Sanctuary

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to xenophobia, enslavement, other violence, and challenges faced by immigrants.

“The underground reporters would also call her brave, defiant, fearless.

And the government news would call her disease-ridden, illegal, criminal.

But as I watched it with my own eyes, I saw that she was just a girl my age. Wearing a faded Mickey Mouse T-shirt and jean shorts that were rolled over on top but still looked like they might fall off her skinny waist. She had somehow gotten over a line of concrete ballasts and the chain-link fence stretching across the burnt-out field between Tijuana and San Diego. That rusty, mangled barricade that was supposed to keep people on the Tijuana side. It stood there as a scar. A reminder. A warning. Its sole purpose was to say

STAY OUT. YOU DON’T BELONG HERE.”

The girl’s Mickey Mouse T-shirt introduces the motif of fairy-tale elements, which are scattered throughout the novel in order to highlight the unimaginable challenges the characters face, as well as the occasional bouts of fortune and chance in an otherwise bleak world. Vali uses the metaphor of a scar to describe the barricade between the US and Mexico to develop The Human Cost of Xenophobia and to illustrate how xenophobia results in violence.

“The Wall. The Great American Wall.

There was nothing great about it. More like grotesque. It blocked out the sky, with fifty-foot-tall reinforced steel slats and thick metal mesh in between. Every few feet there were coils of barbed wire strung across, and on top there was a maze of cables spitting out electricity. The government had spent gazillions of dollars and called in all the Reserves to help build this monstrosity. Sealing us off from the rest of the Americas.

Stop where you are! snarled a voice through a speaker by the Wall.

Technically, that girl wasn’t even on United States soil. But as the President loved to say, America was the greatest nation in the history of greatness, and we needed to do whatever it took to protect our sacred borders. That was why there was a platoon of Border Patrol officers lined up on top of the Wall. Green zombies, I called them. Standing at attention in their olive-colored uniforms with pale, expressionless faces. They had the newest AK-87s strapped to their backs and German shepherds circling at their feet as they stared down that girl.”

The name “The Great American Wall” bears resemblance to the Great Wall of China, implying a similarity of purpose between the two structures. In the novel, the US does not appear to be protecting its borders against war, but rather against civilian immigrants. The level of military presence and weaponry at the border, however, seems more appropriate for war than civilians, illustrating how xenophobia has caused the US government in the novel to view immigrants not as people, but as problems or threats. In clear imagery, Vali describes the wall as “grotesque” and the border patrol agents as “green zombies” to highlight the horrific, monstrous nature of xenophobia and violence against civilian immigrants.