Solexico in Oaxaca

 

I want everyone to know what a great week I had with Solexico in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was a very intense time: I stayed with a family, attended classes three hours a day, did the special activities the school organized, and hung out with another advanced student who was wanting to practice Spanish while we went to restaurants, went shopping, and visited tourist attractions. I came back forming responses in Spanish in my mind to every situation for about a week, having to stop myself from speaking Spanish when English was called for. I really want to go back. Soon!

 

My post "In Mexico, They are Still Loved," a reflection on the sculpture, Almas de Migrantes, was from this trip. I learned everything about the background of that sculpture, the situation with the villages that have been losing population, by listening and reading in Spanish. Doing it in Spanish greatly deepened the esperience. It would be good to experience more of this, more easily.

Anyway, the class I took was small and well tailored to my level. I enjoyed getting to know the other students, especially Mary from New York, and I really appreciated the precise and skillful management of the class by our instructor. It was a little challenging to drop in on Book Three with some folks who had been there through Books One and Two, but I tuned up my vocabulary and remembered the grammar pretty well. So go, I say! And go to Oaxaca. It's fabulous!

In Mexico, They are Still Loved

 

The sculptor Alejandro Santiago was saddened by the reality of the little village near Oaxaca city, the one that still makes the handmade rugs for which it is famous. It is emptied of working age people, especially men, populated by old women and men, children, and some non-aged women. The working men are all away, in the United States or elsewhere, working to send back remittances that keep the family going. When I was there recently, his installation "2501 Almas de Migrantes" had taken over the plaza in front of Sto. Domingo, the streets nearby, and was said also to be occupying municipal offices. The clay figures, male and female, look uncomfortable, distressed, but they stand there in the plaza and on the street, representing creative energies and participation that are missing from the community because all those people were forced to leave.

I am sure they were forced to leave, because this is a truly beautiful place. The landscape is gorgeous. The people have lived there for millenia, attested by the Zapotec and Mixtec ruins that mark the mountaintops. Great treasures were wrought here in ancient times. It is said that these are the people who invented corn, breeding it selectively from a grassy grain that grows wild in the area. What happened?

The fields are still fertile, growing an abundance of vegetables and fruits and coffee. The people's hands are skilled, creating rugs, other textiles, beautiful embroideries, pottery, and amazing painted wooden fantasy animal figures. Still, somehow, the people are too poor for the men to stay. They must go and work in the fields harvesting crops in other countries, or enduring the rigors of industrial meat processing plants, or cleaning houses, or whatever.

Nearly half the population of Mexico is poor in the sense that they don't have enough to eat or a secure place to sleep. Many of those are children. This drives their fathers and/or their mothers to leave them to find jobs wherever they can, enduring hazards to get there, and putting up with difficult working conditions so their children can have food, clothes, school, medical care.

They leave their souls in the villages, says Alajandro Santiago. What can be done?

At the Detention Center

 

Every month on the first Monday of the month, the American Friends Service Committee and some other organization sponsor a vigil at the privately owned detention center that houses people awaiting deportation hearings in Aurora, Colorado. This month it was Regis University and the theme of the gathering was love, because we are so close to Valentine's Day.

It was moving to be part of a group of so many young and old, anglo and latino, of numerous different faiths, carrying signs and lighted candles. Chanting. We walked about a block from the corner where we started, showing our signs to passing cars, receiving honks of support, watching our step on the ice while keeping the candles upright and trying to sing lustily.

We came to a place where the public road was near the chain link fence and the chain link fence was near the building. We stopped. A student, Alejandro, spoke a poem he had written about the meaning of the desert, that desert that people cross, the place where so many die, a place with deep meaning in his own family. A woman who was known to those who come regularly spoke to say that while they had known her as someone who came and knelt at the fence to pray and cry out to God for her son's release, she was now there in gratitude. He had been released in November. What a blessing!

The students festooned the chain link fence with Valentine's Day balloons and paper streamers. Many signs were left on the fence with love as well. There were two carloads of Unitarian Universalists from Boulder in attendance with their yellow "Standing On the Side of Love" signs, and several more of our kind from other area congregations.

As we came to the end of the section where the public road was near the fence and near the building, we stopped again. In the driveway, one of the ominous white pickups was parked, with someone watching us. We chanted, there were announcements, and then a prayer. We walked back to the corner where we started, showing our signs again and chanting, our symbolic mission accomoplished.

There will be Valentine's cards for the detainees and for the workers in the detention center. And as always, encouragement for those who wait. Some of us will go to a deportation hearing ten days from now to show support. The struggle continues, with love and occasional glimmers of hope.

Deportation Traffic Court

I went to the shiny new Federal courthouse in Tucson and found the courtroom for the special deportation program "Operation Streamline". I went with Diane Dowgiert, minister of the Unitarain Universalist congregation in Tucson. Without her, I probably would not have actually gotten there and done it, and I'm usually pretty good at getting to things on my own. It was that intimidating! I had accidentally brought my little camera, which I had to leave at the checkpoint. They let us keep our phones and did not make us take off our shoes.

We found the courtroom, where people involved in the proceedings were being held not only in all the places to sit in the "business" section of the courtroom, but also in the benches normally used for the public, over on the left of the room. They asked us to sit way over on the right, leaving the large middle section empty. Public defenders were also everywhere.

The translator went through the rows of prisoners passing out headphones so they could hear the translation of the proceedings. I noticed he used hand sanitizer afterwards, but I guess anyone would after handing out forty or so headphones to a bundh of strangers.

It became clear as people were called forward to participate in court proceedings that they were manacled with chains around their waists, and shackled. A few had orange prison t-shirts. Most were in the nondescript, faded clothes that seem typical of Hispanic working people. Almost all of them were men.

Everything was well organized and civil. There had been a sorting out of cases, so the great bulk of them were people who had accepted plea deals for some prison time with deportation afterward. (I learned that first-time offenders of being in the country illegally are convicted of a misdemeanor and deported, but that any subsequent occurrence of being in the country illegally is a felony. These were all felony cases.)

A few cases that were going to go to trial or be dismissed were handled at the beginning of the session. The rest was a litany of accepting plea deals through the translator. I wondered if everyone had understood their options. I wondered if all the public defenders spoke good enough Spanish. I wondered what conditions were like in detention. It looked and sounded respectful, but so much took place before anyone appeared in open court. Is this okay? I'm thinking probably not.

It was chilling to realize the size of the flow of deportations from this one place. This court meets three times a week. I heard that Tucson has the largest volume of deportations in the country. Surely there is a better way.

Crossing Borders

People have been crossing the border and ending up in Tucson for years. Once, before the Gadsden Purchase, there was no border. Then for a long time, it was very casual, with people going back and forth for business and family visits and thinking little of it.

There came a time when people fleeing violence in the South began to arrive here seeking shelter. The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly, slowly, as these political refugees petitioned for asylum. For some, the ones from Nicaragua and some of the ones from El Salvador, their politics were not right. Along the border, a system of sanctuary churches quietly called itself into being. It was an interfaith effort, involving Catholics, Presbyterians, and Unitarian Universalists that I know of, and the memory of this forms the oldest layer of organizing around illegal border crossing in this area. When I visited the Unitarian Universalist Church here in Tucson, I saw the oddly placed sign outside the minister's office and heard the story that it covered the hole the FBI had made when they broke in and went through the files to find out where the political refugees were being hidden.

Now, people fleeing economic catastrophe in the South have been coming, and continue to come. When there is no other way to make sure the children have food, people cross in all the various ways available to them. I don't know how the connection works for sure, but I think it's not a coincidence that this latest wave of migration began with the signing of the North American Fair Trade Act (NAFTA). It has affected some parts of our economy more than others, and although the claim is that undocumented migrants are merely taking jobs that "legal" Americans won't do, the truth is that they will work for much lower wages and tolerate much more difficult working conditions. If not for undocumented people afraid to make a fuss, some industries -- vegetable harvesting, meat processing -- might have to offer decent wages and working conditions. The situation is far from simple.

The Desert and the Wall

Today I joined with a community college group for a very quick tour of a few important aspects of the border expereince just South of Tucson. Our first stop was in Green Valley at the home of one of the founders of the Samaritans, a group that walks the desert trails to provide humanitarian assistance to people who are walking from the border towards Tucson. The people they help are undocumented, and the basis for the help is that it is never illegal to keep people from dying, even though it is illegal to provide help in making their way into the country. So they walk a fine line, with jugs of water, socks, shoes, and first aid supplies in their packs.

Walking where migrants have been walking, where migrants might be concealing themselves nearby, this is a very moving experience, even though we were not out very long. Even on this late October day, it was warm out there. Even though it was not particularly hilly or rough, the land was a bosque,studded with cactus and prickly shrub-like trees. Migrants travel at night to reduce the chance of detection, and I kept thinking of how it might be to dodge through that underbrush.

The spot we were touring was carefully selected -- it had been near a pick-up spot, so there were signs that people had been waiting there. Not recently, but the signs were clear. Items of clothing, backpacks, water bottles, strewn by the side of the trail. I thought of the people who had walked at least two days to reach that spot from the border -- of their determination, of their desperation to find some way to survive by taking this tremendous risk.

We got back in the bus and rode to Nogales. A border runs through it. We stayed on the Arizona side and looked at the wall. It used to be a solid metal wall with lots of art painted on it. This summer, they built a new, improved, wall, of metal posts just far enough apart that you can sort of see through it. The perception of one town with a fence down the middle is even clearer -- we could see Nogales, Sonora, right there, going about its business. We chatted with a young Border Patrol agent who told us about the tunnel they had filled in just under where we were standing. We had lunch in the park and heard the story of someone who had crossed illegally twice and decided to return twice. In that context, the story was especially moving.

Those are the things I need to report. Probably the pictures tell the story.

Occupy Tucson

It's not really on my agenda for this trip, but I did happen to run across the encampment of "Occupy Tucson" this morning while out walking. It was really too early (just before 8 AM) to visit with anyone, although some folks were up and stirring. Everything was in good order, and the occupiers seemed to be blending in with the downtown homeless crowd pretty well. A police officer was mediating a dispute between an occupier and a homeless guy about the homeless guy's behavior (I did not find out what it was). A group of police with bicycles and a Segway were gathered in the shade across the street, but they seemed pretty mellow.
Last week's local independent weekly newspaper had a story about negotiations over tickets that were supposedly going to be written for folks who camped overnight, but I guess that was resolved. Everyone here seems grateful that Tucson is not Phoenix. They apparently don't lead with pepper spray!

If someone can tell me where to get a cup of coffee in downtown Tucson, I'd be grateful!