July 25, 2011

Fear Not

By Michael Seifert [PDF Version] [Return to homepage]

Michael Seifert was born November 6, 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama. He graduated from Catholic University with a Masters of Theology. Has lived the past 25 years in the Lower Rio Grande Valley serving the grass roots communities in both sides of the border. Network Coordinator for the Equal Voice for America’s Families project of the Marguerite Casey Foundation.


The front porch of my house is exactly one mile east of the Rio Grande. If I were to take about 2000 steps toward the rising sun, I would come to the geo-political edge of the United States. I would know this, as at the end of my walk, I would come face to face with an endless set of eighteen foot tall iron pilings set with a gap of six inches between them. The pilings march off to the north and the south, roughly following the bends of the river. They are placed there to force those people who wish to cross into the United States to try their luck elsewhere—perhaps in one of the deserts to the west and north of us.

This is the border wall, being built at an extraordinary cost of $6 million a mile as part of an effort to calm the fears of the citizens of the United States. In addition to the wall, every 400 yards or so, border patrol vehicles are parked on the other side of the barrier. I can see the agents scanning the riverbanks with binoculars.

I would not want their job. I wonder if they are afraid.

There are days in which helicopters fly surveillance, over and over again, above my neighborhood. Not long ago, the federal government announced that it had been employing pilotless “drone” planes to fly along the southern border. Daily, border vehicles barrel through here, scattering the kids playing soccer in the street.

Those of us who live here hate the helicopters, the racing patrol cars and the drones. If we were in peace moments before, comfortable in a region that has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the entire nation, then the roar of military vehicles and the low-flying helicopters make us question this peace. We look towards Mexico and we see a long, tall wall, and we are afraid.

It was not always this way.

When I first came to the Valley, in 1989, the face of migration was Central American. The contra wars with Nicaragua had heated up, and the bloodiness of El Salvador and Guatemala continued to drive people from ancestral homes and north to the United States. The communities of the Rio Grande Valley, themselves largely composed of first and second generation Mexican immigrants, gladly welcomed the new comers. It was not uncommon for small church congregations to take up collections for the immigrants, organize packages of food and clothing, and set up committees to help process immigration applications.

In 1981, the Diocese of Brownsville, in a prophetic, although common-sensible move, founded Casa Oscar Romero, a shelter that would end up offering up to 600 refugees at a time a few days of respite before they began the journey across what we referred to as the “real border”—the checkpoints that the Border Patrol manned one hundred miles to the north. Casa Romero became the visible face of compassion for the immigrant that was native to our region, a compassion born out of a similar experience of vulnerability.

There was no border fence then, although Casa Romero had a small fence that featured a portrait of the Archbishop of San Salvador and the blessing quote from Matthew 25: 35 (“I was a stranger and you welcomed me). Despite the loud objections of a very few people, the hospitality of our region was something that made us proud.

In time, though, more and more of the immigrants that came passing through here were from Honduras, and then, Mexico--men and women, and more often, children. In the early 1990’s, these immigrants were driven north not so much by the violence of war as by the fear of the violence of a new economics, a globalizing phenomenon that gave more importance to the prospering of multi-national corporations than even to our neighboring nations to the south. The promotion and promulgation of the North American Free Trade Act, signed into law in 1993, was a death knell for the smaller family farms that were once such a part of the vitality of Mexico. Agri-business moved in across Mexico; farming families were bought out and moved, first to the larger cities, and then, to the United States. By 2000, one third of all immigrants coming into the United States were from a single country: Mexico.

The rising number of irregular Mexican immigrants was reflected in a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment, something that seems to run in cycles in this country, a nation that celebrates its variety of peoples and cultures—its immigrants. The twelve million Mexican immigrants living in the United States began to create new social realities in Arkansas, Alabama, and Wisconsin. Spanish was becoming the true second language of the United States, and this discomfited people who normally confused Mexicans with Spaniards. Politicians, eager to seize on any issue that might drive the public to fervor (and to vote), began their scapegoating exercises, turning the eyes of Americans to the “porous border to the south,” to the “Mexican hordes” that threatened our very American identity.

And so, in 1994, the government began its earnest effort to secure the southern border. In our region, the Border Patrol began Operation Rio Grande, which essentially meant that border patrol agents parked their vehicles every 800 meters or so along the northern bank of the Rio Grande—each within eyesight of their companion agents, creating in this way a wall of surveillance. The aim of all of this was to create a “secure border.”

I knew of these events, as I followed them closely in the news. I was a regular visitor to Casa Romero, and would celebrate Mass with the men and women detained at the federal immigration prison located at Port Isabel, about 45 minutes from Brownsville.

But it was only with the opportunity to offer hospitality to a Guatemala refugee that I began to appreciate the disturbing and yet sacred mystery that is the life of the migrant at this point in our history.

Juan Mendoza was from Guatemala. He had called the parish looking for a place to stay for a couple of weeks after being bonded out of the immigration services’ jail.

Our community had an extra room in our house, and we welcomed him to our home.
Juan was a reserved man, who spoke his Spanish carefully, almost as if he were protecting the small bit of vocabulary that he owned. His first language was in fact, a Mayan dialect from the Quiche region of Guatemala. This was one of the areas that knew in a particular way the “scorched earth tactics” that were taught to the Guatemala Security Forces at the School of Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

The third day that he was with us, I took him to a local restaurant for breakfast. I asked him what had made him leave his home to come north.

He looked at his plate and began speaking his measured Spanish. He told me how he had been the lead catechist at his parish in a small town in Guatemala, and how, some months ago, the army had come in and had built a small garrison next to the town square.
“I took my wife and children and went to greet them; we wished to welcome them to our community,” Juan told me, still not looking up from his plate. “A week later, five soldiers came to our home after dark. They took me and my wife and my children. They bound our thumbs together with wire and lead us to a ravine outside our village.”

He was quiet for a moment; he looked at his thumbs. He went on, speaking even more softly, “They killed first my children, and then my wife. They cut their heads off with machetes. They then turned to me, and I just jumped out into the ravine.” He paused for a moment, and then looked up at me, “And then I came north, and now I am here.”

Juan stayed with us for only a few days. He carried himself with a fragility that I recognized was that of a person deeply scarred by tragedy and one whose very heart had been wounded by terror. In the end, we found someone at Proyecto Libertad, a local group of heroic legal eagles who offered free services to people like Juan, and soon, an asylum application in hand, he was headed to Washington, DC, where he had a brother awaiting him.

Things have changed now, dramatically, along our southern border. However horrible Juan’s travail was twenty years ago, his journey and his grief would now be of a different order. His journey through Mexico, today, would be an excruciating extension of his terror, as Mexican governments, national, state, and local, ignore the organized abuse of migrants. When he arrived at the Zona Fronteriza, he would be crossing an extraordinarily militarized zone—on the Mexican side, the drug cartels have created what can only be described as a nightmare for any traveler, but especially for those bound for the United States. In the month of April, 2011, more than three hundred bodies of immigrants have been found in mass graves just a couple of hours south of Brownsville. In one gruesome discovery, hundred and twenty were found to be bludgeoned to death with a sledge hammer, a tool normally used, apparently, for the slaughter of cattle.

Last year, the bodies of seventy-two Central and South American immigrants were found massacred near the same area, close to the small ranching town of San Fernando. According to one of three survivors, they were shot to death by the Zetas, a criminal organization whose activities were leaving them short-handed. The immigrants were offered the choice of becoming assassins—or of being assassinated.

These incidents are well known by the immigrants, and I can only wonder at the courage (or the degree of their fear) that would drive them to make this journey. (The plight of the women is horrible on yet another scale, and has been well documented by several migrant shelters, most particularly Belen in Coahuila).

If Juan managed to survive this journey, he must re-manage his fear, as, approaching the US border, in his mind, a safe place, he would be confronted with five times the number of border patrol agents as in 1989. If he presented himself “properly” to the authorities and asked for asylum, he would be jailed, quite possibly for the entire length of the asylum process. He would be detained with the general population, amongst violent offenders as well as others who, like him, took seriously the American pledge to offer asylum to those in need. It would be unlikely that he could find an attorney who would take his case, as fewer and fewer people fund such enterprises any longer.

If Juan decided to slip across the border and enter the USA “unexamined by an agent of the United States” he would then become the prey of those who are charged with protecting Americans from that which frightens us (in this case, Juan). If he remained in Texas, he would be living in a place in which, just this past legislative session, more than 75 bills were introduced, all of which were designed to criminalize and punish the immigrant community.

The Price of Fear
The Jewish/Christian scriptures can be read as a narrative of the immigrant. The Spirit of God “goes forth”, Abraham and Sarah, our ancestors in faith, are sent forth; the nation of Israel is formed during its forty year migration. Some would hold that the very word “Hebrew” comes from habiru, referring to those who wander, who ignore the boundaries of nations and tribes. Jesus himself is without a place to lay his head. The Christian testament concludes with John writing in exile, a refugee detained on Patmos.

And while the desert culture informed our sacred scriptures with its profound respect for the life-saving values of hospitality, one cannot ignore the Bible’s preferential love for the stranger and the wanderer. The sojourner was then and now, an opportunity for blessing and life.
I would argue that the loudness of the xenophobes and their quite successful mongering has blinded the American community to the nature of the extraordinary gift to our community that is the immigrant. I myself do not have the vocabulary to describe the courage that is demanded by taking the decision to immigrate. Such a choice, it seems to me, would be in the same category as a decision to amputate one’s own limbs, a cutting off of emotional, psychological, social and spiritual ties that have imbedded themselves in the immigrant, and that are, in the end, the deepest reasons for her joy and peace.

I would find this particularly true for the poorest of immigrants, those who have grown up on farms and ranches, who have lived their entire lives within the confines of small villages. These are not people who have travelled to other countries, who would be schooled, in any way whatsoever, about the ways of others. They have no idea of what they are getting themselves into.

With the extraordinary security in place on the US/Mexico border, and with the stunningly dangerous journey through Mexico, the decision to leave home is now a definitive one—unlike the pre-NAFTA days, there will be no coming back. Leaving home, then, means severing oneself once and for all from the thousand and one things that make up a human life.
For instance, the immigrant will leave behind her language. She will lose that delicate and delightful sense of play that comes with being fluent with those who surround you. In the new place to which she is headed, she will not have the comfort of the poetry of someone speaking to her heart. Even her prayer at church will be changed—the services may well be in Spanish, but it will not be the Spanish of Urraco Pueblo in Honduras, or of Santa Cruz, Guatemala, or her home.

The immigrant will leave behind her friends, and the incalculable strength that comes from a network of support. There will be no one to gossip with, no one to share laughter with, no one to be sad with.

The immigrant’s departure, most importantly, cuts her off from her family and her kin. Her father and her mother, her sisters and her brothers will not be there for her, or she for them. She will no longer be able to visit the tombs of her beloved ancestors. She will lose the smells of her family’s kitchen, of her family’s linens.

The immigrant’s leaving cuts him off from his livelihood, from his career, from what he has learned to do. He will lose any edge he might have had in the local economy—he will have to start “at the bottom” in the new place. If it is as it seems, that a man’s sense of self is derived in large part from his own sense of his usefulness, his departure will mean cutting himself off from the vitality of the confidence that comes from knowing how to do something.

The decision to immigrate is not a easy one, nor a caprice. It is one taken in a moment of desperation, a decision often made out of the greatest self-disinterest. It is, in the end, a human right that becomes, in some circumstances, a moral mandate. If a father’s children are facing starvation and privation, the father’s first duty is to provide for his family. The fact of that duty does not lessen the courage that the decision to leave requires—and the extraordinary quality of unselfishness that marks the person who makes that move.

Americans, however, are afraid, and so we continue to build walls, not only along the border, but in our cities and towns as well. As history has shown, over and over again, a nation that encloses itself within walls designed to protect us from vague threats soon becomes hostage to fear. No individual, much less a national community, can thrive if they live in fear.

And a nation that refuses the blessing that accompanies the gift of the visitor is doomed to a shrinking share of the largesse that comes from sharing life with those courageous, faithful and good people who have come into our midst.

Welcome
The residents of the Rio Grande Valley, being a border-community, have been given the privilege and the opportunity to instruct the rest of the nation in the lessons of hospitality.

It is not an easy task—the criminalization of the immigrant makes those of us who would assist them “partners in crime,” and, while in individual instances this is something that might be routinely overcome (it is hard to imagine many Rio Grande Valley residents refusing succor to an immigrant), it is quite a different story in the case of institutions.

One would expect that the churches would be the first place of refuge, and yet that is not the case. During the course of writing this reflection, friends of mine called 130 Roman Catholic parishes and missions in the Diocese of Brownsville. We asked two questions. The first question whether or not the parish or mission had a special committee for people who would like to work on immigration issues. Not a single parish, according to this informal poll, offered such a ministry. The second question was whether or not they were doing anything for those who were suffering violence in Mexico. I know of several priests and dozens of lay people who in fact offer personal assistance to immigrants—but the Diocese as an institution, apart from some rather cursory help for those who are seeking to establish their legal status in the United States, offers next to nothing.

And although there have been summits on immigration offered in the Diocese, the final outcomes were some documents that presented some interesting stands—but no concrete instance of a task force or a ministry has yet been created.

Years ago the Diocese passed over control of Casa Romero, which was renamed the less controversial “Casa Ozanam” and which mission switched from offering hospitality to refugees and immigrants to offering shelter to the homeless. It is noble and needed ministry, but a clear departure from the past, more prophetic stance in favor of the immigrant.

The Rio Grande Valley, however, is filled with an extraordinarily set of committed Christians and generous human beings, many of whom have experienced the terror of being an immigrant—and the blessing of offering hospitality to the immigrant. Many of these individuals work with community-based organizations, and have created a network of relationships that seek to create substantive change at the policy level as well as creating a new consciousness of the immigrant as blessing.

The Equal Voice Network is a collaboration of eleven community-based organizations that was formed during the 2008 presidential campaign. After a series of town hall meetings established immigration as the priority amongst issues confronting the area’s families, a working group was created. The working group was tasked with promoting a pro-immigrant set of policies at the state and national level. Project ARISE, La Union del Pueblo Entero, Proyecto Azteca, the Brownsville Community Health Center, Casa de Proyecto Libertad and Movimiento del Valle por los Derechos Humanos, Proyecto Juan Diego, South Texas Civil Rights Project, South Texas Immigration Center, and BARCA have worked tirelessly over the past two and half years to push back on the anti-immigrant legislation offered at state and national levels.

The success of the push-back has been uneven, but it seems at our last count that only five of the 75 bills filed in Austin have even a chance at a vote. The group has managed to organize police chiefs and sheriffs to take stands against the Secure Communities Act (which would effectively make police officers immigration agents—although with no training for funding this), and has made numerous lobbying trips to Austin.

What has been most helpful in our effort has been our networking. The Equal Voice Immigration Working Group members are in constant and active collaboration with RITA (Reform Immigration for Texas Alliance) and with the Southern Border Communities’ Coalition. We have learned to reframe the fear-mongering narrative into a story of human rights and a remembering of who we are as a nation. “Texas Can Do Better” was the organizing theme of our most recent work, and it captures the message that we wish for others to take to heart: we are capable of more than fear.

A second and extraordinarily important project has been the careful work of helping others know and understand the immigrant. To this end, several groups in the Equal Voice Network continue to host groups that wish to come to the Rio Grande Valley and see, first hand, what a true immigrant community looks like.

We have found this to be most successful with younger visitors, particularly those who come in affiliation with a college or university. The nearly universal remark that those who come is: “I had no idea.”

Conclusion
I remain haunted by the thought of the 72 immigrants, whom, a year ago, were taken off of their buses and lined up in the courtyard of an abandoned ranch house. This was to be the end of their journey, a fearful moment that many had been living even before they had left their homes.
All migrants know of the kidnappings and torture that await them as they head north. Women reportedly begin birth control months before they leave, knowing of the near inevitability of rape (http://borderlines.weebly.com/). But the desperate circumstances that they face at home must inspire in them an unknown courage. I imagine that they must taste the ashes of their hope even as they take their first steps north.

The hopes of the seventy-two men and women who were killed in San Fernando did in fact turn to coal. After they were shot, their killers did not even bother to bury them; their faces were not even covered.

Because I remain a believer, I am anguished as I wonder, “Where is the light in this?”
I had read other reports and discovered that the migrants were killed, according to one of the witnesses who escaped, because they refused to join the Zetas and work for them as assassins.
“Kill or be killed,” they must have been told. And under a blazing August sun, so many miles from their loved ones, with their lives in their hands, literally, one by one they refuse this sordid offer of hope.

These men and women, powerless in every sense of the word, resisted.
They resisted even that most basic form of greed, the desire to live. They resisted despite the horrible clarity of the consequences of that resistance.
They said no, surely with quaking knees, and anguish in their souls.

They resisted.

I refuse to draw a lesson from this; I just note that only a few hours south of my home, just this past week seventy –two people stood strong.

That is something to consider.

I would be honored to have any one of them as my neighbor, my friend, my brother, my sister.
Any of us would be.

***All rights reserved by the Mexican American Catholic College

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