My family used to joke about the time we helped a drug dealer make her escape. It was the ‘90’s and we were milling about the green-carpeted common area at a hotel where my mom’s family held their annual family reunion. There was a commotion surrounding a woman, sobbing, who didn’t speak any English. When my dad intervened with his mostly dormant Spanish, the woman said she’d been abandoned there and needed money for bus fare to the airport. My parents gave her a ride and the woman offered them a bracelet inscribed with her name in return. They refused, but she insisted.
A short time later, my aunt came across a newspaper article that connected the woman to a man who was busted for trafficking drugs. Apparently, the joke was on us and we had a lovely memento of the irony.
…
A decade later, I spent a summer in Guatemala, eating handmade tortillas by the stack and riding knee-to-knee in the trunk of a rickety old jeep, meandering up craggy dirt roads and thrashing against the side of the truck with every divot. But the driver always had a joke and an infectious laugh to soften the blow. On one of many crowded bus rides down the narrow, winding pass from Chimaltenango to Antigua, there was a weathered old man carrying a young disabled boy on his back and up the bus steps. He settled the boy gently on the seat next to me and stood patiently beside him on weary bones. Later, another boy’s face lit up to find a free pair of faded sneakers that he immediately swapped for the hole-ridden shoes on his feet. There were the handful of women in kaleidoscopic huipils at the tortillería on our block who taught us the secrets of tortilla-making. The jubilant, elderly women who showed us the art of stomping in mud to make adobe. And I still think of the young boy alone on his bike, trekking down a long hill from the highlands to study English — he wanted to be a missionary someday.
Woven through those two months were moments of terror that dim the glow. They started with a bus ride, this one halted by a group of men with machetes. Then, being followed by two dark-eyed policemen in their jeep, street after street and block after block, shifting and re-routing, but unable to escape the sinister presence that lurked behind us until we reached our destination. And daily was the relentless hiss of catcalls spewed from every street corner. All this culminating one day in a death threat on our door. Muera, blondie. We moved to a different city, but the fear followed.
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On the other side of the border in California, I met migrants from all over Central America and Mexico. There was a young family living in a trailer in the middle of a field, who offered to share a simple meal of boiled potatoes. This was a better life for them. The buoyant couple whose jokes and laughter were pricked with moments of despair for paid work. That was the reason they’d settled in a speck of an American town after all. Further south, an earnest young mother worked at a fast food restaurant to support her daughter and a jealous husband, but hid at home when rumors flew that la migra was out checking documents. She’d been brought to the U.S. as a child, before she even knew what citizenship meant. Another mother, whose husband was often absent, spent her days in a dim trailer embroidering colorful servilletas to sell for a tenuous income. And at the school where I worked, sun-worn parents would stream in after a long day in the fields to pick up their young ones and wrap an arm around a tiny shoulder with the last relic of strength left in them.
Much later, in New York, a frazzled woman, at last reunited with her young boys. Disoriented, exhausted. Shackled with an ankle bracelet. Branded as some kind of fugitive for seeking a better life.
…
Today, peering through the haze of memory, I see a helpless young woman stranded at a hotel. Terrified. Tangled in a web spun of desperation. I see crushing poverty and potential violence forcing families closer to the border with each labored breath. Tired eyes grasping for relief. Clinging to a flicker of hope for deliverance. Grasping for survival in a land of supposed liberty.
So many of the faces I’ve seen are God-fearing. Made Catholic by colonialism and further oppressed by a people who profess to revere that same God. Denied refuge, vilified, abused, turned away by a culture that claims the creed love thy neighbor. If only we could see their faces. We would see that the villains are few. If only we could see, we would witness our own humanity.
