The search for the suspects
My sister Tesalia lives in Cambridge, Massachussetts, with her husband. They live but a few blocks away from where the shooting and killing of the MIT cop happened. Tesalia and I have lived apart for the past eight years, but it was only last Thursday I truly felt the distance, as the biological imperative to protect her overcame me.
For almost four years I have kept track of the behavior of violence in Mexico, I have listened to shootouts, drove by crime scenes, I even was in the middle of a riot last December… I have listened to dozens of testimonies of violence and nothing had prepared me to face the impotence –and I must admit, a bit of a feeling of absurdity- of wanting to be there for my 27-year-old sister and being able to do so little.
U.S. media and authorities are framing the Boston Marathon bombings very coherently, and will definitely milk the situation for the sake of providing a coverage that appeals to the well construed storyline of good and evil that surfaces every time there is a threat to national security. Racial profiling, finding the enemy outside ‘one’s home’ will definitely take heed over a more detailed explanation of how a couple of university kids wreaked havoc in one of the nation’s most prominent sports events in one of its safest cities (Boston itself is very safe, although many of its towns are known for inner city gang violence).
This was a very violent week in Mexico, as well, alas the media was slow to build a narrative around the assassination of a journalist, an attack on one of the country’s most important newspapers, and the intimidations to a reporter of Proceso. Today (Friday the 19) we woke up to the news of Article 19 in Mexico also receiving death threats.
What is going on in México remains in a haze, yet we have a detailed account -albeit much speculation- of what is going on in Boston. When I spoke to Norman, my brother-in-law, I told him to trust the police and the FBI, that they would protect them. That was one of the few certainties I thought I could transmit to him, that a situation like this could still be countered by the weight of a police officer’s sense of duty in the U.S.
Nevertheless, though I felt I understood and trusted the security proceedings, I couldn’t extricate myself from the worry of knowing that since they were chasing the suspects of the bombings, there was a risk of another attack. Moreover, that the city would face the aftermath of trauma. Who knows what a couple of sick youngsters wanted, or who and how they wanted to hurt.
What prompted them to express themselves like that?
The Tsarnaev Brothers
The suspects appeared to be ‘well-adapted’ to their environment, even though much speculation came due to their recent interest in their Chechnyan origin. The Chechens have constructed an identity based on resistance. While this is not necessarily an indicator of a maladaptation, it could point out to a deeper dissatisfaction in the siblings who hail from Daguestan.
It is irresponsible to make assumptions, true. Nevertheless, understanding comes slow, and the urge for answers prompts us to entertain certain scenarios in our minds, even if the evidence remains at large and most theories are inconclusive.
Undeniably there is a negative balance to the preservation of human dignity and human rights after the detention of the younger brother, for the old practice of racial profiling took a toll not only to revive the stigma of Soviet terrorism. The reputation of citizen of Saudi ancestry was seriously damaged when he was considered to be a suspect.
Much of what will happen when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is judged will amount to a series of human rights abuses from the United States government, and a bad record for that grey area of the law that has only become greyer after 9/11. United States appears to be at war with the whole world, has not really clarified it, and yet we are supposed to know.
It does not seem too far off to impute the crime to hate –because the emotion is constructed on the fantasy of eliminating someone, or something, from our horizon- and it seems reasonable to attribute the hate to the incarnation of a cultural grudge. But this is nothing new.
Immigrants have it hard, all over the world. They, to begin with, leave something dear, their homeland. The United States government has maybe even earned much of that hate, if we examine the wreckage of many countries where it has intervened and subsequently branded their cultures, such as Iraq, El Salvador, Honduras, and many more. Paradoxically, many migrants are able to build a home away from home in countries like the U.S.
Migrants know that race, background, accent, and fun bits, as much as one would like them to flow inherently and invisibly, do matter. They are meaningful to us, though we may not always be aware, and can be noticed from the outside. What is unfair is to have them be judged as strange and negative simply because they do not conform to a cultural ideal, and this is a tension that does not automatically go away with the creation of a functional migrant community.
We can blend in, or stick out, even feel freer than in our homeland, or feel trapped in a hostile cultural environment. These are all possibilities, and are the sort of nitpicky thing that wear one out, in time. This is also not new.
The Tsarnaev brothers could have very well wanted or needed a connection with their past, and as many disenchanted young men they could have found it in extremist religiosity.
