Egads, I think, I am become Lou Dobbs.
Later that afternoon, I’m standing in a circle of pretty young women, Teach for America workers, at a Mennonite church social in San Juan. It’s muddy and sunny, the music’s about to start, across the two-lane is a tract-house neighborhood à la Spielberg, nearby is a movable free-range-chicken shed and an organic garden and a donkey named Pierre, rescued from a neglectful owner by the pastor of the church, John Garland.
John looks more like a guitarist in an indie-rock band than he does a pastor, and his wife, Abby, looks more like the beautiful vocalist in that band than she does a high-school teacher/pastor’s wife. John has started a model organic farm here at the church. The idea is to help underprivileged workers access the “intellectual capital” of their work; immigrants are often expert organic farmers who, if they happen to be undocumented, get stuck working for other people, underpaid, or cheated of their pay.
Around them, John and Abby have gathered a group of similarly well-educated, young, politically engaged volunteers working with the poor in small towns across the Rio Grande Valley.
What have they seen?
You name it: blond Spanish-only speakers; mothers who call the school to say they’ve been deported but will be sneaking back in time for parent-teacher conferences; families in which the kids speak only English and the parents speak only Spanish; families in which the parents speak English but the kids—recent arrivals—can’t; kids who came over illegally as babies and are now fully acculturated American teenagers—excellent straight-A students who, because they’re undocumented, can’t get financial aid for college, which means, given their family economics, no college for them at all.
So what do they do?
“They go to work,” Abby says.
John has told me that although their mission involves “reaching out to those in need”—some of whom, in this area especially, may indeed be undocumented—they don’t have a clue if people have documents or not. Still, remembering my Lou Dobbs moment, I ask John and Abby if they ever have doubts about working with the undocumented, since technically it’s against the law.
John looks at me thoughtfully from behind his glasses.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Just the other day, these two guys walked up here and said, ‘Hey, man, we just crossed the river, we’re really thirsty, we need some water.’ And I looked them over and said: ‘Sorry, friend, you’ll have to take it up the road.’”
Abby nods.
So this is interesting. They are, yes, Christians, and yet they understand that the law forbids—
Then they both crack up.
“Yeah, see that big cross on the front of the church?” says Abby. “That’s actually what it means: Take it up the road.”
“The thing is, when you read the Bible?” John says. “One thing it’s not is wishy-washy about our responsibility toward people in need. Yes, there’s the law, and we should respect it, but there’s also a higher law.”
In Abby’s opinion, the problem with this immigration debate is the level of abstraction at which it’s conducted. If you talk about
undocumented workers
or
illegal aliens
, it’s easy to make mistakes. Whereas if you say:
This is Valerie, Valerie is my student, whom I love,
then whatever you do will make sense, coming, as it does, from the heart, with a real person in mind.
A STORY TOO SAD TO INVENT
Because of the way Lupe Aguilar’s past has been described to me, I expect him to be mean and wiry and street-scarred, but no: He’s white-haired, gentle, and articulate, with a quality of patient abiding that makes me instantly crave his approval. After church, at the head of a long familial table in a Mexican restaurant, he tells me he used to: (1) run wild (his wife’s sitting across the table, and her eyebrows go up, indicating: Oh
yes
he did), (2) shepherd groups of recently arrived Mexicans into a hotel room, take his fee, then rat them out to the Border Patrol, (3) own bars, party, and fight (a guy he offended once put three slugs in his back). Then he experienced a religious conversion and is now a Mennonite pastor who shelters the homeless—in his house, in trailers behind his house, in the kitchen of his church (as we enter, a smiling, timid family just arrived from Veracruz rises as one, exclaims
mucho gusto
as one, sits as one), or in the church itself (in the Sunday-school rooms, in the sanctuary, beside the altar), with a disregard for his personal space that I find impossible to imagine. Would I let strangers sleep in my home, at my work, would I let a constant flow of Unknown Quantities stream past my kids?
No, I would not.
And this isn’t just my paranoia; Lupe says people he’s helped have stolen from him (he’s lost three cars this way), insulted him, made indecent proposals to his wife and daughters. He’s not a big favorite of the neighbors, either, some of whom consider him a lawbreaker. But he feels doing this work is his duty. Once, back in his early days as a Christian, a young Mennonite volunteer overheard him use the word
wetback
and referred him to Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”). Reading this, Lupe says, he was “changed forever.” His goal in life is now “to be humble and meek like Jesus,” and you see this desire working through him, in the things he does and the way he attempts to deflect credit (“Jesus is the doer!”).
To illustrate the way the current system of illegality creates secrecy and chaos, which in turn brings down worlds of shit, mostly on the poor, he tells me the following story:
Once upon a time, a young couple left Mexico and came north. Trying to avoid the Border Patrol, they crossed the river in a remote area, where they were set upon by “border bandits” who stole their shoes and money and raped the woman in front of the man. She became pregnant. Having become Christians, and after much soul-searching, the couple decided to keep the baby. But the woman’s water broke at five months, and the baby died ten minutes after its birth. The couple couldn’t afford a coffin, so Lupe called in a favor from a funeral director; the funeral home allowed a brief (twenty-minute) ceremony and donated a small cardboard box for the burial. The Mennonites acquired a small plot from the county and drove out in their own cars to bury the baby. At the grave, Lupe had to pry the dead baby out of the grieving mother’s arms. The woman was a mess but, being undocumented, was too afraid to seek psychological help. In her heart, she blamed the man for not defending her, blamed herself for not being able to carry the baby to full-term, blamed God for not helping them. The man, for his part, couldn’t make peace with the way he’d failed to protect her. In the end, the pain proved too much, and the couple separated.
The end.
“WHAT DO WE WANT? DEPORT THEM NOW!”
Let’s meet the
Rodriguezes
, who came from a
Very Poor Central American Country
and now live in
Somewhere, Texas.
The Rodriguez males are legal, the females not. Mr. Rodriguez came illegally but has since gotten his paperwork in order; their baby son was born here and so is a citizen—but the wife and daughters remain undocumented.
I visit them in their home, which Mr. Rodriguez built, by hand, out of cinder blocks, over the past five years, when not working his first job (laying tile), his second (factory watchman), or his third (growing their food in a backyard garden). The gray cinder blocks, arched doorways, and poured-concrete floor give the house the feeling of a medieval castle, had the king driven masonry nails into the cinder block in order to hang some framed family photos.
To get here, Mr. R. worked his way north through Mexico for two years, doing construction, learning local dialects along the way to avoid getting busted by Mexican immigration. He’s a big guy, hearty and happy, somebody you’d see beaming down from a Diego Rivera mural, but his time on the road seems to have spooked him. He saw people shaken down, unfairly arrested, robbed, murdered. He saw “lots of lifeless bodies” along the road.
“The real horror,” he says, “was in Mexico.”
For two years, his wife didn’t hear from him.
How did she feel during this silence?
She suddenly looks physically sick, says she doesn’t like to think of that time, when she was sure he was dead. She was trying to keep the farm going, baking
pan dulce
in a mud oven he’d built, a hundred small loaves at a time. Twice a week, she’d walk into town, tray on her head, and in this way supported a family of five.
Then came the earthquake.
It ruptured the walls of their adobe house, and she moved herself and the children into a shed she built of three sheets of government-supplied sheet metal, which was just big enough for a bed and a table, and unbearably hot in the daytime.
Then, one day, a letter came from America. He’d crossed on an inner tube, in a group, with coyote help, and lived briefly in a safe house that he left as soon as he found it was also being used in the drug trade.
“Wow,” I say, “how did you feel when you first saw his handwriting—”
“Muy contenta,
she says, with a smile so spontaneous and uncontrived you’d think their two-year separation had just that instant ended.
They don’t have insurance, she says, but then again, they never get sick: All their food is fresh, from their garden, she breast-fed the babies, they get good milk and cheese from their goats. In the past, she’s tried government-sponsored health-care programs, but she felt kind of ashamed accepting government aid and probably won’t be doing it again.
“It’s nice remembering these things,” he says, “now that we are all here together. But also it’s sad, because I remember those left behind on the road.”
“What’s your dream?” I ask. “You know, your eventual dream for your—”
“I have arrived at my dream already,” he says.
The oldest daughter brings in some vegetables from their garden—okra, big fat peppers. Is she, the daughter, in school?
“I’m a junior,” she says in perfect English.
Her passion is math. She wants to be a math teacher. I mention that my daughter’s in the throes of quadratic equations.
“Oh,” she says shyly. “I love those.”
“You love quadratic equations,” I say.
“I
love
them,” she says.
If this isn’t the essential American story, I don’t know what is: Guy hews a life out of nothing, by working every waking moment, with no education, no government help, no external advantages whatsoever, and no ulterior motive. What did he want? A place where his kids could grow up, with less fear and more material comforts.
Did he get it?
Yes, he did, God bless him.
LET US REDUCE OUR ENEMIES, SO WE CAN MOCK THEM MORE EASILY
The Minuteman Project is kicking off Operation Sovereignty, their “largest operation to date,” with a rally on a narrow strip-mall berm in Laredo. It’s a rally in the modern-American style: participants few, Media many.
The Minutemen angrily shout, “What do we want? Deport them now!”
Members of the Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste angrily shout, “Hey ho, hey ho, racist Minutemen got to go!”
A jaunty Mexican American, in wraparound sunglasses, wearing a serape, waving a Mexican flag, angrily shouts, “Who picks your potatoes? Who builds your houses?”
A Minuteman angrily shouts, re the Mexican Flag Guy, “He told me to get out of his CITY! This is my COUNTRY, man!”
Everyone’s pissed, oppositional, less empathetic and articulate and well-mannered than they would be at any other moment in their actual lives. The Media rushes around, sticking their cameras into the face of whoever’s behaving most badly at the moment.
A bespectacled little dude in a huge cowboy hat says he’s running for Congress in Austin.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
“Bad,” he says. “I don’t have any money.”
Does he have a position on the immigration issue? He does: Borders make a country, and we need a better border, namely, a wall.
But how do you do that, just, you know, physically?
Simple. Alter the border. Cede land to Mexico until the border is a long, straight line. Then run your wall from here to California.
I imagine that ugly map, beautiful border-curves of the Rio Grande made computer-straight.
I step over for a word with the Mexican Flag Guy. Because of my appearance (white, baseball-capped, middle-aged), he mistakes me for a Minuteman until, to prove I’m not a Minuteman, I disparage the Minutemen. We’re walking by a light pole, the base of which is exposed, a Possible Tripping Hazard. He points it out, saying that had I been a Minuteman, he would’ve let me fall on my ass.
Nearby, three Minutewomen stand in the midday sun with a sign:
Mexico’s a Bad Neighbor.
The Mexican Flag Guy taunts them: “It’s hot in that sun, isn’t it? That’s what you like about us, right? We don’t burn, baby!”
Which is kind of weird, since two of the Minutewomen are Hispanic, presumptive fellow nonburners.