First, the Midwest tour continues, tomorrow (Saturday) in Urbana; Sunday in Bloomington, Indiana; Wednesday in Chicago; Friday in Louisville (the latter two are Dylan-oriented, in the Dylan distilleries, with whiskey flights included). Details at https://elijahwald.com/2026concertdates.html

On to the music:

This is by a Uruguayan songwriter and singer, Daniel Viglietti. I learned this from Victor Jara‘s recording, and didn’t hear Viglietti’s until much later, but he was another prominent figure in the Latin American nueva cancion (new song) movement.

It is a Spanish “This Land Is Your Land,” a song against private property, borders, and capitalism. Alambre is Spanish for “wire,” and by extension, “fence” — in US border slang, undocumented immigrants were at times called alambristas, people who had crossed the fence — and to desalambrar is to tear down the fences:

I ask those present if they have never thought
That this earth belongs to all of us, and not to whoever has the most.
I ask whether on earth you have never thought
That if the hands are ours, so is what they produce.

Tear down the fences, tear down the fences
The earth is ours, yours, and theirs
Of Pedro and Maria, of Juan and Jose.

If my song bothers anyone who does not want to hear it
I assure you that they are a gringo or an owner/boss of this country.
And I ask of those present, or I tell you, in answer,
That this earth belongs to all of us, and not to whoever has the most.

Jara changed one phrase to make the song more universal rather than specifically about Uruguay, and I’ve changed a few words through tricks of memory, but that’s the theme — and it is more important than ever.

I’ve got another blog, The Pursuit of Happiness, where I write about borders and nationalism, the poison of our times. We are living in a period when, due to global warming, wars, despotic governments, and other causes, many millions of people have to leave the places where they are living. There are many ways to deal with that situation, but the first thing to understand is that its principle threat is to those people, not to those of us living in the countries to which they might wish to go.

The second thing is that building stronger borders to keep them out is a form of mass murder, in some situations rising to the level of genocide. It is not just a sin of omission, it is a murderous aggression — and for those of us who are only here because our parents (my mother, for example) were able to flee other places, it is an obligation to do what we can to tear down those borders.

Throughout human history, people have moved when the places they lived became unlivable; virtually all of us are descended from people who spread around the world in earlier times. National borders are not new, but in most periods and places they were not intended to keep people from moving, nor were they regularly patrolled — and, to the extent they were patrolled, it was typically to control the flow of goods, not of people. Passports, in the modern sense, are barely a century old.

Obviously, it is a problem when too many people move to an area that cannot support more people. But the richest countries, the countries most harshly opposing immigration, are not keeping people out because we cannot support them. On the contrary, the point is to trap them in places that are less able to support them, where they produce the raw materials and cheap goods that make it possible for us to live much better than them, and to maintain that imbalance rather than sharing the wealth.

The United States, while frequently led by people who fulminate about the danger of immigration, has been conducting an experiment for years in what happens if you allow large, free movements of people. Millions of us have moved and are currently moving in search of better jobs, cheaper housing, and for all sorts of reasons. We have seen numerous large migrations over the last century or so, including the Great Migration of Blacks from the Southeast, of Southwestern farmers out of the Dust Bowl… and when we wanted to stem those flows, have passed laws and established rights that somewhat equalized and balanced the push and pull factors. I’m not pretending that has always been a pretty story, but with some ghastly exceptions — none of them involving people of majority-European heritage — we have not tried to prevent those migrations by erecting borders and forbidding movement.

Bottom line: freedom of movement is one of the most basic human rights. And… I’ve written a lot more about this, but Woody Guthrie and Daniel Viglietti said it all more eloquently and simply.