Chapter 111: The Borders We Dare to Cross

Only the rarest of journeys is transformative, of the sort that continues when we’ve stopped our strides, and that guides us thereafter like an imperative. Yet that is the sort of journey that a young anthropologist named Levi Vonk undertook, resulting in a book seven years in the making, Border Hacker.

Set on the migrant trail from Central America to the US, he portrays an extended odyssey through geographies, the brutality of policy and borders, and the best and, more often, worst humanity has to offer. At the heart of it all lies one of the essential themes words can tell: a story of love and brotherhood –between Vonk and a migrant named Axel, co-authors of this book– that crystalizes the open wounds of immigration today.

Here is what Levi shared with us about the genealogy of this work:

I was twenty-four and very green. I’d received a Fulbright grant and was conducting anthropological research on a secret pact between the US and Mexico called the Southern Border Program, in which the US pays Mexico millions of dollars a year to catch and deport as many Central American migrants as possible before they could reach the US and ask for asylum. I was working in migrant shelters in southern Mexico at the time, and it was common to see people who had been beaten by immigration, or who had walked the bottoms of their feet clean off in the jungle in order to avoid the new immigration patrols. Migrants were also being kidnapped and killed by gang and cartel members who were taking advantage of the chaos the Southern Border Program had caused. It almost felt like a war zone out there, but no one in the US media was reporting on any of it.

In the middle of all this, I was invited to march on a migrant caravan, and it was there that I met Axel. This was 2015 before almost anyone had heard about migrant caravans. It started off quite small and very disorganized, but it quickly gained momentum. The idea that hundreds of migrants could gather together and charge through immigration checkpoints felt scary and novel. I wanted to try to somehow communicate what I was seeing back to people in the US.

Then, amidst everything, Axel joined the caravan by chance. He’d grown up in New York City but had recently been deported to Guatemala. I can’t quite explain it, but I knew straight away that he was something different. He just had this mystique about him; the way he spoke, the way he acted, I’d never met anyone like him before. I needed to know more.

Many immigration books in the US often face a twofold translation issue. First is the straightforward problem of how to translate certain Spanish phrases into English. The second is cultural. It’s a very tricky task, for instance, to accurately portray the worldview of someone from a rural, indigenous village in Guatemala to a US audience. But with Axel, neither of these things was a problem—he was speaking a very lyrical and arresting kind of slang, and he was doing so through the perspective of a born and bred New Yorker. For all intents and purposes, he was an American that had somehow been picked up and dropped into the pit of hell.

I didn’t realize it for a long time, but in a way, our story is really a romance. And we wrote it that way; Border Hacker has the structure of a romance novel. We first meet in Chahuites, where at the time more migrants disappeared than anywhere else in Mexico, and I’m absolutely struck by this man in front of me. We fight through immigration checkpoints together, and that forms a kind of bond that’s hard to explain, risking something of yourself with another person.

Then, eventually, Axel is kidnapped by, of all people, a man who claims to be a migrant activist. He had learned a secret about Axel, a secret that I had learned around the same time: Axel was a hacker. He’d taught himself how to hack in order to survive as an undocumented immigrant in the US. When Axel was forced to hack Mexican government officials on the activist’s behalf, he and I tried to raise the alarm but were basically told to shut up, that we were hurting the cause. And we couldn’t report it to the police either, because we were worried they would end up detaining and deporting Axel rather than helping him.

I have to make a decision. Will I abide by some kind of anthropological or journalistic boundary, or will I follow my heart and try to help him? So eventually I said, “Well, hey, I have all of these interviews that document what has happened to you, as well as plenty of photographic evidence. What if we wrote something?”

I thought that, in a book that is ultimately about transgressing borders, we really needed to emphasize that—if we are serious about ending the great violence of the US-Mexico border—then there are many other kinds of borders that need to be transgressed as well. The traditional author-subject divide was a big one for us because I think that in mainstream journalism and academia, it’s framed as an ethical concern in order to uphold “objectivity,” but in practice most often just leads to the academic or journalist excusing themselves of any notion of personal responsibility or solidarity. We wanted to do something very different.

The philosopher Alain Badiou has written that one of the most urgent political tasks of our lifetime is for the intellectual youth of the Global North to organize with today’s “vast nomadic proletariat,” and to figure out how to make new kinds of social claims collectively. Axel and I saw our book in some sense as attempting to answer Badiou’s call. It’s a story about exactly that, about how two people who seemingly have nothing in common on paper—a young, white, Southern academic and an Afro-Latino, New York hustler—can still share something, can still struggle together for something better.

Axel and I do not have the same goals as straightforward reportage or activism. I write not because I want to portray some kind of journalistic objectivity, nor because I believe in some kind of liberal notion of the Good. I write because I want an entirely different world, and at the moment this is the only way I know how to begin to glimpse it. So I write. But I believe the purpose of art is to simulate revolution up until the point that one no longer needs the simulation.

Border Hacker isn’t only anthropology —it is also in dialogue with creative nonfiction, with reportage, and, especially, with the Latin American tradition of crónica. It is a difficult word to translate, but it is the place, to paraphrase the writer Alejo Carpentier, where the journalist and novelist become one. The writer of crónica is that stubborn soul who continuously questions how truth is constructed and bounded by contemporary literature, and in doing so insists that one’s writing should go beyond the page and that it should have real-world consequences. In this way, all crónica is political, because it seeks to remain faithful to a truth it speaks into existence. Crónica does not uncover the truth but produces it. It calls for action, then answers its own call.

Axel’s voice is a powerful one. How did you come to realize that it could shoulder essential parts of the narrative?  How did you choose when to opt for paraphrasing it? Your field notes shine through and feel freshly transposed. How did you document and merge these materials?

When I marched on the caravan, I brought a cheap recorder and two empty notebooks. It was absolutely maddening to walk down the blazing roads of rural Mexico every day. You’re starving, every inch of your body hurts, you stink to high heaven, and at any moment you think immigration might show up and detain you or worse. So I turned my recorder on and started talking to people. I probably had that recorder running twelve hours a day on average. It was just a way to keep me from going insane, an attempt to give a purpose to this thing called a migrant caravan that initially felt so strange and feeble and potentially very dangerous.

In the evenings I would write in my notebooks, just pages and pages of little details throughout the day that couldn’t be captured on audio alone.

Axel wanted to collaborate with me as well. I think doing all the interviews helped give Axel at least some small sense of purpose. Someone was listening, someone was recording his story, and he could tell it his way.

When Axel and I initially started talking about collaborating on a book project, I envisioned him as the subject. But after I returned to the US at the end of 2015 when my visa ran out, I started transcribing our interviews—listening to lord knows how many hours of his voice in my house or on my daily commute or even at my dead-end desk job. I carried his voice with me. And I knew that I had to capture his particular cadence and syntax if this book was going to work. But when I sat down and tried to write in the traditional way—me describing who Axel was, quoting him from the transcribed interviews when necessary—it all just fell apart. Axel’s voice would not be contained within my voice, it kept breaking free.

I remember late one night, incredibly frustrated at my own clumsiness in portraying his voice on the page, I just copy-pasted a large chunk of a transcribed interview directly into the text. In the passage, Axel was talking about his love for hacking, the desire behind it, and his compulsion to penetrate something that was supposed to keep him out. I put it right next to an early passage I had written about my own uncertainties about who Axel really was and if he was actually telling me the truth about himself. And suddenly, I saw two voices on the page speaking to one another, rather than one voice trying to contain the other. That was the lightbulb moment. Axel did not need me to be his mediator. He needed space on the page to tell his story on his own terms, even when he contradicted or criticized my account of events. In the end, that contradiction is what makes the book interesting. It adds a new layer, a different relationality that troubles the borders between author and subject. And that’s what I really wanted to do in this book, trouble borders of all kinds, battle them as much as I could. I showed Axel the passage and that was when he really became interested. Suddenly the book project made a lot more sense to him if he could just say what he wanted to say without me getting in the way.

And though Axel could question my account of events, I could also question his, which is another move away from traditional nonfiction. Normally, for a book to be “credible,” the author needs to find a “good subject” who we understand is trustworthy. Or, on occasion, they find a definitively “bad subject,” who, it is made clear from the beginning, is untrustworthy and therefore unrelatable and unlikeable. But that’s not how the migrant trail works. (And, frankly, I don’t think that’s how anything works.) You need to trust someone because the trail is dangerous, but also you can’t trust anyone for that same reason. I wanted to portray that uncertainty and explore it, and get us past this idea of the “good subject” of nonfiction.

For years, Axel and I recorded incredibly long and nonlinear interviews, both in person and over the phone. Eventually, I would return to a certain subject we explored at some point—a story about his childhood, or a particular experience on the migrant trail—and ask him to repeat it at length, adding more detail and reflection. Then a few months later we’d do it again. And again. And again. We did this for seven years.

Part of my inspiration was psychoanalysis, the deceivingly simple conviction that by returning to a certain narrative or life event over and over again, new insights can be gleaned each time, and new possibilities. Another part was Godard’s famous quote about making political films versus making films politically, the latter meaning that on set one must also enact a certain kind of ethic, that the production of the film itself is also political and therefore potentially transformative for all of those on set. I wanted to do the same with the writing of this book.

One way was to make Axel a co-author and have him compensated as such, which we did. Another way was to be incredibly mindful about our interviews in the moment—especially when exploring his childhood and intense moments of trauma—and to try to make the interview a means for him to transform that pain into something else. I am no psychoanalyst, and I don’t profess to have healed Axel in any way, but I did hope that our interviews might give him a new means of relating to himself as well, of making something new out of so many haunting memories.

I began to realize a much more important truth. That, in order to be in Axel’s life, to collaborate with him in any way—whether in a literary sense or just in comradery—I had to be okay with not knowing everything about him. Potentially for his own safety, or potentially for mine, but also because I am not entitled to know everything about him, and, in fact, this idea of “knowing everything” is a lie in itself.

I think we have this idea that in order for someone to be helped today—to be granted asylum, for instance—they must lay themselves bare on the altar of truth. And that’s absurd because, for one, it means that someone must debase themselves if they need aid. But on a more fundamental level, no one can tell the whole truth about themselves. We do not even fully know who we are. That knowledge lies with another, someone who catches a glimpse of something about us that we don’t even see or understand ourselves. There is something of profound significance about me that only you see, and vice versa. I wanted that to come out on the page, that Axel and I were revealing things about each other to the reader.

Axel and I wanted to force the reader to consider, even if for only a moment, the deep uncertainties that we must all confront in the pursuit of a different world, and to at least consider some of what would be required to actually give someone like Axel a life free from that unimaginable oppression.