The Brooklyn Rail

In the summer of 2023, I was standing on the southwest corner of 47th Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan with two individuals—both of whom, as unaccompanied immigrant children (UICs), walked from the “Northern Triangle” in Central America at different times to cross the southern border into Texas.¹ We were looking at a store window filled with merchandise covered with Milton Glaser’s I ❤ NYC logos, when one wryly asked, “¿Dónde Amamos ❤ ️ NYC?” Both individuals are a part of the pilot program RSVP, developed with the organization Terra Firma—a clinic in the Bronx providing mental health, medical, and legal services to UICs. The program introduces UICs to the arts as a method for acculturation in New York City. For reasons of privacy and safety, the individuals’ names, personal information, and country of origin are not being shared, nor are the details of their circumstances regarding their crossing or their decision to leave their place of origin.

On the corner, we discussed the staged reading we had just attended of Jesús I. Valles’s bala.fruta./bullet.fruit. Valles wrote and performed an excerpt of the work as a part of the annual SOL Festival at The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT). The reading opened with a YouTube video, “How the Glock 19 Fires.” What we didn’t expect was that the work was about the border’s relation to mass shootings, featuring an anthropomorphized bullet as Valles’s protagonist. In Valles’s reading, the bullet passed through the head of a presidential candidate of Mexico (1994) then through the Pulse nightclub in Florida (2016). Ultimately it lodged in the Cielo Vista Walmart in the mass shooting in El Paso (2019), where Valles is originally from. In fact, they are from Ciudad Juarez, not El Paso, but for generations of residents both cities are thought of as one locality that exists in two countries. As the performance continued, an illustration of a cross section of a bullet for an assault rifle classified as a long gun, was projected.

The bullet could have extended its trajectory in Texas with the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, a massacre where nineteen children and two teachers were killed. Upon his eighteenth birthday, the gunman was legally able to purchase a long gun that is known for its ease of use, rapid fire rate, accuracy, and “excellent killing or stopping power”—an AR-15 military-style semi-automatic assault rifle.² He ordered it online from a manufacturer who markets through social media with “violent militaristic imagery” and through first-person shooter video games. The gun was shipped to a local store in Uvalde that is both a restaurant and outfitter for hunting and fishing. Holding a Federal Firearm License (FFL), the store received the gun and logged the assault rifle into a firearms acquisition and disposition (A&D) electronic record, performing the necessary background check on the killer. He left the store as the legal owner of a military semi-automatic assault weapon and then proceeded to enact the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

There continue to be mass shootings that could be included in an expanded version of bala.fruta./bullet.fruit: the Boulder shooting in 2021 with semi-automatic pistols/short guns; Buffalo supermarket shooting in 2022 with a semi-automatic rifle/long gun; and most recently the Monterey Park shooting in 2023 with a semi-automatic pistol/short gun.

The distinction between a long and short gun at the border is critical. In Texas, you can be eighteen years of age and buy a rifle/long gun, including military style assault rifles, but you must be at least twenty-one years of age to buy a handgun/pistol/short gun. The logic for an eighteen-year-old purchasing long guns is tied to military service and “the right to bear arms.” But what eighteen-year-old needs to own a military-style assault weapon? One important step in gun control would be to increase the age limit for the legal purchase of firearms to twenty-one.³ Mothers of the Uvalde victims are working towards this in a manner that is not dissimilar to MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).

Back at the Southern Texas border, the rhetoric of “invasion" and references to “the Great Replacement” continue to drive the perpetrators of these massacres. The real “invasion” is the proliferation of firearms there, and the ease with which one can acquire an assault rifle at eighteen years old, enabled by the opacity of gun regulations across the United States. The paradox that follows is not the public’s inurement to mass shootings, but the perceived threat that rocketed the acquisition of munitions as an individual’s protective entitlement—their “right to bear arms.” Domestic arms sales, both licensed and unlicensed, only escalate after mass shootings with the imagined threat that bans would be reenacted.

Meanwhile, the world’s existential crisis of the climate emergency is accelerating migration and human trafficking on both sides of the border and compounding the proliferation of firearms in the process. This ecosystem includes the respective military and border patrol agencies as well as the informal militias, straw purchasers, and their entrepreneurial counterparts. Note the direction in which these firearms travel. A report by the US Government Accountability Office observed that “Texas is by far the leading source of weapons trafficked into Mexico.”⁴

It is the immigrants, and in particular the unaccompanied immigrant children, who are the most vulnerable to this violence. But their imagination and courage will be the “great replacement” of their misguided, racist, and long-gun owning peers.

We never finished our discussion on that corner of bala.fruta./bullet.fruit, or the border and mass shootings. One of the UIC’s had to get home to the Bronx as they were starting high school the next day. We headed to our respective subways, but not before they turned and said, “Amamos ❤ NYC.”

1. ¡WELCOME TO AMERICA! is the title of a forthcoming exhibition by the Berlin-based curator and art historian Ruth Noack organized by Mary Ellen Carroll/MEC, studios. It is also a special edition by Labour & Wait produced by Brand X Editions in Long Island City that will benefit the medical, mental health and legal programs for UIC’s at Terra Firma in the Bronx.
2. “Field Test Report, AR-15 Armalite Rifle, Final Report,” U.S. OSD/ARPA Research and Development Field Unit – Vietnam, RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY Washington 25, D. C. 20 August 1962. Declassified Document: AD343778, 31 July 13 1974, DoDD 5200.10; DARPA per DTIC Form 55, Page 24, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0343778.pdf
3. Kiah Collier and Jeremy Schwartz, “Why 18-Year-Olds in Texas Can Buy AR-15s but Not Handguns,” ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, May 26, 2022, 4:10 p.m. CDT https://www.propublica.org/article/why-18-year-olds-in-texas-can-buy-ar-15s-but-not-handguns
4. “FIREARMS TRAFFICKING—U.S. Efforts to Combat Firearms Trafficking to Mexico Have Improved, but Some Collaboration Challenges Remain,” Report to Congressional Requesters, U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-16-223, January 2016, Pg. 15, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-16-223.pdf