Jennifer Stoever

On June 18th, 2018, Pro Publica released a soul-wrenching 8-minute audio recording of Central American children keening for their parents in one of the U.S. Government’s newly-erected border internment camps in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. Attained via civil rights attorney Jennifer Harbury, the recording came from an anonymous client who, Harbury said, “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it and had to act.” Now circulating widely on the Internet, the audio calls upon us to do the same.

Without a hint of hyperbole, this audio is utterly devastating. Except to the unnamed Border Patrol agent who callously remarks in Spanish to the crying children: “Bueno, aqui tenemos una orqueta. . . lo que falta es un conductor” (“Well, here we have an orchestra. . .what is missing is the conductor”). Over gasps and sobs he then shouts an abrupt, frustrated “No llores!” (Don’t Cry!”). These remarks—both delivery and content—reveals the active, oppressive presence of a long historical relationship between race, gender, power, and white listening in the U.S., a socially-constructed but materially-reinforced aural border between white people and all “Others,” what I call the sonic color line.

The sonic color line is the learned cultural mechanism that establishes racial difference through listening habits and uses sound to communicate one’s position vìs-a-vìs white citizenship. When the patroller taunts the children, he sonically performs the hierarchical border between white male U.S. citizen and brown “illegal” migrant. It’s no small thing that he chooses their native language to communicate their smallness; he could so easily use it to comfort them instead. Rather he speaks as an annoyed patriarch, insinuating the children cry about something small, like a scuffed knee. His teasing voice trivializes the children’s massive loss and the direness of our vast humanitarian crisis while erasing his own culpability, reframing their cries as the problem, not his actions and the state authority authorizing them.

Documentation