The Border Is Present in Everything We Do”: An Interview with Nellie Jo David

November 28, 2023

In the following interview, the O'odham scholar and activist Nellie Jo David situates the 2020 O'odham uprising against the construction of the Trump administration's border wall within the longer history of O'odham resistance to colonization. David discusses the revolts of 1695 and 1751 as significant moments when O'odham peoples united to contest colonial rule, noting how this history of struggle is important for mobilization against the intensification of the US-Mexico border militarization, policing, and surveillance during the twenty-first century.

The traditional homelands of the O'odham peoples extend south from what is currently called central Arizona, between the Gulf of California and the San Pedro River, to include most of the northern half of what is today called the Mexican state of Sonora. First colonized by Spain and then occupied by Mexico, a significant part of O'odham territory was transferred from Mexico to the United States soon after the US war against Mexico and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo under the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. This interimperial real estate transaction imposed the settler states’ international border and divided O'odham peoples and homelands between Mexico and the United States. Land dispossession on both sides of the border accelerated after 1853, with the United States promoting railroad construction, mining, and property sale to settlers. It was not until the 1980s that a barbed wire fence was constructed at the border and US border enforcement measures intensified on behalf of the so-called war on drugs. Such measures not only heightened the punitive supervision of O'odham peoples in the name of securitization but also foreclosed their mobility and access to traditional lands and sacred sites. Since the 1990s, increased US border enforcement in urban points of entry effectively compelled migrants seeking entrance to the United States without documentation to travel the far more hazardous and often deadly route through the Arizona desert, with the territory of Tohono O'odham becoming a primary crossing point.

Under US colonial rule today, O'odham peoples include the federally recognized Tohono O'odham Nation and Akimel O'odham—with the latter including the Gila River Indian Community, the Ak-Chin Indian Community, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. The Hia-Ced O'odham, who live throughout southwestern Arizona, remain unrecognized by both the state of Arizona and the US federal government. The division of O'odham peoples both by the US-Mexico border and by the colonial technology of federal recognition has had profound consequences, including the specific conditions described by David in the interview.

AG: Can you begin by providing some context on how US colonialism and the colonial border—the border wall in particular—impact O'odham peoples?

NJD: Unfortunately, the border is present in everything we do. Ever since our lands were divided by colonization and by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, we have experienced different oppressive conditions brought on by the border. More recently, because of the xenophobia that was heightened by 9/11 and all the other circumstances of the past twenty years, we've experienced even greater militarization on the border. I grew up in a community near the border, one that's in fact divided by the border but still very much connected to both sides. The US-Mexico border has been imposed on us as a culture, a community, and a people. This imposition has been very difficult and has brought on troubling circumstances throughout my life. Though all the recent presidents have been very pro militarization of the border, these circumstances were especially exacerbated by the election of Trump. It was Trump who finalized the thirty-foot border wall in our sacred areas.

We knew this was coming for a long time. Even around the time of 2010, xenophobia was rising. We knew this was coming even as early as the 2000s with the REAL ID Act of 2005.¹ One of the reasons I went to law school was to try to stop the wall. Even though we knew it was coming, there was quite a scramble to prepare for trying to stop the border wall, because of the many circumstances we face.

One of the things that I've found frustrating in my activist and academic work is how little we talk about border history in this area. That's partially a consequence of Tom Horne having been the Arizona superintendent of public instruction and his role in determining the state's curricula. There's a lot of oppression when it comes to teaching and learning about Indigenous histories and Mexican histories. Our history and the long history of revolts isn't really talked about. We need to make the connection between the present and revolts such as those in 1695 and 1751. Experiencing our current struggles with the border and the O'odham revolt of 2020 really made me feel for our ancestors. Their experiences were not identical, but they were very similar in that many families were politically divided. There were families who sided with the priests and the missions and those who were in complete and total rebellion. It wasn't an easy time. Sometimes, because of the process of assimilation, you see your own relatives and your own people pulled toward bigotry and xenophobia. These are very old divide-and-conquer tactics to make sure that we stay in chaos and that there isn't a formidable opposition.

One really momentous thing about the revolt of 2020 is that it was the first time a very long time when all the O'odham peoples from different areas came together. The revolt of 1751 was similar in this respect. The people were able to keep the revolt a secret from the Spanish forces who were so intimately involved in our everyday lives, across communities that were widely dispersed geographically. So 2020 felt similar because we not only had people from all areas of our land, but we also had to coordinate and keep everything secret. Because we couldn't let the Border Patrol and the police know our next move. And this was during our electronic age of social media and cell phones.

AG: What were the specific circumstances in 2020 that led to the revolt happening in the way it did?

NJD: The border wall construction was definitely a significant factor. Prior to border wall organizing I was organizing against the Israeli Elbit Integrated Fixed Towers on O’odham land in 2019, and then all of a sudden had to jump from that to the wall. In June of 2019 there had been a Ninth Circuit ruling that actually put an effective stay on the wall. But then in July, the Supreme Court overturned it and lifted the stay. We had just one month to prepare for this huge movement.

Ajo, where I'm from and where I was organizing at the time against the wall, is tiny town where everyone used to know everyone else, but now it's gentrified. Our town used to be a mining town. There was a diaspora when the mine closed down in the 1980s, leading to gentrification. For a few decades now we've had multiple ideas about how to save our town from becoming a ghost town, preferably by encouraging the people who used to live there to move back instead of growing the economy based on the Border Patrol and increased militarization. Our ancestors are people who have a lot of heart in this community. But recently that has been replaced by “snowbirds” and white folks. Starting in August 2019, we held community meetings and tried to do everything in our power to get people from the area to stop the border wall. For an entire year, we had meetings hoping there would be direct action. There were a lot of people saying that they were going to take action to physically stop the wall. But for an entire year nothing manifested.

I had given up at this point. COVID happened, and by the summer of 2020, we had tried for a year and nothing manifested. At different points, we tried to host folks from other movements in our town and everything had been a disaster. We also had a lot of problems with misogyny within our movement, and as a result of that I had completely given up hope. But then, all of a sudden, everything started to really take off. A bunch of us got invited to help stop the wall with the Kumeyaay movement. We were really just happy to be there helping to stop the wall in any capacity. This helped inspire a new O'odham movement, which was all women and femme as opposed to the previously male-dominated movement. We named our new movement Defend O'odham Jewed [homelands]. In August of 2020, we organized an action at the Stinger Bridge and Iron fabrication company's Coolidge facility on Akimel O'odham land.² We disrupted Stinger Bridge and Iron operations and received a considerable amount of news media coverage. It was a pretty momentous action; it felt like we accomplished something.

During the summer of 2020, the work on the wall stopped because COVID was transmitting really fast. So, for a moment, we thought we had bought time near our sacred site. They had been blasting sacred sites at a rapid pace, then construction suddenly slowed. We concentrated on defending sacred sites at Quitobaquito Springs, because we really wanted to stop our most sacred area from getting destroyed. But by August or September, they ramped up the work. It happened that the morning we were checking up on things, they were bulldozing Quitobaquito Springs. Amber [Ortega] and I went to do our prayers, and we heard the bulldozing. We immediately ran to the place where we heard the desecration happening. We did not plan to get arrested, but we blocked construction anyway because the moment called for it. We were in front of the bulldozers for an entire hour before the cameras got there. We got arrested and taken to a CoreCivic facility, where we were held for two days. During the time we were in jail, other O'odham attempted to stop the wall with their bodies.

I don't know exactly how many actions we held between September and October. The National Park Service, which supposedly exists to preserve these areas but instead has allowed mining, put closure orders in that area specifically to keep us from our direct actions. The closure orders were intended to prevent access to the site. The main road was closed off, so they had to strategically find alternate routes to resist construction. It's amazing what we were able to do, considering how militarized that area is, including a bombing range. Law enforcement was deliberately targeting what they considered the weakest links. But we were able to stay together as a group. We used several tactics that folks had learned elsewhere. For example, we set up a “white line” where the white folks got in front to protect the Indigenous peoples.

We resisted the wall through several actions, until Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October 2020, when we held our final action.³ The closure orders kept us far away from Quitobaquito, so we did prayer actions near the checkpoint and were met with violence. One of our friends who got arrested was shot near his heart with a rubber bullet at close range. They took the thirteen people they arrested in a paddy wagon to Tucson. After this action, we were too overwhelmed with court cases to continue a viable resistance.

RS: This sounds like a really intense and challenging moment. From your perspective now, what do you think is most significant about what happened?

NJD: I'm starting to grasp that not everything is going to be a victory. What we're doing is more long-term. We're setting things up for the future. This was the first time in my lifetime that we've taken significant collective action and stood together in resistance to the wall. For me that was huge. We're letting future generations know that we did fight, we did stand up—we didn't just stand idly by. In retrospect, I think it would have been an even bigger disappointment if we did nothing.

AG: What about the dynamics of migration and the ongoing struggles of O'odham peoples? What conversations do you think would be important to have between migrant justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements?

NJD: That's a loaded question. I think that awareness about the significance of border history is really lacking. The creation of the border was accompanied by racialization, and such racialization was even written into the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. There are specific treaty provisions against Apache, who were treated as savages. There were guaranteed land rights for citizens, but Indigeneity was only considered in the sense of being inferior. In US racial politics today, we often leave out the history of the border. For instance, when I studied Indigenous law and policy when getting a law degree, I didn't learn border history. In the context of O'odham peoples, the imposition of the border is crucial for understanding the question of Indigenous identity—how it's complicated by national and state jurisdiction and territoriality. A lot can be learned from the situation of O'odham peoples.

RS: Can you talk about how, within that already fraught context, the further militarization of the border and the global economics and geopolitics of displacement has forced people to seek refuge?

NJD: First, I want to say that there are so many other lines dividing us as O'odham people. There are towns. There are reservations. There are bombing ranges. There are military bases. There are all these other geographical political borders that divide us as people on the north side and the south side. There are the differences produced by federal recognition. Whereas before the militarization, we could all intermix as families. We wouldn't have to be categorized differently, but now we're categorized differently. Only Tohono O'odham have border crossing rights, and the Akimel O'odham and Hia Ceḍ Oʼodham do not.

And when it comes to migration in the borderlands, you have some people who are very politically aware and know our culture and our values and others who don't. We've always believed in the right to have water and the right to have food and all of those things. So, it's part of our culture to give water and aid to migrants coming across. US policy encourages so much death on the border. These days, television and popular culture bring assimilation and xenophobia to our people. We grow up with a public educational system in which we're really not aware of our history.

RS: I want to go back to your concern for setting things up for future generations. What do you feel you've taken away from the O'odham movement that crosses the borders of settler states?

NJD: I have to be candid and say that I feel like I was a lot more hopeful before the 2020 revolt. I've struggled since to feel hope again. But I also feel like it is important to reflect on some of the things that went wrong. This gives us an opportunity to strengthen our movements so that we can win. What do we do to prepare youth for the future so that they don't make the same mistakes that we did? We really need to strengthen our community relationships before these movements start. That's been my biggest takeaway. With the revolt of 2020, it's been difficult for me to give interviews because I think that people are looking for something inspirational. And, to be really honest, I'm feeling more grief than inspiration. I really thought we could stop the Border Patrol, and I really thought we could stop the wall. But the battle continues, and we have to keep fighting.

Notes