Borders
On lines and identity.
Hello folks,
Today I want to talk about a place. It is there every time I cross between Carolinas to visit home, a drive I have done often this past year, weaving through until hills become highway and the marshes appear earth-toned and blue in front of me. When going from North to South, you do not see this place until it is right there, the spinning sombrero to your left and then suddenly in the rearview as you speed up to merge onto I-95. But coming South to North, it is teased for nearly a hundred miles, billboards popping up every five cars or so, promising a land before you full of reptiles, fireworks, hot tamales, and camper vans.
If you are from the Carolinas, I am sure you know exactly the place I am referring to. But if you are not, let me welcome you to a place that has frustrated and intrigued me to no end this year. It is called South of the Border.
South of the Border (www.sobpedro.com) markets itself as a “world famous highway oasis and gateway to the southeast.” Google searches lead you to websites like Roadside America, Atlas Obscura, a handful of South Carolina newspapers, and the Washington Post, which describes the place as “garish, tacky, and un-PC.”
Straddling the North and South Carolina border between Dillon, SC and Rowland, NC, South of the Border is hard to describe. It began as a beer stand in 1949, owned and operated by a white man named Alan Schafer, and grew in popularity due to the fact that it was next to then-dry North Carolina counties. In 1954, South of the Border became a motel, and soon began importing goods from Mexico. Over the years, I-95 was rerouted to run right by the park, and they expanded the area to include a cocktail lounge, gas station, barber shop, drug store, post office, go-kart track, souvenir shop, and eventually their largest draw: the fireworks selection, which doubled in sales last year during the 4th of July.
You will know you are at South of the Border when you see the yellow tower, complete with a sombrero at the top. And when you enter the park, you will be greeted by their mascot, Pedro, a “caricature of a Mexican bandido,” who stands watch at 104 feet tall over the entrance with his overdrawn eyebrows and mustache, his bright red pants, and sign with South of the Border written out in decorative white letters. According to history, the mascot was modeled after two boys Schafer brought back from Mexico to work for him, whom patrons referred to as Pedro and Pancho; today, all South of the Border employees— regardless of race or gender— are referred to as Pedro.
If you are like me, this place will make you angry. I have never been, though I grew up hearing about it; it is, after all, right on the way to places such as Myrtle Beach and Charleston, popular destinations for piedmont North Carolinians. Until this past year, I assumed it had probably gone out of business, or at least come under fire for the ways it promotes and profits off of cultural stereotypes. But it still exists, edging on the side of the highway, marking the turn off for the road that will take me to my new home. The only thing that seems to have happened is that the billboards have been changed to be slightly more toned down and “less offensive while still retaining their tongue-in-cheek tone.”
Alan Schafer has denied many times that his attraction is racist. On a personal level, he was known for standing up to the KKK and helping his employees to vote. South of the Border was at one point the largest employer in Dillon County, South Carolina, and went out of their way to hire employees of color. But regardless of this, there is something in me that still feels a sharp pang of disbelief every time I pass it, a feeling that never wavers or dulls no matter how many times I do this drive. How is it that still, after all this time, this is the entrance that welcomes people to the state? In rural North Carolina, only a few counties over, I teach in a school where more than half of my students came to this country from Mexico and Central America. This is home for them now, too. I often wonder how they feel when they drive past these billboards and statues, which are everywhere here, no matter if South of the Border is just a small speck of land, and unavoidable.
We devote so much energy in this country to talking about place, and by extension, stereotyping. I knew the perception people had of me when I moved to New York in 2016 as a white girl from the South. When my mom had done the same back in the 80s, the reaction of her peers hadn’t been much different. And it is true— this place is home to many of the stereotypes that the rest of the country assumes; just look at South of the Border. But it is also much more than what we like to believe. As is the case with any stereotype, what we believe is often easier, simpler and more convenient to comprehend than the truth of things, which is usually complex, and layered. The South gets a lot of heat, and rightfully so, but yet it seems to me that the rest of the country has accepted it as a backwards place, worth writing off and too difficult to change. The activists and organizations who are here doing this work— of which there are many, and which I will highlight soon in another post— fail to garner the national recognition they deeply deserve. Borders, which are, in the end, such an arbitrary thing, now divide this country between good and bad, right and wrong— definitions which fail to account for the fact that, as with anything, there is no clean, clear binary, no distinct line that can be drawn to state that one place is one thing and another is not. You can stand on any state border and straddle it, and there is nothing that will change within you. So much of what we allow to divide us exists in our minds only.
I think about borders every time I make this drive. I think about how strange they are, how much national thought they occupy, how hundreds of years ago none of this, or us, was even here at all. I wish that one day I could drive home and see the place where the park once was barren and empty, and something better and more representative of the South I call home in its place. I don’t have the answer, but, as I drove past the shining yellow sombrero this past weekend, I found myself thinking about borders again, both the ones that criss-cross this country in invisible webs and the ones within myself, too, which try constantly to tell me who I am, where I am from, and the ways I must exist in the world. More than anything, I think I wish for this place and those of us who call it home to be free of these borders and what their definitions offer. I have faith we can get there.
Your prompt for this week is to find a border where you live. It can be something as simple as two street signs intersecting, or something with deeper implications, such as train tracks dividing a community. Go there and walk along it. Spend some time thinking about what it means, both for yourself and the land around you. Write two stories: one a reflection of the world with this border, and the other of a world in which it didn’t exist. How are they different? Are they different?
We’re reachable at goodfolksonly@gmail.com if you want to share your stories or talk further about this topic. Lord knows there’s a lot more to be said.
Have a great week, friends.
— Spencer
This week’s song is Green River by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I listened to this song for almost the entire 3+ hours of this drive, which meant it played as I drove past South of the Border, and I kept looping the last line in my head: “Well, if you get lost, come on home to Green River… Come on home, come on home..”
Creedence Clearwater Revival is a very well-known American rock band from the seventies. If you don’t know them by now, you should. They performed at Woodstock, and helped pioneer Swamp Rock and Southern Rock, even though (like myself, funnily enough) they hailed from San Francisco. But we’ll give them a pass for it. The music’s great.