La Mariposa en la Pared

Home

2011-10-08T00:19:00.008-04:00

"Esta gente aqui-" I let my eyes wander over the richly carved woodwork, and listened to the laughter from the gallery as artists with grey ponytails flirted with women wearing too much makeup, holding wine glasses. "Es que la gente aqui no son mi gente."

A couple walked in from the chilly evening, eyeing me suspiciously as if I were plotting something secret in my foreign tongue over the cell phone. I blinked and they glided by in a watery blur.

But how could it be? With my birth, my degree, my culture, by all means I should belong here. Only once in my life had I felt like I truly belonged anywhere. Not in high heels, not here. There. Among the big warm bodies with their earthy smells and whinneys, laboring and sweating, laboring and freezing, every day living alongside people who never failed to smile to me, to welcome me in a million different ways. Speaking the language that came to me like a gift. My learning it was a labor of love, my ultimate expression of the desire to understand and to be understood.

Now I'm home but I feel homesick. What is home? Is it a house? A city? My family is here but they have lives that have endured and changed while I was gone. My life is back there, abandoned back there along with the people who made that place feel like a home, of sorts. I feel like a ghost visiting where I once lived. I feel detached, like I'm floating near the ceiling, unable to get my feet under me.

Then I remember that I'm talking to someone who understands what it's like to be a stranger. For him, home is a confusing notion, too. The primos y amigos who surround him understand what he gave up, how hard it is to live day to day in a place where no one speaks your language, and that to go back home would mean to be among family, but family who don't know what his journey has been like. Family who feel hurt when you don't seem all that content to be home. Because you feel more at home among those who understand you best.

So many months away from home. So much effort to get back home. Only to find that home had changed from a location to a measure of belonging. And I belong with them.

La Despedida

2010-11-26T23:04:00.003-04:00

He sat alone in the dining area of the convenience store, waiting for the Greyhound bus. Beside him leaned two big black suitcases bulging with everything he had decided to take back with him to Guatemala. For ten years he had worked en los estados unidos. When he asked her to come see him before he left, she asked instead when he'd be back. "Nunca," he said.

That was unusual. Most who go home admit before they even leave that it's unlikely they'll be able to avoid having to return eventually to work en el norte.

Three hours were all that remained of his time here. After that, a bus would take him to Houston, and a plane would fly him to the land of eternal spring. It was a lonesome end to a lonesome long time. He had spent the last few months watching her work, blurting out "buenos dias" a little louder than he intended, smiling when he caught her eye, waiting for her to walk by. She had mostly ignored his calls and messages, after many polite no's, doubting his sincere I love yous in spite of his pleas in English.

"Hola."

He looked up from his clasped hands on the table. She looked into his surprised chocolate eyes and smiled. They just looked at each other for a long moment before she began to explain. "No pude dejarte salir sin decirte adios." The truth was that she knew she could go say goodbye, it was a short drive to where he was waiting, so why not? Why not give him a warm send off? Why not, when this simple kindness could make him happy? She felt compelled, and she knew that she wouldn't regret it.

"Estas sola?" he asked hopefully. "No.. I gave someone a ride.. he's waiting in the car." She hadn't wanted to put herself in a compromising position, and she was pretty sure that the man in the car would understand if she ended up having to explain herself.

They spoke for several minutes, looking into each others eyes, committing one others faces to memory.

"I wish I could kiss you."

She pulled up a chair and sat opposite him, and leaned forward, and smiled. "You can."

It was their first and last kiss, and it was the kind that she wished she could repeat again, and often.

She stood and hugged him, and they hugged ever tighter, and then she kissed his forehead - feliz viaje - and his cheek - y que te cuides - and his other cheek - mucho.

"This is the best gift you could have given me," he said softly. The tears in his eyes reflected her own, and it was she who felt she had received a gift.

"Adios."

A Simple Request

2010-10-31T15:21:00.004-04:00

The most common complaint I hear about how difficult it is to learn English is that the words are not spelled phonetically like Spanish words are. Trying to learn to speak English from reading study guides or Spanish/English dictionaries is frustrating, because one is left still unsure of how to pronounce the words just from looking at the way they're written.

I've become familiar with the vernacular spellings used by migrants with little formal education. They sometimes make Spanish even more phonetic than it already is, and shun the B in favor of V, since the two letters make an almost identical sound in Spanish, anyway. Many have written more by sending text messages on their new cell phones than they did in their everyday lives before they came here.

While out walking my dogs yesterday, I found a crumpled piece of notebook paper lying alongside the sidewalk, and the writing on it caught my eye:

"ai nid ei jercot on leyers end ai want jailaids on all heair"

It is a simple request, written phonetically in English but with the letters having a mixture of English and Spanish pronounciations. Keeping in mind that the Spanish J sounds like our H, if you read it out loud, it makes perfect sense.

Deciphering the note reminded me a bit of trying to make out the meaning of an early 19th century diary written by a New England farm wife. Vernacular spellings were common here back then, too, when formal schooling for most people was spotty at best. Of the migrants I know, most of the Mexicans have made it through about the 8th or 9th grade, and among the Guatemalans, 4th grade is about the extent of their schooling.

I wanted to share the note, partially because I am fascinated by language in all its uses, and partially to make a couple points. The first one being that this note is emblematic of how challenging it is to communicate even simple requests in a language other than your own. This is a difficulty faced by many immigrants, and can be quite serious if the problem is a matter of health or safety, life or death. The note shows that someone who knew how to speak the words had tried to write them in such a way that one who doesn't speak English could later repeat them accurately by reading the note outloud.

Secondly, consider our immigration system, with all its bureaucracy and difficulties. Few people try to navigate it without the help of a lawyer, but many have been misled by their attorneys, or become hopelessly lost in the system after trying to do everything right themselves. Now imagine trying to approach this system, and tackle the paperwork, deadlines, roadblocks, exclusions and exceptions, having only an elementary school education. I'm not talking about stupid people. I'm talking about people who know more about life, death, happiness, work, and surviving corruption and violence, than I will ever know. But with education comes more than literacy. There comes a confidence with all things written that one who lacks an education does not have. That lack of confidence can make some things so intimidating, that a man who has lept onto moving trains and crossed half a continent enduring regular beatings and robbings can find himself frightened to enter an office or sign a paper.

I'm not saying this to make excuses for not immigrating legally. For most of the poor and unskilled migrants who wish to work here, there is no legal recourse, period. I just feel that most people who talk about reforming the immigration system know very little about the people it needs to serve. And, I feel that there's a serious lack of compassion and understanding toward migrants, and the problems they face, from the horrific conditions they have fled, to just wanting to get a decent haircut. This note is a little step into their shoes.

Delicious Stories of Connecting

2010-05-30T09:32:00.005-04:00

Food has always been a universal tool for bringing people together. Shared meals have often been the bridge between me and those I seek to understand. The flavors transcend language, the ingredients speak of the land which their fathers still work, their mother's recipes adapted to a lonely new world open wide a window into their past where cooking was done by women, communally and over fire, instead of alone in electric griddles.

But the solitude disappears when these simple meals are shared. The feeling of being an outsider evaporates, and we become more like brothers and sisters.

I'm not the only one to have felt this sacred connection over a shared table. A few years ago, I added my voice to that of many others to create a collection of stories of love and food, traveling and connecting. The result: a book, complete with recipes, the proceeds of which will go to send slum kids in New Delhi, India, to vocational school, thanks to Rotary International.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A Scrumptious Summer Read That Celebrates Traveling, Connecting, and Eating Around the World

FEMALE NOMAD
AND FRIENDS
Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World
by Rita Golden Gelman

“Tales from around the world, which . . . affirm a sense of human decency, generosity, and community beyond the borders of language or political affiliation. . . . All feature an appealing sincerity.” —Kirkus Reviews

When Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman was published in 2001, it became an instant worldwide bestseller. The story of Gelman selling all of her possessions and becoming a nomad—traveling through many countries and homes around the world—captivated readers. Gelman insisted on putting her personal e-mail address in the last chapter of her book and was flooded with correspondence from readers worldwide who offered their guest rooms, couches, meals, and—most important—stories from their own nomadic adventures.

In her follow-up, FEMALE NOMAD AND FRIENDS: Tales of Breaking Free and Breaking Bread Around the World (A Three Rivers Press Original, June 1, 2010), Gelman includes many of her own further adventures, as well as essays by writers and readers celebrating the connections they’ve made around the world. The stories in this moving anthology include people taking risks, seeking adventure, stepping out of the box, and discovering that beneath the beautiful differences that make us unique there is a universal sameness that bonds us.

FEMALE NOMAD AND FRIENDS also pays homage to the wonders of cooking and eating around the world, and includes more than thirty travel-inspired, taste-tested, and author-approved recipes. Among these fabulous international dishes are vegetarian dolmades (stuffed grape leaves), chiles en nogada (stuffed poblano chiles topped with a white cream sauce with walnuts and a sprinkle of pomegranate seeds), and ho mok (an extraordinary fish coconut custard from Thailand).

Happy reading—and bon appétit, selamat makan , buen provecho!

All of the royalties from FEMALE NOMAD AND FRIENDS will be used to fund educational scholarships for kids from the slums of New Delhi.

About the Author
Rita Golden Gelman is the author of Tales of a Female Nomad and more than seventy children’s books, including More Spaghetti, I Say!, a staple in every first-grade classroom. As a nomad, Rita has no permanent address. She is currently involved in an initiative called Let’s Get Global, a project of U.S. Servas, Inc., a national movement designed to bring the gap year to the United States. Learn more at: Lets Get Global.

Female Nomad and Friends
By Rita Golden Gelman
A Three Rivers Press Original | On Sale: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-58801-2| $15.00 | 352 pages
www.crownpublishing.com
www.threeriverspress.com
www.ritagoldengelman.com

El Día de los Muertos, El Día de los Difuntos

2009-11-01T12:37:00.006-04:00

To some people, the Day of the Dead is an ugly pagan holiday, something akin to devil worship. In the white protestant world, it's poorly understood, and therefore feared and looked down upon.

Yesterday, as I was talking with someone I love about a Halloween greeting I had received from a Guatemalan friend, she said, "But don't they celebrate the day of death or whatever?" It wasn't just the mistaken name, but the tone with which she said it, that made me cringe. What I heard was her refusal to respect what she didn't understand. What I understood was that, to her, the blending of pre-Columbian and Catholic traditions had produced something sinister rather than something sacred.

I remember learning about the Day of the Dead in Spanish class in high school. What I didn't get out of it was the beauty of the day's intent. I remember candy and skeletons. I remember it as the "Mexican halloween." I never even saw a Day of the Dead altar until I saw this one:

All by herself, Luis' grandmother lovingly placed food, dishes, flowers, and candles in memory of her departed husband. He was on her mind as she worked. Less like Halloween and more like Memorial Day, the Day of the Dead is for remembering those who have died. Families gather and celebrate the rememberance of their beloved departed. The belief is that their spirits return to earth to visit the living on that day, so they are welcomed with their favorite foods, their way lighted by candles.

It is a hallowed day.

Rudi's Return

2009-10-19T11:23:00.006-04:00

I almost didn't recognize him. The defeated stoop of his shoulders, the pale of his once morena clara skin, nearly caused me to look away. But he looked at my eyes in the rearview mirror as I was just leaving, and I stopped.

His smile is still silver, but now when he smiles, he only does so with his mouth. His eyes don't follow along. They're sad, and they're flat black, like holes in his face. I couldn't stop looking at his eyes as we talked. This 27 year old had aged a decade since I had last seen him.

Rudi asked, Cuanto te debo? How much do I owe you?

Oh, Rudi, that was a long time ago. Ya me he olvidado. I've forgotten it already.

But he insists, and I think that even though I never expected to be repaid, maybe it's essential to his dignity that I allow him to repay me. In Mexico, he lost some of his dignity, but he also lost a ton of money. Not money that he had to lose, but his future earnings. He was kidnapped on his way back here, held for ransom, and now on top of the cost of his passage, he owes $6,000 to his friends and family who paid for his freedom.

It kind of makes the $600 I paid the lawyer seem insignificant. I was happy for the chance to help him, and although it came to naught, it was not money wasted. It was proof that, as he sat in that glowing white hot tent in Texas, someone cared for him and wanted him out of there. He was deported back to Guatemala anyway, where he lived and, according to his primos here, suffered, until he had the strength to cross Mexico again.

That crossing took years of his life, and that sparkling-eyes-and-teeth smile I had loved to see directed at me.

He had called me once from Guatemala, told me there was no work, and he would return in March, nearly a year after he was deported. March came and went, and I asked about him. His cousin told me, he's in Mexico. He left Concepcion Las Minas the end of February.

But it's April.

He called his mother and said someone took him, not la migra, not the police. They're holding him there. He can't leave until he pays them six thousand dollars.

What does that do to a man? How can he swallow the injustice of having to pay so much money to someone whose only intent is to cause him more suffering? On top of the injustice of poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunity in his homeland, lack of respect in the only place that offers him any hope at all for a better life. I burn with injustice at being ripped off in simple everyday purchases. But six thousand dollars, for nothing? Just for the privilege of continuing an already terrible journey?

I complain when my flight to Key West is delayed, bitch and moan about my "lost" luggage that I have to wait an agonizing 24 hours to receive. Rudi lost two months, sitting in the middle of a hostile place, just waiting. Waiting for his destitute family to collect and send that $6,000.

The injustice of this is indescribable.

Nearly two months after he left Guatemala, Rudi was back here, with a mountain of debt to pay. He took no time to rest and recover. Mowing lawns, washing dishes, he dove instantly back into his work, the same work he was doing when he was arrested for having committed no crime aside from simply being here, working.

Rudi didn't tell me any of this. I heard it from his cousins. For me, Rudi had nothing but his best attempt at a smile, and two questions: How have you been? and, What do I owe you?

Unapologetic Love

2009-06-21T13:26:00.006-04:00

Death is, in a way, a blessing to those of us who remain. It reminds us how short and precious life is. It keeps us from drifting too far away from what matters the most. Death gives us an opportunity to stop for a minute and think of the people we love, people we take for granted every day, people who may not be here for us tomorrow.

I see death pass me on all sides, causing awful holes in the lives of people I know. Gone are mothers, brothers, husbands, children. I'm sorry for those who have lost someone they love.

Just this morning alone, I've been told to be my best, for God and myself. Ask forgiveness, offer a balm for an unnecessary hurt. Thank you, Tim Chavez, for being a voice for the voiceless, and for writing as long as you could.

Thank you, Luis Urrea, for reaching out in your time of sadness and loss to those of us who need the reminder: Don't wait another minute to tell someone you love them.

..if you love somebody, tell them now. If you're mad at them, get over it. If you miss them, write them or call them. Tomorrow might not come around in time. Love them now.

DREAMers Are Our Future

2009-01-14T12:57:00.003-04:00

Thousands of students are hoping for the chance to realize their dreams of higher education and employment as fully contributing members of society through the passage of the DREAM Act. Undocumented students are currently faced with closed doors at every turn, through no fault of their own. They are barred from receiving financial aid and scholarships, and some states have begun to bar undocumented students from attending community colleges. Even after working hard and paying their own way through college, their job prospects are cut off by their lack of working papers. They can't get a driver's license, can't work legally, can't be the fully productive Americans they want to be.

We all lose when the talent and ambition of these bright young people goes to waste. We can all win by opening the doors of opportunity to those who work so hard and deserve the chance to succeed.

You can take 2 easy steps to support the passage of the DREAM Act!

At Change.gov, add your vote and your voice to President-elect Obama's Citizen's briefing book. The most popular ideas will be presented to him after his swearing in, so every vote is vital to getting the DREAM Act the attention it deserves!

At Change.org, your vote will help make the DREAM Act a priority in making positive change in our country a reality. The deadline for this action is Thursday, January 15, at 5 p.m. EST.

Help ensure a bright future for the United States of America through our immigrant children. It's how this country has always grown and prospered! It's the American Dream!

Angel Crossing

2008-12-02T01:01:00.006-04:00

Workers lined up outside the U.S. consulate office in Monterrey seeking work visas. (© AP Images)

Angel rides Thoroughbreds, bathes them, feeds them, cares for them when they're sick. He speaks to them in Spanish, sometimes in English if necessary. He works legally in the U.S., thanks to the 4 month work permit he carries.

He returned to Mexico this week to renew his permit, which was due to expire. It's the second time he's done it, the last time was fairly easy, so he expected no problems. He figured he would spend a week staying in his parents' house, visiting family and friends, renew his visa, and return to work by the following Monday. Even though Christmas is coming up, and his brother will arrive to spend the holiday with the family, Angel couldn't afford to stay that long. He was anxious to get back to work.

Early in the morning, Angel went into the city to wait in line for his visa. In the late afternoon, he returned to his parents' house empty handed.

It seems there aren't enough work permits to go around. Angel was applying for his third 4-month visa, and apparently, the people applying for the first time get preference. Come back in a year, they said, and apply again.

"What can I do here for a year? There's no work here, and my job is waiting for me there."

I asked, "So what are you going to do?"

"I'm leaving, Friday or Saturday, so I can be back to work on Monday."

"Leaving, how? How can you return without your permit?"

"There's a guy who can bring me across for dos mil quinientos. Like they do for little children. He says I won't even have to walk."

So... let me get this straight. He was here working legally, just long enough to get settled, acquire stuff of his own, get into the groove of his own routine of work-eat-bathe-sleep. Just long enough to learn his job well, so well that he moved from cleaning stalls to riding racehorses in a matter of months. Just long enough to take the edge off his homesickness, until he had to go back to renew that little 4-month work visa. He had had no troubles with the law. And now -

If he stays in Mexico for a year to wait to re-apply (without any guarantee that he will be approved again) for a visa, he will lose his job. His boss will have to hire someone new, someone lucky enough to have gotten a work visa, or maybe he'll have to hire someone desperate enough to work without one. His boss will have to retrain this new person and hope he's as good with the horses as Angel was. Meanwhile, Angel will try to find work in Mexico, but even so will most likely be a burden instead of a help to his family.

But Angel does not want to burden his mother, and he does not want to lose his job. Instead, he will pay $2500 to be smuggled across the border. If he's caught, he will be processed and will have a criminal record. He will face a ban of 10 years to enter the U.S. legally. He may go to jail.

Or, the smuggler may not keep his promise of a safe ride across the border. He may drop him off just short, make him walk or swim across, and promise to meet him after just a couple hours' walk on the other side. That couple hours' walk could stretch into a couple days, unprepared and without water, in the desert. Or, his safe ride across the border for the bargain price of $2500 could end in a house in an American city where he could be held against his will until he pays more money, more than he had originally agreed to pay.

Dos mil quinientos is a lot of money, hard earned and better spent to help keep his sister in college than to end up in a coyote's pocket. Angel is a good man, has done everything legally up to this point. His family has become dependent on his income, and he has come to love being employed where he is treated well and can live pretty well on what little he keeps of his earnings. No one can imagine how much better that is than the alternative, until you consider all that he is willing to pay and risk for it. Then it becomes a little easier to understand.

¿Y Que?

2008-11-03T12:38:00.003-04:00

Sunday morning as Luis and I were leaving the Western Union office, I pointed to the headline on the local paper: "Obama aunt illegally living in U.S."

"Mira, la tia de Obama es una indocumentada." I said, wondering what he would think of this earth shattering news.

He raised his eyebrows, and shrugged, and said, so what? Everyone at some point arrived here illegally.

This is the reaction of one who is also labeled indocumentado. Undocumented. Illegal. This is the reaction of an indigenous Mexican.

El Miedo y La Hermandad

2008-10-22T15:39:00.005-04:00

Sunday after a walk along the shore of Cayuga Lake, Luis and I decided to have dinner at a Mexican restaurant we had never noticed before.

As we walked in the door, they locked eyes like long lost brothers, and their questions flew back and forth in español rápido, first pertaining to each other’s nationality. “Soy Poblano,” Luis said. “Ah, de Puebla, Mexico?” replied our host, his uncertainty betraying his relative unfamiliarity with Mexico. “Soy de Ecuador,” he offered; this, his proof of their brotherhood. Luis has told me he believes that they’re all one people – Mexicans, Guatemalans, Colombianos, Chileños - all de la misma sangre. Not everyone believes this, or if they believe it, sometimes don’t want to admit it. But these two men, they believed it. They celebrated it.

It was one of those moments when I had again become the outsider, an appreciative spectator to their meeting in this town with so few hispanos, where seeing one is a surprise for me, but like a homecoming for them.

He seated us at a table and Luis asked, “How long have you been here working?” They always, always, use the word work - trabajo - when talking about their lives or when asking others about theirs.

Like the man from Toluca at the circle center in Indianapolis who, within moments of making my acquaintance, lowered his eyes and said this life is full of work, hard work. He spoke of his life and his days with work being the thread that held it all together. Exhausted, his thoughts were dominated by the need to work, by the work he had done that day with his paint smeared hands, and by the work that waited for him tomorrow. He hardly knew what to say, because his phrases, like his thoughts, were constantly interrupted by that word, trabajo. But that’s a story for another day.

I looked up at el cuencano and his eyes darted nervously from Luis to me and back again. His smile faded. “You mean here.. here at this restaurant, or in the United States?” Oh God, he looks like he’s being interrogated, I thought. I recognized his nervousness and tried to reassure him with a smile, trying to meet his eyes because, surely, ICE agents don’t make eye contact while chatting up their prey. I wanted so badly to put him at ease, our gracious host now suspicious of this mexicano and this gringa asking him questions.

I remember when such friendly conversation in a Mexican restaurant between curious patrons and their foreign hosts was innocent and not a cause for alarm. I remember precisely the day it all changed, when the smiling waiters became guarded, and the singing kitchen workers became quiet, working with their heads down and one eye on the back door. Such questions used to be nothing more than the locals’ attempts at understanding these new people with no apparent ties to our little town. It was the chance to learn about and welcome them to our stagnant town in need of new dreamers, with their new enthusiasm and hunger for the freedom and affluence of which we had grown complacent. Seeing our town through eager new eyes was refreshing, it reminded us of all that we had to be thankful for. They reminded us of our Italian grandparents, of our English ancestors and their idealistic dreams. It was our first impulse to wish them well as they began the hard work to prosper here.

As the two men continued to trade questions and answers, our host regained some of the disarmed joy that had shone unabashedly from his face the moment we first walked in the door. He turned his shoulders and directed his words in my direction a little bit more, finally met my eyes, a gift of trust and acceptance that I received with gratitude, knowing from whence his momentary distrust had come.

After our delicious meal, he shook hands with Luis and with me, two or three times in our journey from our table to the exit, all of us proclaiming - ¡mucho gusto, mucho gusto! Such pleasure, such pleasure, at having met.

"I didn't stop."

2008-10-22T12:32:00.004-04:00

He walked away, the voices of the police officers calling out to his back. "Come here and show me your identification."

Was he afraid that he would be pursued, knocked to the pavement, handcuffed and put into the van with the others? Did the skin on his back prickle at the thought of a bullet that could be sent to stop him in his tracks?

If so, those fears were not as strong as the ones that made Enrique keep walking.

According to la chota, they were responding to complaints that a group of day laborers, who had gathered at that spot daily for the last 3 years without incident, were blocking the sidewalk and "congregating."

For that, these men who were seeking work - not buying and selling drugs, not begging, not fighting - some of whom are the primary breadwinners for their families that are so lucky to have mothers always in the home to care for the children, these men were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Is it also disorderly conduct when a group of white guys in suits block the sidewalk waiting for a bus or a train, or waiting to cross at the crosswalk on their way to their jobs? If more than one of them at a time pause on the sidewalk to take a sip from their Starbucks cups or talk on their cellphones or punch important information about stock trades into their blackberries, and block my way as I try to pass, is that also disorderly conduct? Sound absurd?

No more absurd than a group of day laborers waiting to go to work being charged with disorderly conduct. Then again, groups of brown men congregating on a sidewalk do not strike terror into my soul. They remind me of every single wave of immigrants to ever come to New York seeking a better life. Giving more than they take. Willing to work hard at whatever job that needs to be done.

A Dispatch from Our Future: Allie in Slovakia

2008-09-09T15:10:00.006-04:00

In light of this sad news of violence between African immigrants and Roma in Spain, I thought I would post my daughter's excited news of a class she is taking in school in Slovakia:

o i have to tell u! i have a Roma class! its mandatory for every high school student in slovakia to take a class on the language and culture of the Romas. but everyone regards it as a huge joke. apparently from what i gather from the students, the Romas are the source of all the crime in SK, they steal, beat people up, and hate evryone and everything. i find this hard to believe. they are a group with no homeland who is forced to live as slovaks live. the slovaks hate them more then they hate the slovaks. its tricky, but im very interested in their culture. sadly the class is in slovak, so for a while i wont understand, but i have the class all year i think.

A required high school course that aims to increase understanding of the Roma and erase people's negative attitudes toward them is a good start, but as Allie said, the kids see the class as a joke. No matter what they are taught in the class, if they go home and learn intolerance from their parents and grandparents, they will only continue to perpetuate that intolerance in spite of what they're told in school.

I wonder how long it will be before our kids are required to take a class on Latino culture in school, and how many of them will regard it as a joke? I hope things don't get to that point here, but there are so many things that do point in that direction. Allie has told me of her many heated discussions about immigration in her social studies classes here in NY with students who, as she put it, were just repeating what they had heard their bigoted parents say at home. She said that, while her teachers were impressed and even admitted that she helped them see things differently, the students often continued to be closed-minded and prejudiced.

We all - Americans and Slovaks - have a responsibility to teach our kids to see a person's humanity first, before we see their skin color or their ethnicity. This kind of learning has got to begin at home, or all the well-intentioned classes at school will only continue to be a source of jokes for the kids.

Documentary: Valley of Tears

2008-08-26T17:07:00.002-04:00

SnagFilms has released a film that looks at the migrant labor community around Raymondville, Texas (home of this horrible place, where my friend Rudi spent several months), throughout the nearly 30 years since the 1979 onion workers' strike. It's the story of the workers' struggle for equality and a better life.

Todos Somos Migrantes

2008-08-18T22:02:00.004-04:00

Today, my baby girl is a migrant.

She is headed four thousand miles away, and she will be gone a year. We've been preparing for this trip for almost as long, since she first decided she wanted to be a Rotary exchange student. Her decision left me proud and excited for her, and not until my last few days with her did I begin to feel the dread of seeing her leave, knowing I wouldn't see her again for a long time. But my sadness at her leaving is tempered somewhat by the certainty, barring any tragedies, that I will see her again, and by the finite amount of time that she will be away.

My ache at being separated from my daughter is eased by something else, too: by the knowledge that what I am experiencing pales in comparison to what thousands of mothers are going through as their children set off on more perilous, less certain, journeys.

Those mothers don't have the means to provide all the comforts that will sustain their children on their journey - my daughter filled her wallet with cash and two suitcases with clothes, toiletries, books, a photo album, and a blanket her friends made for her; their children will carry little money, and maybe a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and a photograph, and will be robbed of those few things shortly into their journey.

Those mothers don't have the means to provide a plane ticket, and their children don't have the right to ride in a plane. Their children will walk, or be smuggled in dark, airless, claustrophobic secrecy for days on end. I remember my mind's odd reaction to hearing Milton tell me of traveling across Mexico in the luggage compartment of a bus, then across the U.S. in the trunk of a car. I remember thinking of my own trip across the U.S. to Mexico, and how I loved watching the landscape change as it passed by outside my window. And I thought, how sad that he didn't get to see any of the scenery through which he passed on his long journey from Guatemala to New York. He was my daughter's age, 16, when he made that trip.

Those mothers don't have the political importance I enjoy, simply by being an American citizen, to ensure that my daughter will receive a visa, allowing her to stay legally in Slovakia for a year. They will have to swallow the unfairness of their children being denied traveling papers because they are poor and foreign.

Those mothers do not have the comfort of knowing that smiling, helpful, caring people are waiting to greet their children at the end of their trip. Those mothers can only hope for the best as they watch their children leave. They feel that surely God will bless their precious child in the land of opportunity. Surely their child, too, will enjoy what so many others have headed to that great country to find: honest work, good pay, and the freedom to follow their dreams. They can only hope and pray that the Americans will be kind to their children.

While I waited hours to receive a phone call from my daughter telling me she had arrived safely, I thought of the mothers who wait weeks to hear whether their children made it safely to the United States. Some of those mothers will never receive a call, while others will only receive bad news.

While my daughter stretched her cramped legs and wished for a shower after her 8 hour flight, other daughters faced a frigid swim in a river and miles of walking across a desert, after 20 days of hunger, of no sleep and the constant threats of rape that, for most of them, became horribly real as they fought and begged their way north.

As my daughter entered a country that welcomes her as an ambassador of peace and cross-cultural understanding, as people smile patiently at her attempts to use a new language, the sons and daughters of so many other mothers endure hostility and hate as they try to make sense of their new environment.

My daughter is happy and comfortable in the home of her host family, surrounded by people who are committed to keeping her safe. I would be horrified if this were not the case. I miss my daughter, but I do not fear for her well being.

No mother should have to endure the pain of knowing their child is being denied compassion, protection from violence, or medical care when they're suffering. Those mothers know as I do that their children are no less precious than mine. All the protections and opportunities that my daughter enjoys is all that any mother anywhere would naturally want for hers.

Why should any child be less deserving than mine, simply because he or she was born on some other piece of earth, outside of the man-made border of the United States of America?

So while my fears are few and I feel fortunate to be spared the desperation that other mothers feel for their migrating children, my comfort comes at the expense of those mothers whose suffering need not be inevitable. The degree to which our country - specifically the poisonous attitude of intolerance and hate that is creeping into people's minds, the unchecked abuses of power wielded by the Department of Homeland Security's ICE, the broken immigration laws that determine who is worthy to live and prosper here, and the economic policies that keep so many in Latin America living in desperate poverty - is responsible for those mother's greatest fears come true, that suffering is not inevitable.

We as Americans need to do everything we can to put a stop to that suffering.

That is one reason I am willing to sacrifice a year of my time with my daughter to share her with others. She is aware of how lucky she is, and she has heard first-hand the stories of migrants. Her heart carries compassion for them, and her conscience carries a mandate to help make the world a better place for everyone. This is a message that she brings to a part of the world that is not immune to the vilification of migrants.

My daughter is migrating to another country for some of the same reasons people migrate to ours: for the experience and for the adventure. She goes without fear and without the desperation born of poverty. She goes with the protections and privileges that Americans enjoy, and for that I am grateful; without that, I would not have let her go.

Her absence makes me remember the "other mothers" who are missing their migrating children, and I hope that her journey can remind more people to remember them, too.

Donna Poisl, A Friendly Voice for Immigrants

2008-08-11T16:06:00.007-04:00

Donna Poisl has the right idea. She is the author of How to Live & Thrive in the U.S. / Como Vivir y Prosperar en los Estados Unidos, a bilingual guide for immigrants to everything from seeking medical care to opening a bank account. Her aim is to help immigrants to learn our system and live successfully in the U.S. as active members of society rather than as passive visitors. The book is available spiral-bound, with English printed on the left and Spanish on the right to facilitate its use by advocates, such as ESL teachers, in helping to instruct their students.

I wish I had known about this book a long time ago, for the many times I've guided migrants to walk-in clinics, dentist offices, and emergency rooms, and tried to answer questions about auto insurance, drivers' licences, and various other "documents."

I want to add, however, that most of the challenges faced by those I know were compounded by their being undocumented, and I don't want to invite hate-mail by implying that she has written this book to help undocumented migrants navigate (i.e. take advantage of) "the system." From food stamps to Planned Parenthood, undocumented immigrants aren't eligible for public relief, anyway. In fact, in spite of what some nativists like to say about immigrants' receiving social services, those I know rely on each other for support in times of need, rather than trying to get anything for free, and when given the chance, pay their hospital bills in installments rather than walking away from their obligation.

Poisl's book is on my list of things to purchase with my next paycheck, so I haven't read it yet. It seems an invaluable resource for anyone who works with or advocates for immigrants of all kinds. Whether a person is documented or not, it's ultimately better for everyone if they know what to do in an emergency, what their rights are, and how to live as seamlessly as possible among us.

Donna also keeps a blog, highlighting mostly positive articles relating to immigrants and their lives here. Her advocacy - helping to orient immigrants in their new surroundings and guide them to sources of support, and her blog's emphasis on the positive impact of immigrants on our communities - is a powerful force in the right direction, creating win-win situations for immigrants and those who live alongside them, and countering the negative press that aims to vilify immigrants.

Fear & Despair: Thanks, Department of Homeland (In-)Security!

2008-07-09T12:58:00.005-04:00

I've heard more and more lately something along the lines of, "I changed my tune about immigration issues once I got to personally know some immigrants." That has been the idea behind this blog from the very beginning, to present the lives of immigrants, some documented and many not, so that more people can get to know them as people, as fellow human beings, each with a story, each worthy of love and dignity.

Occasionally, though, I have to show the ugly things that are happening to them, all in the name of the Law. For every victory in the name of human dignity, it seems like we are suffering a thousand defeats. I say "we" because injustice against any person is cause for alarm; an injury to one is an injury to all.

I become overwhelmed at times with it all, hence my long spells of silence, when my stories of migrants learning to live here and dance here and love here seem frivolous in light of the increasingly nerve-wracking reality that they live with every day.

Sunday morning two kitchen workers showed up to the restaurant bright and early to begin preparing food for the day. They stood by the door finishing off their cigarettes when a car pulled up beside them, and a voice in Spanish called out from a lowered window, "What time do you guys open?" Always happy to hear his language spoken in a town where it hardly ever is, Jaime smiled and approached the car to answer the question.

More questions followed. Did he know of any Hispanic barber shops in the area? How about Mexican grocery stores? Because the occupants of the car were clearly Hispanic, perhaps their questions were innocent, he thought. But Jaime knows as well as any of us that the hispanos around here all know each other, and they know where to get their hair cut, and where to buy their groceries.

Milton hung back, frowning, as an eerily familiar feeling of dread and mistrust washed over him. Their language and their ethnicity did not put him at ease. He felt uneasy, and catching Jaime's eye, shook his head ever so slightly and took another step back.

After giving vague and unhelpful answers to their questions, Jaime stepped back, too, and the car drove away.

Both boys climbed solemnly back into their little truck and went home. The restaurant did not open that day, and they both lost a day's pay. Living in fear is not only demoralizing, it is also costly, as a restaurant and it's workers lose their income even as bills still need to be paid.

Now, who in my community feels safer from terrorism? How, exactly, is this kind of fear and loathing helpful to our economy and our security? How does the intimidation and detention of kitchen workers make our country better?

It doesn't.

Nor do things like this. Or this. I could go on, but that's enough despair for one day.

Musing on Simple Things

2008-06-03T12:50:00.005-04:00

This is a bit off topic for my blog, but I couldn't help but feel delighted that the blogueros in two of my favorite places, Key West and Antigua, Guate, chose to highlight their appreciation of simplicity today in their respective, decidedly complex and sometimes commercialized, locations.

"...how can something as mundane as a wooden beam produce pleasure to look at, enjoyment at the touch, happiness at its humid-old-wooden smell?"

Shady, scrappy beaches and massive wooden posts may not be the first things that come to mind when one thinks of Key West and La Antigua, but our generously-blogging ambassadors in paradise know how to see the divine in the commonplace, and how to weave these simple things into the lives they live filled with gratitude, the kind of sweet gratitude that is multiplied by sharing it with others.

"I think we have a long way to go before we learn to appreciate the simple things in life, the non- consumptive way of life, demanded by ratty beaches, small engines and finding pleasure in what is there, unbidden, stumbled upon, borne of an idle afternoon's exploration."

It's not such a long way, really, to this kind of appreciation; all it takes is for one person to take that narrow, overgrown path, and to share with others the delight that comes from seeing the forest beyond the trees.

Mariposita Soñadora

2008-05-16T16:14:00.004-04:00

"It seems as though the drama of crossing is just preparation, a taste of what is to come. It is training for becoming a shadow; for becoming sub human, for being broken into lowering your gaze and doing the work for less than minimum wage. ..having to go through the border is just practice for what is to come."

She and I may share a name, but I write only what I see. This girl is living the life of an undocumented student, and writing about it. Read the life of a DREAMer, here.

And here is more information on what it means to be a DREAMer.

Know The Truth

2008-04-22T12:15:00.001-04:00

Loving, Part 2

2008-04-01T14:12:00.015-04:00

In the Bible, this is called "agape love." This is exactly what I have tried but failed to explain, but that has become more apparent to me since the morning of February 24th. This kind of love is not a feeling; to describe it as a feeling is to make it something fleeting. It's the kind of love you choose, the kind of love that doesn't change, but that changes you forever.

"The most mutually respectful of emotions, where your fate is entwined with another’s, where you could never be truly safe if they are in danger, truly free if they are imprisoned, truly happy if they are unhappy. We call it love. I don’t just mean romantic love... . I mean the moral, even spiritual love --- a deep feeling of connection to other human beings, that their struggles are our struggles, their pain our pain, and that no one person’s happiness or security or hopes for the future can be rightly put above any one else’s."

- Sally Kohn, Movement Vision Labs.

Los Desaparecidos

2008-03-20T20:25:00.016-04:00

Sunday morning, February 24, some people I love disappeared. They showed up to work, and waited in the parking lot for the boss to unlock the door. Milton stood outside his little truck, smoking a cigarette and sipping bottled water. Rudi reclined in the front seat, wishing for a few more hours of sleep. Victor talked, as usual. Rudi wished he'd do a little less of it, and his closed eyes and sighs were unsuccessful in conveying his wish.

When we arrived hours later, Milton's water bottle still sat on the ground next to his truck, his keys tossed onto the front seat. The passenger seat was still reclined, the way Rudi had abruptly left it. It was as though the men had just evaporated.

While some of us read the morning paper, drank coffee, lingered in bed, made love, or worshiped the Lord, others were hard at work thoughtlessly plucking people from their lives of work and worry and placing them into prisons at the taxpayers' burden. A group of ICE officers, who had dined and drank and yucked it up with the waiter at that very restaurant the night before, laughed at the funny joke they were now playing on their gracious hosts. One woman officer, who had gotten tipsy and had her picture taken with Victor the night before, winked at him when he recognized her. "Just doing my job, baby," she purred. Always popular with the ladies, and always respectful and charming, he had prepared her dinner just hours before she and her cohorts returned to insult him.

These brave soldiers say they were protecting us from the worst of the worst, criminal aliens who threaten us and our children.

But I know that's a lie.

"ICE claims that Operation Return to Sender was designed to arrest criminals and individuals with old deportation orders, people whom ICE calls 'fugitives.' But the statistics belie this explanation. Of the 2,079 people arrested in New Jersey last year under this program, 87% had no criminal record, and as few as 1 in 3 were "fugitives" with outstanding deportation orders. These statistics demonstrate that the program has been used as a pretext for dragnet searches in which ICE makes thousands of what it euphemistically calls 'collateral arrests'..."

Out of the six taken from the parking lot that Sunday morning by ICE's Fugitive Operations Team, only one had a criminal record, and he had served his time. The others were more law abiding than most of us.

Now, instead of working, paying their bills, paying their rents, and supporting their families, they are languishing in detention camps and juvenile homes. Counterproductive, poor use of taxpayers' dollars, misplaced "national security" priorities - only begin to describe this excessive use of militant force against working migrants. The punishment does not fit the "crime."

One week later, as we were still reeling from the February 24th raid, another hermano was taken away. He was speeding, and the policeman who pulled him over was a friend of his. But once entered into the computer, his information came up flagged by the Department of Homeland Security. He was immediately taken to the county jail. Less than two days later, he was en route to the Federal Detention Center in Batavia. He placed one phone call, only to tell us not to bother with a lawyer, because there is nothing we can do. He is kicking himself for getting caught for something as foolish, and preventable, as driving too fast.

Who was this criminal alien, and why was his name on the list of fugitives to be summarily deported?

Just days before he was taken, Jose asked me for advice. He began by saying, "I entered this country legally."

"Wait a minute. Did you have a visa?" I had heard him make this assertion before, and I was curious what legal means he'd had of coming here.

"No. Mira pues.." That's usually how he begins an explanation of any kind. "Llegué de mojado." He arrived as a wetback, he said, using a word that is a slur in English, but a simple fact of life in Spanish. He then continued to describe a practice that had become extremely common among migrants from countries other than Mexico.

Shortly after crossing the border, Jose was apprehended by Border Patrol and given a Notice to Appear, and a permission to live in the United States until his court date. That permission was the reason Jose believed he had entered legally. With that paper in hand, Jose was legally living in the United States, for a while. Like nearly everyone served with a NTA at the border, Jose simply continued on into the country, to forget about that court date which he figured would result in his being returned to Guatemala, where he would have to start all over again. If he could live and work without getting into trouble with the law, there would be no problems.

There is little wonder that many people took full advantage of this system. The vast majority of those migrants are not bad people, looking to screw the United States. Before you condemn them for taking advantage of the catch-and-release, try and put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if you wouldn't do the same thing in their position.

Jose's question to me was, How do I make this right? How will this affect me if I'm picked up by immigration?

I already knew the answers to his questions, but I didn't say anything. He always wants to do things the right way, but in his case, there was no right way.

Now Jose and several of his friends are paying a disproportionately high price for the U. S. government's "catch and release" chingadera. After being given invitations to come here, they are now being hunted down and put into holding pens.

I can't overstate the sadness and disruption of lives that has resulted from the raids and detentions. I will try and describe the depth of despair that has descended on our little migrant community in later posts. This is only an introduction to a story that is being re-played all across the country right now.

I can't see how these raids and detentions benefit our country in any way. All I see are working people in jail, charged with no crime. I see healthy communities being destroyed. All I see is the crushing of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

El Patrón

2008-02-01T13:54:00.000-04:00

Victor is a proud Mexican, un mexicano orgulloso. When we're dancing, and I comment on his skills, his explanation is always, "Of course I dance well - ¡I'm Mexican!" Back in September when we danced in celebration of Mexico and Guatemala's Independence Days, his pride overflowed in the form of gritos, throwing back his head and howling his delight in being puro mexicano. While some may be offended that anyone living in this country would be so proud to be born of another, I see the beauty in his national pride, and the sadness in the fact that living in the country he loves is not feasible if that life is to include having plenty to eat.

His pride isn't always pretty, though, especially when it sheds a glaring light on the class division that exists between Mexicans and the Guatemalans. Even among good friends, this hierarchy is accepted as a part of life.

These long cold evenings spent huddled inside, so unlike the warm nights they grew up enjoying outdoors in their pueblos' central plazas, are made much more bearable with cerveza and amigos. Still wearing their black pants, black shoes, and stained white shirts - the unmistakable garb of the kitchen worker - the Guatemalans lean back in the kitchen chairs or recline on the couch. I smile at Jaime's tired eyes and tell him I love it when he comes home smelling like lettuce and fried tortillas. We sit in a big circle, with the 12-packs of beer stacked in the center of the room. Drinking in a bar would be more fun for some of the men, perhaps, but they know it's far safer to drink at home.

I raise my eyebrows at Rudi sitting across the room, the only one without a beer in his hand, and mouth the word ¿café? His face lights up, and he nods. He and I smile over our hot mugs, preferring warm java over cold cerveza. He shrugs off the jabs from the guys with good humor. Having grown up his mother's favorite child, sipping coffee with her at the kitchen table from the time he was about 7, his love of coffee is tied to warm memories of home.

Victor is also wearing black pants and shoes, but with the colorful, specially-embroidered restaurant logo shirt, because he works in the dining room, interacting with the customers. He understands far more English than he lets on, but speaks less of it than one would expect of someone who's been here for 10 years. His outward lack of English skills has less to do with intelligence than with his work environment - surrounded by all fellow Spanish-speakers - and is also a way of refusing to let go of his dream of returning to Mexico, soon, to begin his real life. This life here, working hard and living lean, is only temporary; it's just a way to achieve the financial means to live a good life in Mexico.

Victor can, and does, talk all night long. He tells fantastic stories of his previous life in Mexico, like the time he married the daughter of a wealthy land owner, just after her quinceañera, only to tell her at the wedding reception (just like in a Vicente Fernandez movie) that he wasn't really in love with her, and disappearing into the sunset with her angry, powerful, dangerous father hot on his heels.

To my musclecar-loving delight, he also reminisced about the '77 Maverick that he bought with 6,000 in cash when he was 16. It was the envy of all his friends, a wicked machine with 3 speeds on the floor and enough power to rip the rubber right off the wheels.

He also offered advice to the Guatemalans sitting around him. He often prefaces his lessons with, "I'm Mexican, and you're from Guatemala..," which is apparently the only credential he needs, and then proceeds to apply his wisdom to their problems with their bosses or girlfriends. At first, I braced myself for what I figured was an inevitable fight. To my shock and surprise, even the proudest of the chapínes sat back and nodded in agreement, only interrupting occasionally, and only then in a soft, reasoned voice. They accepted the patronizing lectures from Victor with tremendous respect for his age (he is an ancient 29 years old, compared to their ages of 17-26 years), and for his broader life experiences from which he drew his instruction.

Even if his advice is well intentioned, his ridicule carries an edge of disdain that makes me cringe. College-educated Victor also teases the Guatemalans about their lack of formal eduction. When Rudi crossed the room to get a pen, he asked incredulously, "¿Sabes escribir?" Departing from my typical participant-observer role, I chided him in English, "That's not very nice," while at the same time remembering Rudi's Guatemalan ID card which states, among many other odd personal facts, that he doesn't know how to read or write. The municipal ID card, which he said allowed him to travel to Honduras and El Salvador, but not to Mexico or the U. S., also describes his skin color as "morena clara" and his occupation as agricultor, or farmer.

It's hard to know why the ID marks him as illiterate, when I know he can read, and does write, albeit with the vernacular spelling common among these guys who eschewed school well before adolescence to go to work for the good of their families. Was it somehow safer for him to be identified as just another illiterate paisano in his home country?

Victor's infectious laughter followed Rudi into the next room, and even Rudi's uneducated primos tittered, as if their shared amusement allowed them to indulge in a bit of Victor's orgullo.

Breaking Free

2008-01-24T00:40:00.000-04:00

God bless the Palestinian people.

Which brings me to a new definition of "border" as put forth today by Luis Alberto Urrea:

BORDER, n. 1. An imaginary line imposed on an indigenous landscape by men who are not from that landscape; 2. A line that unites two different cultures and forms an unbreakable bond between them.

The first definition seems the most accurate, and helps explain why borders can be so disfunctional for the people living at odds with them.

The second presents an invitation and a challenge to see the people on the other side as connected rather than separated from our reality on this side. The more familiar you are with someone, the more commonalities you can find between the "other" and you, the less likely you are to fear them, and much less likely to see any need to hate them.

We all need to break free from something. For the Palestinians, it was hunger, need, and imprisonment. Perhaps we need to break down the walls in our mind that define our views of borders, and look at the real purposes they serve, reject the divisiveness of the line and embrace instead the unity that can come from meeting there.

Speaking of meeting at the border, John Moore of Nonviolent Migration is organizing a walk to show support for landowners along the border who are resisting the fence. If you feel like being civilly disobedient, or would just like to spend a few days walking and talking with some passionate people in the gorgeous Texas sun for a just cause, sign up and get on down there.

Breakin' the Law

2008-01-07T11:28:00.000-04:00

I'm a felon... in Oklahoma.

No one who knows me would ever guess that I belong behind bars. But I prefer to live a life that makes the lives of others better in some way. There is no greater tragedy than turning our backs on people who live in need among us, and it seems so unreal that American laws would encourage just that. Serving others without regard for where they were born, befriending people without first asking to see their documents, is just part of being human.

One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sometimes humanitarian needs trump immigration law.
- Joe Biden

Cantando Para No Llorar

2007-12-07T18:20:00.000-04:00

La música es el arte más directo, entra por el oído y va al corazón.
- Magdalena Martínez

It's happened again.

Few things are sadder to me than the murder of people who make it their livelihoods to enrich our lives with music. I never knew Sergio Gomez, Zayda Peña, or Jose Luis Aquino. As for their art, I was familiar with only Sergio's music.

The loss of someone with whom you've become familiar through the appreciation of his or her music is a loss that feels more personal than it seems it should. Their music has become part of us as it has accompanied episodes in our lives. Their songs belong to our memories, and carry special meanings assigned by our experiences. When we have raised our imperfect voices with their polished ones, learning the lyrics by heart and matching them verse for verse, grito por grito, we begin to feel like we know them in a way. Certain songs evoke feelings from long ago as strongly as if I felt those feelings just a moment ago. If scent is the most powerful conjurer of memory, music has to be a close second.

The music that once made me smile now makes me sad.

All I want to do is toss back shots of tequila and cry. I want to spend the whole night drinking and listening to music with my friends.

I want to properly mourn this loss.

Cantando, Bailando, y Llorando

2007-12-05T23:14:00.001-04:00

Last Saturday night I danced the night away, packed into a tiny Mexican restaurant with dozens of ecstatic, sweaty people, gritando con gusto to the singer's inquiries, "Who's from Guatemala? ¿De México? Colombia? El Salvador?" She crooned karaoke style to Grupo Montez de Durango. Her partner did his best to imitate the inimitable Vicente Fernandez. We swayed to bachata, bumped to reggaeton, and bounced to duranguense. You won't find happier sounding music than duranguense, the sped-up polka is absolutely infectious. The mexicano stepping with me sang into my hair, a song by K-Paz de La Sierra. I thought, I love it that he's singing. When the song ended, I missed his uninhibited singing as much as I did the actual dancing.

As we were singing and dancing, none of us had any idea what was happening to the man who helped make our night so special.

As mis amigos were losing themselves in the music that made them feel like they were home again, the band K-Paz de La Sierra was performing for a similarly festive crowd far away in Morelia, Michoacan - the town some of my friends call Home.

By the time we fell exhausted into our beds at the end of our blissful evening, K-Paz singer Sergio Gomez was missing. As we slept with his music still ringing in our heads, he lay dying by the side of the road. Targeted by members of drug gangs who had warned him not to perform that night, he was tortured and murdered that night after his concert.

Hundreds of miles away in Matamoros, another singer, Zayda Peña, was executed in her hospital room, where she was recovering from a gunshot wound she suffered just a day earlier.

Like Gomez, Pena had no known drug associations. While Gomez was famous for his up-tempo "Pasito Duranguense" rhythm and Pena wrote more in the ballad-like "grupero" style, both essentially sang songs whose themes went little beyond love.
- Associated Press

John Lennon did not even enter my mind until I read that.

I remember the day John Lennon was killed, it will be twenty-seven years ago this coming Saturday. Waiting for the school bus, I could hear my mother crying in the kitchen. She told me he was just full of love. Why would anyone want to kill someone like him? she asked through her tears.

Last night when Jaime told me about Sergio Gomez, his eyes were full of tears, too.

Sergio Gomez's family has decided his final resting place will be in his adopted country, in the city of my birth. (Gracias a Tomás for that news.)

En La Cocina

2007-11-18T21:44:00.001-04:00

I spent last Sunday evening making pupusas with my friend Mari and our daughters, ages 2 and 15. It seemed strange for me to be teaching Mari how to make them, but she's from Mexico, and they don't have pupusas there. She made the refried black beans, and my daughter and I brought the cheese and maseca. Hers turned out much prettier than mine, because she smoothed the edges with water to get rid of the cracks in the masa. Our tortilla making skills were similar, though. We could pat them out in our hands until they were about 4 inches in diameter, at which point we put the torillita on a little 6 inch plate between sheets of plastic wrap, pressed down with another plate, and in this way turned out over 70 lovely pupusas.

In one of my previous posts I described the pupusas served in a little cafe in upstate New York (sadly, the Café Chapín is now closed). However, I first tried them last year in San Salvador. Days later when I went up to Guatemala, I had trouble finding any. Luckily, a man I met on the bus from San Salvador to Guatemala City took me to a pupuseria for dinner for one last treat before I left to come back home.

It's not easy for Mari to make the food she's used to. When she lived in Chicago, the ingredients for real Mexican meals were easy to find. Here, the Goya section in the "ethnic" food aisle at the supermarket is a joke. As a result, she cooks less than she would like, and her family's diet consists mostly of the readily-available fried chicken from across the street.

Fresh tropical fruit is the thing she misses the most. Last night, she brought over a pomegranate. I had no idea what it was, mystified by the little red pearls packed within the red skin. She and Jaime lamented how expensive fruit is here, compared to back home where the most exquisite delicacies grew literally right outside their front doors. They tried to outdo each other with their descriptions of the bounty borne by the various fruit trees in their yards back home - for Mari, home is Michoacan, Mexico, and for Jaime, Chiquimula, Guatemala.

Mari smiled as she described the enormous duraznos (peaches) that grew in her yard, and the limes and mangoes. Jaime boasted of trees laden with coconuts, bananas, and foot-long papayas. In the home videos sent to him from his family, there is always extensive footage of his father's garden. There is no grass, but lots of roses and other flowers, bushes, and the incredible fruit trees. Chickens keep the ground clean and roost in the bushes. My heart aches with the beauty of Don David's garden, and I know that ache is only a hint of what Jaime feels at having left it.

So we pass the evenings eating pupusas and overpriced, less-than-fresh tropical fruit, watching the snow mix with rain. We've made plans to cook a feast for Christmas - tamales, stacks of tortillas, and a big fruit salad.

Truth

2007-10-23T14:53:00.000-04:00

"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth."
- Benjamin Disraeli

I am strongly attracted to the truth. At times it's depressing, exhausting, and frustrating. Learning the truth is kind of liberating, though, in that it frees you from ignorance. But at the same time, it recruits you as a soldier, because you can no longer be happy knowing what you know, and being surrounded by people who have no idea. Once you know about something, you are obligated to do something about it, either to improve the situation or at least to make others aware. And sometimes, what you learn becomes part of you, and not only do you feel obligated, you feel incensed, horrified, and passionate.

I think that's why we blog. That's certainly part of why I do it.

Generally, if I read something on someone else's blog, I feel confident that many more people will see it there, than if I posted it here. There is one blog, however, that I don't see mentioned among the pro-migrant blogs I frequent, and although it is more art and less activism, the insights Luis Urrea provides are valuable for a deeper understanding and for feeling the significance of immigration as it touches everything around us. His posts hold an abundance of beauty, gratitude, faith, cynicism, and rage - those things that combine to create passion.

I've chosen his latest Immigration Monday post as a means of introducing him to a (hopefully) new audience. Enjoy.

"All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful."
- Wilfred Owen

"Thanks, New York State, for Pimpin' My Ride!" UPDATE

2007-10-17T13:03:00.001-04:00

Jose just bought his first car. He's extremely proud of it. He hauls all his friends around and takes great pride in never having to ask for a lift. Because he never drinks, he is the much depended upon designated driver, often making several trips back and forth from the baile or fiesta to make sure his friends all get home safely. Besides offering safe rides to and from fiestas, he drives to work, to Walmart, and to church.

Before he bought the car, he asked me all about how to get insurance, and how to register his car. Jose tries to do things the legal way whenever he can. He showed me his Guatemalan passport, his birth certificate, even his record of baptism. He says he actually entered this country legally initially, but for one reason or another (an expired visa, perhaps), he is no longer legal. He has an international driver's license, which will expire in August 2009. I made some calls and found a place that would insure him, but his, ahem, "status" made everything else questionable.

He wound up insuring and registering his car in another state. Most of the vehicles driven by los indocumentados that I know have plates from that state, too. I don't know if their insurance and registration are legal and valid, but I do know that everyone would be better off if they were.

That's why I was happy to hear that our new governor, Eliot Spitzer, recently gave people in New York who are ineligible for social security numbers the opportunity to apply for a driver's license. Jose was thrilled, too, but his first question to me was whether he would be safe in going to the DMV to apply for a license, even though, like many illegal immigrants, he ignored an order to appear in court a while back out of fear of deportation.

Living a quiet and otherwise law-abiding life, he opted to disappear into the shadows like so many others rather than risk being deported. Deportation would mean weeks or months in jail, then being returned to Guatemala empty handed, losing all the time spent and the thousands of dollars he paid for the privilege of living and working here.

There has been a very vocal outcry against Spitzer's new law by the fearful and ignorant. One popular argument against it is that people who are ineligible to vote would be able to show their new licenses and vote anyway. Silly, since you can't just stroll into a polling station, flash your license and vote, without first being a registered voter. Others claim that allowing illegal immigrants to get licenses would entice them to come to New York. From what I have seen, the only thing that truly entices them to go to one place over another is the availability of jobs, and the possibility of working at those jobs, saving money, and living in relative security.

There are also arguments about terrorism, of course, in spite of the fact that not having New York State driver's licenses did not stop the Saudis who boarded planes on September 11, 2001. Opponents to Spitzer's bill claim that allowing people who are otherwise undocumented to have driver's licenses would compromise our security, although in reality, the licenses would facilitate the tracking and capture of criminals.

It's unclear to me if Spitzer's opponents can do anything to rescind the bill now that it has passed. Many of the benefits - fewer unlicensed and uninsured drivers on the road, and a way of documenting the undocumented (not legalizing their status, but bringing people "out of the shadows" to be counted, taxed, and tracked)- seem to actually favor the desires of those who express their disapproval of "illegulz."

For those of us who try and support the efforts of indocumentados to live successful lives here and avoid trouble in the process, their access to driver's licenses means more accountability for them, greater autonomy, and greater participation in this society of which they are a part. While it will make it harder for them to hide, it will also make it less necessary for them to do so.

UPDATE: Damn it.

"I no longer feel good about this country." - UPDATED

2007-09-29T22:29:00.001-04:00

Today I sent a very angry email to Kyle, over at Immigration Orange. I was irate, sputtering curses through the tears that had run down onto my lips as I punched letters to form words that I hoped would arouse a similar rage in him.

It wasn't my intent to ruin anyone's day, just as my father didn't mean to turn me into a hopping-mad, stuttering, sobbing wreck, just by trying to make conversation about something he knew would interest me. It's just that I know people like Pedro Zapeta. And it makes me sick to see years of hard work and sacrifice taken away from him just because he didn't know about, and therefore failed to fill out, a form.

I watch them work long hours for little money, pay much of that money just to cover their meager living expenses here, and send the rest home via Western Union at $11.99 a pop. Pedro Zapeta, however, did not send money home. He saved it up to present it to his family all at once. I can only imagine what he was thinking as he headed to the airport to finally go home: how happy his mother would be to see him, what a hero he was going to be to his sisters once they saw the money that would give them the life they had dreamed of.

Pedro was on his way home, after 11 years of working as a dishwasher here in the U.S., to finally reunite with his family, buy some land, build a house, and live comfortably for a while on the $59,000 he had saved. The $59,000 that was in his duffel bag, which he was about to carry onto a plane that would fly him back to Guatemala. As he went through security, the money caught the attention of an agent, who called customs. But rather than say, "Sir, in order to transport that amount of money, you need to fill out a form," they seized his money. Then, later, after he made a fuss, federal prosecutors told him he could take $10,000 of HIS MONEY, and donations totaling $9,000 made by supporters, if he would shut up and leave already. He opted to hire lawyers and fight instead.

Now, after 2 years now of fighting to get his money returned to him, he has been given a deadline of this coming January, about 3 months from now, to leave this country. Without his money. To return to Guatemala where there are no jobs, and now, no hope for Pedro and his family. When asked what he would do if he didn't get his money back, he replied, "Me voy a matar" (quote from "Lay Off the Guest Worker We Want" by Dan Moffett, Palm Beach Post blog, Nov. 12,2006).

Here's the CNN article:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/27/immigrant.money/index.html

Read the UPDATE, here!

"The poorest people in the world"

2007-09-10T11:01:00.000-04:00

As I sat working this morning, a coworker came over to me and said, "I just found out about the poorest people in the world." He paused, and in an attempt to guess who he was referring to, my mind scanned the world, resting on Central America and Africa.
The seventy year old retiree continued. "My daughter does mission work in Guatemala." This time, my mind envisioned children in the Guatemala City garbage dump, the Maya in the mountains, the poor ladinos in the oriente.

"They live in huts of saplings woven together, with thatched roofs. If they're really well-off, their houses are adobe. They don't have plumbing, they have communal restrooms. They cook on rocks, do their laundry on rocks."
It was clear that he was amazed that people still live this way in our hemisphere.

I told him about being in the laundromat last week with mi amor. There were some friends there, including a woman who's also from Jaime's hometown in Chiquimula. She sat back and laughed at how easy, "qué fácil," it is to wash her clothes in a laundromat. That made me think about how Jaime's mother cried when she received a washing machine from him for her birthday in June.

The shaky home video showed Doña Tina's birthday fiesta, the frail little 55 year old woman (the same age as my 55 year-young mom!) surrounded by her three grown daughters and two of her six sons, weeping as the washer, complete with a huge pink satin bow, was lifted by her equally-frail husband and another man also in a straw cowboy hat, off the pickup truck and onto her porch, accompanied by snapping firecrackers set off in the dusty street. As she held one hand to her heart and with the other, dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, she thanked her boys working in the U.S.; I heard her say Jaime's name over and over. Her youngest child, he contributed overwhelmingly the most money toward the purchase of the washer, a gift he was sure his mother would love.

To me, the irony of the gift was startling. After a life spent washing her family's laundry by hand in a stone basin, what would she do now with all that spare time? Now that so many of her children are gone, she has far less laundry to wash than she did when they were little, before they left. Were her tears bittersweet? Was she thinking about the awful trade-offs in having luxuries she never imagined possible, at the cost spending each passing year growing older without her sons and grandchildren by her side?

And I could tell, she would give anything, she would trade that new washing machine in a heartbeat, just to have her boys home again.

What Free Health Care? Part 2

2007-08-10T08:15:00.000-04:00

Last night I was approached by a young woman from Mexico asking if I knew where she could get contraceptives. In Mexico, they're available over the counter. Her two year old hija hugged her leg and stared up at me. They haven't been here for long. Her boyfriend drove to Chicago a couple weeks ago and brought her here so his little family could be together. In spite of what the prevailing vicious stereotypes suggest, the young couple intends to keep their family little, at least for a while.

We have a free clinic at the county health department, ten miles from our town, and there is even a Spanish-speaking doctor who works there from time to time. It's an STD clinic, though, and upon investigation, I found that they offer absolutely nothing for preventative care. Planned Parenthood was where I went as a young woman when I became sexually active, and at the time (in the late 80's) I received excellent care and free birth control. I don't remember having to fill out much paperwork, and I didn't even need to have my mother with me. I checked out their website this morning, however, and found that now you need to bring proof of residency, proof of citizenship, proof of income (or rather, proof that you have nearly NO income). You must, it said, have "SATISFACTORY IMMIGRATION STATUS."

I understand that American taxpayers don't want to pay for the health care of people who are here illegally. But I am coming to believe, the more I see the need, that it would be far less costly in the long run to provide essential preventative care to anyone who needs it, than to foot the hospital bill for a birth or emergency care for preventable ailments.

As I search for affordable women's care and dental care, I am not only looking to help non-citizens. I am keeping in mind those who were born and raised here, who have no money and no transportation, and no health insurance. I have stepped outside my white upper-middle-class, privileged life to see a very real and pressing need. Like the young woman with a broken molar who couldn't get treated because she is 17, even though she has lived on her own since she was 15, estranged from her bipolar, abusive mother and absent, apathetic father. She asked me if I knew of a "cheap dentist." As it turns out, there is no such thing. And emergency rooms don't do dental work.

When I lived in Mexico, I was struck with a bladder infection. I was treated for free (actually, upon arriving in the town, I had purchased "health insurance" for something like $3) at the Centro de Salud by a doctor who had recently graduated from med school. He was working for no wages for two years to repay the government assistance he had received for his education. Los pobres in our pueblito, and even us visiting gringos, received free, or nearly free, medical care. The doctor received his education, and he got to see first hand the need in the countryside. His life was changed for the better, and he got to help people who desperately needed him. I know our great nation does not look to Mexico for pointers, but this seems like a good idea to me. Health professionals here could donate part of their time and effort to treat the poor, no matter who "the poor" is, in exchange for a break on their tuition.

But that idea doesn't help me right now. I will do what I can to find Mari a doctor who will prescribe the pill for her. Or, she will try to get her man to use a condom consistently, and end up having more children before she really wants to. And listen to the neighbors bitch about how those Mexicans breed like rabbits, and how their taxes are going for the immigrant children's education and health care.

They are here, no matter how much some people argue that they shouldn't be. It is in everyones best interest to provide affordable health care for them and for our own poor citizens.

"What part of ILLEGAL don't they understand?"

2007-08-01T13:07:00.000-04:00

Oftentimes I have heard people justify their hateful attitudes toward los indocumentados by saying that they don't oppose LEGAL immigration, only ILLEGAL immigration. To me, the legality of their entry into this country has always been pretty far down the list of what's really important. Why? Is it because I have no regard for the law? Don't I realize the importance of the rule of law in maintaining order? No, it's because people are suffering, and that's more important than any law. Kyle from Immigration Orange summed it up for me beautifully:

"We have to look beyond temporary fixes like walls and securities and consider the global climate that is forcing these migrants to leave in the first place. Whether their movement is legal or illegal should not be the question, the question should be whether or not what is happening to them is just or unjust. We have to move away from questions of legality to questions of justice, and anyone that has interacted with migrants on any level will conclude that what is being done to them is unjust."

Loving

2007-05-21T12:03:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I like to think I'm the only woman who feels this way about Them. Like I'm the only one who has fallen in love, and who has a hard time fully explaining why.

A few days ago, a Guatemalan man asked me how I got "into Latin men." The question itself sounds a bit sordid, and when I stammered out a lame attempt at an answer, he interrupted with, "It's because we're hot, right?"

Groan.

If I say no, it means: "No, you're not hot." If I say yes, it's a serious oversimplification of my very complex feelings and attitudes toward my latino friends. But I had no simple answer for him, and I even have trouble explaining it to myself.

Where and when did "it" begin? When I was 9 years old following a latino man around the Kmart, peering around the end of the aisle just to look at him because I thought he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen? Or was it in 1995 on that hillside in Mexico, overlooking the pueblito of Trincheras, watching the train go by covered in people? Dark, tired people, on top of the train, under the train, even riding between the boxcars, peering up at the gringa on the hillside. They were hundreds of meters away from me, but they looked right into my eyes, and I can see their faces clearly. I had no idea where they were from, or where they were going. At the time, I assumed they were refugees fleeing the violence in Chiapas, and I assumed they were just coming to northern Mexico. I had no clue whatsoever that they probably weren't even Mexican, and that they were headed for the United States and Canada. I had no clue. Ten years later, sitting in the Mexican restaurant watching the waiters and just beginning to learn about illegal immigration, it dawned on me, and I wondered, did these guys go through hell to come here? These happy guys bringing my food and tolerating my fledgling Spanish - did they ride under a freight train, cross a desert, leave all they loved behind, to come wait on us wealthy gringos?

Just after that awkward conversation with the chapín, I had the pleasure of passing the morning with a young lady who has been seeing one of my boyfriend's roomates for about a month. She described how she became involved with the Spanish speaking group that we spend time with. For her, "it" began with the babysitter from her early childhood, a Puerto Rican woman who always had music playing in her house and good food cooking in the kitchen. "It was everything, the music, the food, just.. everything. I just loved it." As a teenager, she happened by chance upon a shop inhabited by a group of Mexican immigrant workers. She was attracted by the sound of their voices, a sound she fondly associated with a happy childhood spent amongst Spanish speakers. She became friends with them, including a 17 year old named Juanito who eventually became her first serious boyfriend. She spent many hours with Juanito and his compadres, learning Spanish and learning their culture. The guys eventually moved to other places in search of work, and soon after, she discovered "my" little group of Guatemalan immigrants, dating my old flame no less.

Our experiences have been different, but our feelings remarkably similar. She and I share a passion, but to assume this passion is something lustful, merely sexual attraction or some kind of "latin fever," is completely wrong.

Then, just this morning, I happened upon this comment written by the American wife of an illegal immigrant on one of my favorite blogs, The Unapologetic Mexican:

"I myself can say that I never understood how hard it was for an illegal immigrant to live in this country until I walked in their shoes. And I have felt myself have a sort of transformation, I can not imagine a life without these honorable hard working people."
"... I just want to say to all the immigrants who came here on foot, who crossed the rivers, mountains, and deserts. For every immigrant who ever had to hear about a cousin, brother/ sister, mother/father, aunt/uncle, or a friend, die on the way here, who ever had to sit in jail overnight because they didn't have papers, who ever had to watch someone get deported, and hope that they make it across the border alive. Who ever had to work 12-14 hour shifts for miminum wage, and then go back and do it again, every day hoping for something better. I just want to say, that you are the most honorable people in the country, you are the most hardworking, strongest, people in this country, and anyone who calls you a bad name, or discriminates against you deserves to walk in your shoes for one day, and tell you how hard it is, because they will never know."

Those words could have come from my own heart. We women who love men who surreptitiously crossed the border share a passion, and our passion runs deep, much deeper than the pretty brown skin our men have, deeper than the beautiful language they speak, deeper than the luscious food, music and dance they share with us. Our passion is not just for those men, but for their families both here and "back home," for their right as men to seek a better way to make a better living, for their strength and determination, for all they've been through and all they've suffered and sacrificed, and for all the promise we see in them. We are passionate about doing all we can to help them enjoy life here, a life we were fortunate enough to be born into, a life that we want to share with them. We see beyond the border, into the countries from which our men migrated. Because of them, we are now painfully aware of the deep social inequalities that are at the very root of the "immigration problem," inequality that makes us sick at heart, that we want to change somehow anyway we can, even if we can only do it for one man.

Border Stories

2007-03-28T12:37:00.000-04:00

There were too many people smoking in too small a space. Alejandro sat on the floor trying to get through to Guatemala on his cellular, three of us reclined on the bed, and a cousin from down the street sat in one of the dining room chairs placed around the room. The small apartment holds two full sets of dining room chairs, a testament to the social function of the place. Every evening the chairs fill with brothers and cousins who gather to watch the Spanish language cable channels, listen to music - bachata, norteño, romantica, duranguense - and to talk, from 10 p.m. to about 2 a.m. A nearly empty Aquafina bottle circulated around the room, swallowing the ashes from each cigarette.

In the next room, three vatos crowded at one end of the couch, intently exploring the internet on their new laptop for everything relevant to them. My preguntita, "¿Quieren café?" was met with a fantastic silver grin from Rudi, who I can always count on to drink (coffee) with me. It's his only vice. One of us always makes the coffee; last time he did it, and under our informal telepathic agreement, tonight it was my turn. I brewed a pot and prepared each cup according to the preference of each man: some sugar, lots of sugar, milk and tons of sugar. After distributing the cups, I eventually settled back cross-legged on the bed, cradling the hot mug and trying to get the gist of the conversation. The talk swayed and wove above my head for a long time, and I divided my attention between trying to translate and watching "latin" music videos. After a while one cousin stood up, yawned, and exited with a drowsy "Hablamos mañana." Soon another cousin followed, disappearing into the misty night with his hood pulled over his head to disguise his hispanidad from the always roving pinche policía.

That left Alejandro still on the floor sending a barrage of text messages to his fed-up, neglected, estranged wife, alternately begging forgiveness and threatening to forget her forever. Young Milton remained in one of the chairs, and I on the bed with mi amorcito's cabeza in my lap. The conversation centered on plans to open a Mexican restaurant upon their return to Guatemala. Alejandro was asking his brother how he planned to carry thousands of dollars in cash back with him. He spoke of the danger of being robbed, especially at the southern border of Mexico and Guatemala. Jaime occasionally raised his head off my lap to argue. What I was wondering, but did not interrupt to ask, was why he didn't just stash the money little-by-little in a bank account in Guatemala.

Neither brother has a Guatemalan passport, and they plan to return to their country in the same clandestine way they left: by sneaking across borders. In a way, it is more dangerous to go back than it was to leave. Mexico remains dangerous to them, as the authorities there show no mercy to Central American migrants. Coming north, they risked being caught by la migra crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, but would not have been subjected to the abuses that faced them at the hands of Mexican police. I remembered one quiet night in the summertime when Jaime whispered to me the story of his journey across Mexico, of being arrested three times along the way. He did not say how he was released, but he did say they took everything he had.

To make his point, Alejandro told scary stories about the thieves who work near the Guatemala-Mexico border. This led to each telling part of his own border story. Milton described his crossing of the Rio Bravo (they never call it the Rio Grande), and how he laid low on the American bank while lights passed above his head. Jaime spoke for nearly an hour about his journey. He began by saying the river crossing from Guate into Mexico was fairly easy, but at the Rio Bravo, his guía asked who in his group knew how to swim, and none did. The "guide" then took each one across holding onto an inner tube, with their clothes in a bag on top.

His walk through the desert took 24 hours, during which time he became separated from his group and from his guía. In the middle of the night, while he was walking alone, he encountered a woman crawling, who begged him not to leave her alone. She was an older woman, he said, divorced with two children left behind in El Salvador. Together they eluded la migra, running hand in hand, and somehow reunited with part of his group. By following the red lights of a tower, they made it to a meeting place where they piled into a SUV and rode 4 hours to Houston. There they were met by a salvadoreña at a house, who gave them clean clothes, pizza and soda. There was an old gringo there, too, who yelled at them and said they each owed a thousand dollars for the ride to Houston, and that they could not leave until they paid up. Jaime was apparently not expecting this extra expense on top of the thousands he had already paid for his trip through Mexico in the cargo compartment of a bus. He remained in the house for 9 days until his brother wired the money from New York.

The next morning, after having spent the previous evening hearing about their crossings, I saw a post on La Bloga reviewing a book called First Crossing: Stories About Teen Immigrants by Donald R. Gallo. Other compelling reading on the same subject is Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario, and of course, Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea.

Café Chapín

2007-01-25T19:33:00.000-04:00

The Café Chapín is something of a misnomer, since the woman who works tirelessly in the kitchen patting out pupusas between her puffy brown hands and steaming tamales filled with all sorts of delights from pork to pollo, and those golden treasures that need no filling at all called tamales de elote, is actually a salvadoreña.

It doesńt matter, for it seems the place is actually named for its clientele - humble, industrious people, with ready, gold-gilded smiles. Never far from their very next thought is all they left behind in Guatemala: their tired mothers waiting, aging fathers toiling, younger brothers trying to stay in school, desperate cousins stealing to live, lonely girlfriends trying not to cry on the phone, babies growing up without them, celebrations going on without them, the dead gone and buried without their goodbye... and the grinding poverty mercifully alleviated because of their sacrifice.

Working hard and sending money back home to sustain their families in their beautiful but violent, beloved but impoverished Guatemala, they pass their few free hours pining for the familiar music and food that would both sharpen the pang of their memories, and bring unspeakable comfort. The ladies at the Café Chapín provide homemade, Guatemalan comfort food along with the soundtrack to go with the memories awakened by the aroma and savor of home.

Walking into the café on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I was the cause of much curiosity and the object of hushed questions aimed at my Chapín boyfriend, Jaime, by the teenaged Guatemalan girl behind the counter. The first, and I thought oddest, question was, "Is she an American?" This is a question I have never heard directed at me in my home state of New York. She was polite and kind, but her eyes looked directly into mine with unabashed curiosity. Our Mexican companion, Victor, felt as foreign as I did in this little Guatemalan enclave, and he stuck close to my side, and let our Chapín friend order for him.

The girl was surprised to hear me speak Spanish, and further mystified by my familiarity with and enthusiasm for pupusas. Jaime tried to explain to me how exactly she was related to him, but the convoluted lineage was lost on me and he finally summed up his explanation by describing her as a cousin. The distantly-related paisanos exchanged the latest gossip about family both here and there, shared the cell-phone numbers of several mutual friends and relatives, and we finally wandered over to the corner jukebox to select the proper aural seasoning for the meal we were about to receive. My homesick Jaime chose the sublime sweet sadness and longing in the deceptively cheerful-sounding strains of a bachata song, while Victor satisfied his craving for home with the more buoyant sounds that only Los Tigres del Norte could deliver.

When our food arrived, we eagerly shared bites with each other, jealously eyeing one anotheŕs tamales, each different from our own. Tall glasses of milky horchata provided the perfect chaser for each mouthful of maíz encased latin american delicacy.

In my desire for understanding and sisterhood with my expatriate latino friends, I have found shared meals to be particularly binding, and as I basked in the glow of a belonging borne of the mutual satisfying of our different kinds of hunger, Victor iced the cake of togetherness with the type of good-natured jab that always makes me feel even more at home with these boys. He had noticed that I shunned the condiments normally eaten with pupusas - a pickled cabbage salad called curtido and a pungent orange salsa - in favor of eating them plain. After trying unsuccessfully to persuade me to eat the pupusas the way any self-respecting latina would, he gave up with an exasperated "¡Gabacha, aprenda a comer!"

Heading Home

2007-01-04T17:39:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, Juan returned home to his family after 2 years working in the United States. He had worked as a day laborer out of a Home Depot parking lot in Arizona, and in restaurants in Tennessee and New York. He showed me pictures of his gorgeous Jaliscan wife, and his two sons all dressed up in matching cowboy boots and hats, both of them under the age of 8. He had come here with hopes of earning a better living, allowing him to better provide for his family. They weren't starving or suffering; he just wanted more for them.

The reason for leaving to finally reunite with his family was simple: "It just isn't worth it," he told me. "I only make a little more money working here than I did working for my family's monument business in Mexico. So I'm going home." He packed up the gifts he had bought - an X-Box 360 for the kids, perfume and jewelry and pretty clothes for his wife - and he left.

This is, of course, good news! This also shows the simple economics involved in either keeping men home where they can be with their families and earn a decent living, or forcing them to look for work in far away places when there is no work at home, or when the work available doesn't pay enough to compete with wages they can earn here. Unfortunately, Juan's situation isn't typical.

An example of the latter option: In Guatemala, twenty year old Julio made 38 Quetzales, or about $5, a day, working long hours outside doing construction. Here, he earns $10 an hour doing the same work for fewer hours, or $60 a day working in a kitchen during the wintertime. The choice for him was simple, because the amount he earns here is, in his mind, almost too good to be true. Mothers allow their sons to leave, fathers encourage their sons to go north and work, because this amount of money makes an enormous difference in their standard of living. The boys leave as heroes, with dreams of returning home in about 5 years driving nice trucks, with money in the bank and cash in their pockets to build a house and provide well for a future wife and children. This begs the question, however: what happens when that money they've earned up north runs out?

What free health care?

2006-10-23T10:13:00.000-04:00

It's easy to take good medical care for granted. Blessed with a job that comes with excellent health insurance, I don't bat an eye when I pay my 15 dollar co-pay for a doctor visit, or the same thoughtless amount for a test that costs over a thousand bucks. I realize not all Americans are so lucky. But for those among us with no health insurance, and limited English skills, doctor visits can be not only expensive, but confusing and terrifying as well.

Last week, my friend who cooks in a Mexican restaurant put his hand into a food processor. The specially designed guard intended to keep his hand safely away from the swirling blade didn't really do a good job of guiding the lettuce down the chute, and besides, he doubted that his fingers were really long enough to reach the blade. After several shockingly quick turns of the blade, his eyes rolled back in his head and he hit the floor, blood spurting from his fingertips.

All I could discern from his calm voice over the phone was that he had cut himself with a knife, and had been sent home from work for the rest of the day. His hands are just rough enough to attest to the hard work he has done ever since he was about ten. More recently, small mishaps in the kitchen have left scars on the tip of his thumb, and on the side of one finger. Nothing serious.

Arriving at his apartment eight hours later, expecting to find him resting comfortably with a band aid on his finger, I was greeted instead by his usual sweet smile, beaming up at me from the floor. His hand dangled into the kitchen garbage can which teemed with paper towels soaked in coagulated sangre. One of his roommates had wound a tourniquet around his arm to stem the bleeding, which continued nonetheless at an astounding rate. "WHY DIDN'T YOU GO TO A DOCTOR?" The question was absurd, I knew it as soon as I said it. First of all, it was blurted in English, which he doesn't understand, and secondly.. "He can't go to the doctor. It could make trouble for the restaurant, and for all of us," English-speaking roommate Juan explained gravely. All that blood was making me feel a little bit hysterical. "I don't care. We are going to the doctor, and we have to go NOW. Can you walk?" Still smiling, which he always does when he is scared or in pain, my friend nodded and started to get up. Quiet Julio spoke up in Spanish, "Mira.. you can't tell the doctor this happened at work. You have to lie." I nodded, pressing my lips together hard to compose myself. "I understand. I will say he did this at home. Vamos."

With his hand wrapped in a kitchen towel, we arrived at the walk-in clinic a half hour before closing time. The receptionist took one look at us and summoned a nurse, who swept us past those already waiting into an examination room. The doctor, a kind, hefty man with small, round glasses, was the same man who had treated my friend for an unexplained case of hives just a week before. That visit had cost 73 dollars, the "reduced rate for those without health insurance," the receptionist had explained. My friend reimbursed me for the expense less than a day later without being asked.

The kind doctor asked only once if the accident happened at work, to which I answered a strained "No, he did it at home." My friend wondered out loud when he would be able to return to work, and understanding the gist of his inquiry, the doctor said, "He's a hard-working fellow, isn't he?" "Yes, he is," I said. "God bless 'em," he murmurred as he wrapped my friend's fingers in gauze.

Answering medical questions for my friend stretches my interpretive skills to their limit. How do you say "tetanus" in Spanish? Have you ever had any injections? Yes, when I was sick, before I came here. What kind? Shrug. He had never been to a doctor; the woman in the pharmacy gave him a shot once. The small scar on his shoulder was from an innoculation that "everyone in Guatemala" receives.

He looked sideways at the probe aimed at his apprehensive smile. At a loss for words, I opened my mouth and said "Aaaahhh.." He followed suit, but I had to explain in convoluted Spanish to put the thermometer under his tongue, and to close his mouth around it.

The Vicodin would take the edge off the pain and help him sleep. I carefully explained that he could take one or two before bed. "They will make you sleepy," I said. "Don't drink any alcohol with this medicine, it can kill you." I could just see his well-meaning friends giving him a shot or two of tequila to kill the pain; I didn't want to underemphasize how serious mixing codeine with alcohol could be. You can't take anything that's common knowledge to the average American for granted.

He went back to work today after a week off. Waiting anxiously for the doctor bill, and paying 40 to 50 dollars a day to his coworkers to cover for him on their days off, he lamented his mounting debts. But his boss graciously offered to pay the doctor bill, and surprised him with his normal week's pay. I offered to help, but I offered tactfully, because he hates to accept money from anyone. He politely declined, as usual.

This morning, for the first time, I visited a Western Union office. In far away Guatemala, his mother is suffering from the flu, and he wants to be sure she can go see a doctor. As I handed over 200 of his hard earned, carefully saved dollars, I said a silent prayer that his mom would receive the care she needed.

Pistolas y Lagrimas

2006-09-26T14:14:00.000-04:00

One night, I drank with a Mexican. We sat at the kitchen table, which was not in the kitchen but in the foyer of an apartment inhabited by his favorite waiter, the waiter's two brothers, one nephew, and a friend. All five guatemaltecos came from the same little town to work in three different restaurants. The Mexican owns one of those restaurants.

The boom box on the table trembled with the sometimes sorrowful, sometimes celebratory, always heartrending gritos of Grupo Montez de Durango. An echoing "Ah ha jai!" from a Guatemalan in the kitchen sent chills up my arms and down my legs. Spent wedges of lime and gritty salt stuck to my elbows as I leaned forward, alternately tipping my Corona and nodding my head sympathetically to the story the Mexican was telling of his recent journey to and from his patria.

He made the 36 hour drive to Degollado, Jalisco, in his big new white truck. It was only a few days after Christmas, and his wife and four year old son were waiting. The trip was an emotional one for him, because his wife and son would be returning to the United States with him this time, and it was hard telling when they would see Jalisco again.

He leaned his chair back on two legs, gazed at the bare light bulb above the table, and spoke of his homecoming with misty eyes. The best part of his story was the way he ended it: After so many hours behind the wheel, he could finally see his hometown shimmering ahead in the dusty, ochre light of early evening. Tears streamed down his face as he pushed the Ram a little faster. He reached into the glovebox, pulled out his thirty-eight, and fired it out the window into the sky as he drove into town - blazing gun, plume of dust, salty tears, and gritos straight from his panza and corazón.

"Mexican men..." he smiled into his beer as he shook his head. He was reading my mind.

Mission Statement

2006-09-15T14:35:00.000-04:00

My plan for this blog is to encourage understanding and compassion for the newly arrived latinos among us, whether they came here as fully documented guests of the United States, or secreted across a border, or two or three borders, to live as unobtrusively as possible and work for a better life for themselves and their families.

I don't intend for this blog to be a forum for the discussion of the political aspects of immigration, although I expect there will be people who want to comment regarding illegal immigration. While I welcome all thoughtful comments whether or not they agree with my point of view, I encourage anyone interested in this issue to visit one of the blogs listed in my Links. My intent is not so much to put forth my opinions on the subject as to simply offer the stories of a few individuals and allow you, the reader, to form your own opinions.

My goal is to submit one or two posts a week that simply reflect the daily lives of a group of immigrants I have the priviledge of knowing. I am partly an observer, and partly a participant, in their lives. I hope that by bringing their stories to light, and bringing the huge and often overwhelming issue of immigration down to a personal level, I may encourage greater understanding of this rapidly growing segment of our population.

Dinner and a Movie

2006-09-13T12:43:00.000-04:00

Last night I took a Guatemalan to dinner. Actually, we went to see a movie, and afterward ate at a Greek diner. The new Tarantino flick was partially in English, partially in Thai with English subtitles. I had decided on that particular film for my friend and me to see because it contained a lot of action, so it would be exciting, and because the storyline seemed like it would be easy to understand, even if the viewer understood little English. The added bonus was that it was by Tarantino, creator of my favorite, and my least favorite, movies of all time.

When we walked into the cinema, his jaw dropped. We were nearly the only people there on a Tuesday night, and our hushed voices echoed throughout the two-story lobby, surrounded by blinking arcade games and pinball machines. As he always does when we go places, he hung back, as I bought our tickets and made chatty small talk with the woman behind the cash register. His crossed arms, held tightly against his chest, belied his self consciousness.

Inside the theater, we had our choice of seats as there were only three other people there. We sat in the center, about a third of the way back. He smiled and remarked ironically on the small size of the enormous screen. I asked if he had been to this cinema before, and he answered no. In fact, this was the first time he had ever been to a movie theater at all. Before the movie had even started, he asked when we could go to the theater again. He enjoyed the movie, and asked when it would be available on DVD.

After the movie, we were both hungry, and I knew of a 24-hour diner nearby, so we went. The place is opulent in a way that reminds me of visiting old people - white leather-like vinyl upholstery, gold gilt and chandeliers. Sparkly lights. The place was totally empty with the exception of the owner, a waitress, and whoever was working in the kitchen. I mentioned to my friend that I had met a guatemalteco at a dance who works here in the kitchen. My friend also works in a kitchen, and after our meal of chicken livers and fried fish, he tidied up the table, carefully stacking the plates and wiping off the table with a napkin. He is considerate in ways only one who has worked in resturants can be.

My friend seldom eats in restaurants, besides the Mexican resturant in which he works. Most places are closed by the time he gets out of work at 10 pm. He has worked in a diner, so he's familiar with diner menus, although he still shyly asks me if I will order for him because he is self-conscious speaking his fledgling English. He is becoming acquainted with American food; I keep my eye on him and gently stop him before he pours tartar sauce on his salad. It looks just like ranch dressing. He sniffs the plastic cup of Italian dressing intended for his salad and raising his eyebrows, takes a guess: "Caldo de pollo?" "No, it's for your salad," I smile back. He shakes his head and lowers his black eyes, "Que vergüenza."

I take for granted all the little tasks involved in going places and doing things in a society I´ve grown up in. He is eager to learn English, but embarrassed to practice it. He wants to experience the United States, but has no idea where to begin. There is always the possibility that he will draw too much attention to himself, get into trouble and get deported.

I love taking him places and watching his confidence grow. One of the first places we ever went was to an outdoor ice cream stand. I had somehow mispronounced "helado," so he didn´t know what to expect until we arrived. He didn´t want to get out of the car and join the line of people. He did finally get out of the car, and we huddled and discussed the myriad flavors in hushed Spanish until I placed our order in bold English.

"Vergüenza" is a word he uses often; it means shame or embarrassment. But every time we go to the mall, to a restaurant or to a park, his arms relax a little more, and he utters the word a little less often.