If you live along the southern border, you understand its demands & its natural rhythms. If you don’t, take a moment to consider a few suggestions for making your trip to the Santa Teresa protest site beneficial and safe.
July 12 is high summer in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Don’t be surprised if temperatures soar to triple digits that day. At the same time, do note that we are holding the protest at 9 AM, a compromise between the coolest hour of the day &—for those traveling some distance to Santa Teresa—a reasonable hour of departure.
Because of the likelihood of high temps, we’re planning to limit the rally program to an hour. If activists would like to remain after the rally to carry signs, confer with immigration allies, or to speak with others who arrived at the rally not entirely in agreement with our position, they are most welcome to do so.
Rally organizers are committed wholeheartedly to non-violent principles. We will have peacekeepers on site, trained & identifiable by brightly-colored vests, & we ask rally attendees to model non-violent behavior and discourse throughout the event. This doesn’t mean we dilute our messages; as Holly Near put it, we’re a “gentle, angry people”—a balance not always easy to strike but worth pursuing.
Some of us relish creating potent, righteous protest signs. By all means do so, & bring them to the rally. We don’t tell people what they can & can’t say, of course, but to maximize our persuasive power, we organizers recommend that signs generally focus on anti-authoritarian themes, humane immigration policy, & public-lands advocacy. One of my friends carried a sign at a recent rally that read “Trump is a rapist.” Who am I to argue with that? For this rally, however, we’ll be more persuasive if our individual messages stay focused on the theme of “Humanize, don’t militarize the border.” We’ve contacted local media, & we want our coverage to focus on why we’ve all made a trip to this corner of New Mexico.
Besides taking care of our message, we need to take care of ourselves. Some of this goes without saying—but bring ample hydration with you! For many of us, respecting people & respecting the environment are of a piece; we’re trying to avoid passing out disposable drinks at the rally, but the Silver City cohort will bring ice and water coolers with us to share. If you use sunscreen, July 12 will likely be a banner day for its application. Wear a hat. Wrap a soaked bandana around your neck. & forgive me if I’m “mothering you”; I’m a former backpack trip leader.
Portable restrooms will not be available at our rally; our best advice: use the Love’s Travel Stop, located on Airport Road, about 6 miles north of the protest site (&, for those coming from Silver City, Deming, or Columbus, about 3 miles north of the intersection of NM 9 and NM 136). Make a pit stop before the rally—but know that several other people may have read this online tip, so give yourself ample time at Love's.
The simplest route to our peaceful protest site: If you navigate using Google Maps, you can plug in “Avenida Delicias, Santa Teresa, NM” and follow directions till you find yourself at the site where we will hold our rally. (More detailed driving directions are available under the "Directions to the Rally" tab on this website.) Enter Avenida Delicias & select a place to park on the edge of the road, leaving plenty of room for vehicles to pass. Ave Delicias is a 40-foot-wide paved street that provides ample parking spaces along the curb. Park with extra care, so that law-enforcement officers have no reason to complain about our orderly rally. If possible, avoid Ave Casas Grandes, as the Border Patrol sometimes uses this particular road to access the Border Wall.
As we mention on the homepage of this website, conditions at our southern border are dynamic, so please check back with this site to access updates.
Note well: While we expect no one in a position of authority to limit our right to public protest, we have arranged with the New Mexico State Land Office a permit that will allow us to congregate at a "back-up site" in Santa Teresa, located approximately 2.5 miles from our Avenida Delicias site. To avoid confusion, we are not currently posting directions to the backup site, but we will pass out detailed driving & parking instructions to rally attendees in the unlikely event we will have to relocate our rally. For the record, we have notified the Doña Ana County Sheriff that we are holding a protest in Santa Teresa on July 12.