Sonoran and Chihuahuan Rattles

Ciudad Juarez
My life’s fate is cast with this infamous place and its people.  I have no pleasant memories of it.  Most of the memorial frames cast through wire fences are limned by fragmentary shots of poverty and dark smog.  In the torturous streets of my history there is only a strange fear and dread of being there at all.  The random, chaotic traffic was less fearsome than emerging to throngs of poverty players clutching and grabbing at me. I grew to mistrust all perception there because it was difficult to tell who was really poor and who was playing scams to get more money.  
I remember weeping beneath the huge crucifix staring out the dust stained window at the stripped, hilly, arid landscape dotted with ‘tent neighborhoods’ of the very, very poor.  The broad well-lit superhighways of  ‘el norte’ leeringly mocked the plight of these ravaged peoples.  However, the massive villas of the very rich Mexicans who were even less tolerant or caring than those across the international bridge became more of a challenge to understand. 
It is not easy for me to incorporate all of this.  Because of those dear to me whom I love the vacuous easy referendums by those in the USA, who so easily toss aside the writhing realms of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts as unimportant, has been utterly stripped from my being.  Only those with much love and wisdom can justly move or dwell within its borders or comment on its life and death.  From outside its borders strangers view it as an alien place.  The ‘Sonoran rattle’, too, is an infamous blight in the belly of North America.  Its fences are many and varied.  After half a century of being entwined in the history with great sorrow for its people my view has re-emerged in a fury at the violent upheavals exploding because of evil’s unchecked in-roads.
“When Bolaño came to London early this year for the English publication of By Night in Chile, he was already very ill from a longstanding liver complaint. Despite this, he was still talking non-stop of the many projects he was involved in, including a mammoth novel provisionally entitled 2666, already more than 1,000 pages long, that dealt with the murders of more than 300 young women in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez, another novel, and a new collection of poetry…” ~ Nick Caistor, ‘Obituary: Roberto Bolaño’, The Guardian, 17 July 2003