At the rail of hope
Episcopal News Service. January 23, 2007 [012307-03]
Winnie Varghese, Episcopal chaplain at Columbia University in New York, writes for The Witness and serves on the executive council of the Episcopal Peace Fellowship.
Peter Turnley has a photograph in the October 2006 issue of Harper's. Ubencia Sanchez from the Chiapas region of Mexico, it says, peers over a border fence in Tijuana, looking into the United States for the first time.
Ubencia Sanchez looks to me like she is in her 50s. Her face is in profile like a formal portrait: graying hair flowing down her back, thin body in a blue dress with small flowers, with the strong features of the quintessential American face.
By American I mean the Americas; imagine Montezuma or Sitting Bull, and the profile you will conjure is close to hers. She is simply standing and looking over the corrugated metal at a landscape that on the far side looks essentially the same as that on the side that is hers by birth, but she must see something else.
She stands there as if at an altar rail, at that fine line between earth and heaven. I do not mean to say that the Southern California desert is anything like my hopes for heaven. I do hope to burn an image so fully into your imagination that you cannot escape it the next time you approach the altar for Communion, an image of all who stand at borders everywhere, as we do every Sunday, in hope.
I grew up in Texas as the child of resident aliens. Legal but alien nonetheless. The kind of immigrants who are recruited from around the globe to do the jobs U.S. college graduates don't want to train to do.
I have heard politicians spit the ridiculous term "illegal alien" like phlegm. They insure enough hate for their political ambitions to be realized. Our public social services are in dire shape and, yes, the poor and indigent need those services the most, but are they to blame for the decrease in services? Could it be, rather, the convenient effect of the systematic dismantling of our social support system, a system designed because the desperate suffering of Americans searching for work and food during the Great Depression appalled modern America?
Our Congress has approved a bill to build 700 miles of fence, a $1.5 billion wall, on the border with Mexico.
Should we have secure borders? Sure, but we must begin by allowing legal protection to those we coax up here to work in our fields and construction sites. When someone like Ubencia Sanchez can come here to seek work and walk though the border with dignity, both ways, we will begin to be able to track the reality of who and how many move back and forth every day.
In Texas in the past, the borders have regularly been "opened," meaning there was no enforcement, and then "closed," meaning people got shot, as the need for labor on ranches and farms waxed and waned. The borderland of the desert Southwest is as Spanish-speaking on one side as the other. Families have lived for generations in the same place and found themselves on either side of the same border. The border is porous and fluctuates and will continue to do so.
The rhetoric we hear now is designed to target and scapegoat people who come here to work. The majority of the criminality associated with undocumented migration is a result of the laws designed to define people as illegal. There is no need for "coyotes" and no space for the trafficking of persons if we give legal protection to what is now being encouraged under the table.
Why do people come? For food and hope for their children, nothing more complicated than the reasons that we come Sunday after Sunday, hands out, expectant. Would it be better for Mexico if the poor remained and demanded their rights? Yes, and it would be better for my floors and laundry if I stayed in on Sundays as well. Yes, maybe it is not the brightest move we make, maybe it looks utterly foolish to everyone out there who knows how things really work. Yet, still, we know the urgency of what we need now, and we come and stand and cast our eyes there. If anyone understands what it is she sees across that wall, wouldn't it be us?
To respond to this column, email edge@episcopal-life.org.