Susan Sontag began her recent acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer who examines the relationship between freedom and individuality, by talking about words. She spoke of how words are never just words, especially words that are big and over-arching and general. These words, she said, can come to “resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand or cave in.” Because they mean so much, they can end up meaning so little.

She gave as an example “peace,” a word that can mean either victory or defeat depending on who employs it and who it is employed against. It is of course no coincidence that she offered her comments in the Middle East, at yet another moment of crisis in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Such moments force us to re-evaluate how the world becomes narrative, how society is transformed by the language that pretends to represent it; and Sontag’s speech reads like a treatise on words in a time of emergency.

“Border” is a word that has become both room and tunnel, and it’s being spoken now more often than ever as a state of emergency continues in the US-Mexico borderlands — a place that has itself come to resemble a graveyard. Some might balk at the idea that we have a border war, but all the signs are there. The 14 migrants from Cuatro Caminos who in May died in the desert sun in Arizona are only the most recent of casualties.

The US government has blamed the coyotes for those deaths, but it should blame itself for making the border crossing a trek toward inevitable death under a merciless sun. We have increasingly made the Border Patrol into an arm of the national-defense industry. The central communications unit that monitors border traffic is located on an Air Force base, and the latest sci-fi border-patrol technologies — infrared scanners, digital fingerprinting, footfall detection magnets — were all developed during Vietnam.

The special June 11 issue of Time magazine suggested that perhaps there is no war, that the “border” may be vanishing. “How much has to cross a border before it might as well not be there at all?”, Nancy Gibbs asks in her lead article, and it’s a fair question, but just because more goods, people, culture, ideas, and sounds are crossing back and forth does not mean that the border will cease to exist. These people and things cross because the border does exist, because it exists more and more, claiming more and more lives. First it’s a line in the sand, then a fence, then a bigger fence, then a wall, then a bigger wall.

Border (Narada), the new album from Anglo-Oaxacan singer Lila Downs, seems at first to subscribe to the vanishing-border idea. She begins by calling the border “an imaginary line,” but we quickly see that for the migrant characters of her songs the line is imaginary because they wish it were, because the brutal reality of it forces them to pray for its disappearance. The border of Border is anything but vanishing; it may be, as the Time articles suggest, its own country, but as Downs sings on “Sale Sobrando,” it is a country where justice does not matter, where “blood flows from those who have been sacrificed.” Even on “Tránsito,” which is about movement and flow, the border persists. When it rains in the song, it rains dust, it rains with the “cries of millions, their enchantments and frustrations.”

Like Sontag’s “peace,” Downs’s “border” is both victory and defeat — defeat for the migrants crushed by their dreams to cross it, victory for the border patrol that stops them. The new Learning Express prep guide for the Border Patrol Exam — offered monthly and taken by 25,000 people each year — tests you on your commitment to defeating illegal immigration. Applicants are tested on their language skills and on their “logical reasoning.” As the exam guide explains it, “The border patrol has to be very intelligent. He or she has to be skilled in the identification of illegal papers.”

On one practice exam provided in the prep guide, applicants are asked to translate lines like “He shot (an escaped girl),” “The river is an enemy,” and “The enemy spy had to injure the loyal guard.” These are the words of the border patrol. These are their rooms and tunnels that expand and cave in, that cover and crush those who wait for the day when their words will be the words that matter.