “Hope isn’t weak. Hope is gritty.” And compassion is gritty too. So when they say, “Oh, they’re just down there spreading peace, hope, and love,” “Oh, aren’t they silly?” No. We are very serious. And those imaginative ideas can come out in all different kinds of ways, in all these different pathways. And so this [pointing to the happening around us] was all organic. This was all done, no email, LISTSERVs. This was all through our group networks, trusted networks, and so it works. You can get people together without all these social media things. So they haven’t caged our hearts. We are coming up with clever ideas.
A child named Elliot approaches us with a burrito. Burritos were being passed from one side of the border. I asked Elliot what he thought of the border.
Elliot: The fence that Trump put up sucks.
Kate (following Elliot’s lead): You know, we know it’s coming. But I hope we can slow it down a little bit. Maybe we can get people to realize that they don’t need it. I heard from a lot of people whose friends said they didn’t want to come. “Well, Kate, how do I get people to not be afraid, not stay at home?” People who say, “I don’t like to protest.” And I say, “Well, come to this. Meet people, rejuvenate your soul. Then you can get up tomorrow morning and feel like you’ve got this. You can do this.”
This is a protest. Witnessing is a protest. Maybe we’ll help the protesters feel a little better. And maybe you too, ’cause I know what you do, and it’s got to be hard for you, Todd.
Todd: No, this is great. I love coming to things like this. We get inundated by the negative spin all the time. At the same time we have to look for not only where the different angles for stories are, but also where the power is—the people power, that is—and you come to a place like this where you see people gathering on both sides, and there’s this unique, binational power to it.
Kate: Yes, the power. We are creating our own murmuration. Murmuration was behind everything in this happening. When you see our sticker, you’ll see birds on everything. That’s not random. Birds talk to me. I woke up one morning, and the word murmuration came to me. How does the word murmuration just come to you? Well, because we were planning this, and I thought, “Well, a murmuration is done by two types of birds, starlings and snow geese, and they do these incredible pictures.” Just incredible. You can look them up online.
But if you look up what it means technically, well, one bird sees another bird, and they follow, and this bird says, “I’m going to go this way.” And I think it’s to evade predators. So what do we got? We’ve got a predatorial government being forced upon us? So how do we do a murmuration? We show up. We are here. And we are there.
You can say there is a liberation element to murmuration as well, right? Especially with the birds and the freedom of movement and mobility?
It’s the creation of all these different shapes and ideas. And birds are messengers. So I feel like it gives us freedom, because I look up and see the birds and think, “Thank you. I’d like to be up there with you.” We are up there today. We are not caged in. We are not being caged today. Nor any day if we feel it in our hearts.
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