Two Americans

I was sitting at the bar in el Hueso del Fraile, a coffee shop in downtown Brownsville. Laura, the owner, was working with a younger friend of hers putting together sandwiches.  My friend from the ACLU was going to show a film ("Two Americans") later that evening, and the two women were getting ready for business.

As they laid out sandwich meats and dressings, they shared dreams. “I would like to found an orphanage based on art,” said the younger woman. “Art helps you discover yourself even as you express what you discover.” Her eyes shone with the idea. Laura smiled and said that she knew just the place, a large, abandoned house down the street. I chimed in that I had had my eye on that place as well, and that I, too, thought that it would be a great space for a community of elderly folks mixed with younger ones.

Laura and I discovered that not only did we both like that house as a possible place for a community, we both liked it so much that we had made it a point to buy a lotto ticket each week, “just in case” fate agreed with our grand ideas.

 The two women continued to lay out their plans, these Mexican immigrants intent on using art to defuse loneliness and need, plotting on ways to make things a good deal better than they were.

Soon afterward, Hank, a tall, rail thin man dressed in khaki, from his brown ten gallon cowboy hat down to his boots, wandered into the café. After ordering his coffee, he folded himself into one of the chairs and started looking over the ACLU material. He peered over at me and said, “Hey! Are you ACLU?” I smiled in my most disarming manner and said, “Yes, sir, I am a card-carrying ACLU nutcase.” He looked at me for a minute, and shook his head. He picked up a pocket constitution that the ACLU hands out, and he asked, “You folks are all about the Constitution, right? Then you tell me where in the Constitution it says that illegal aliens have any rights in this country?”

While I knew that this was a rhetorical question, I was, after all, card-carrying, so I  started sharing my scant knowledge about the fifth and fourteenth amendments and equal protection under the law. Hank would have none of it. “You need to start with the eleventh amendment,” he said, “There ain’t no place in the Constitution that says that we should protect illegals.”

Laura, the immigrant with good dreams, brought Hank a refill for his coffee.

A short time later, the film began. It was a hard one to watch, as it featured Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Katherine, a nine-year-old victim of one of the Sheriff’s immigration raids in Phoenix. Arpaio and his cronies positively crowed about their meanness, the sheriff nodding and winking as he spoke about “law and order.”  The filmmakers interviewed a couple of white midwestern retirees about Arpaio, and they gushed and carried on as if the whole anti-immigrant operation was somehow cute and with no real consequences for people (much less for a nine year old who loses her parents in Arpaio’s game).

After a particularly dreadful spewing by the sheriff, Hank got up and left the café., taking a seat outside. Perhaps he was equally disgusted by Arpaio, or perhaps he was bored.

When I left, he was still sitting there, flipping the constitution open and shut. “Hey! ACLU man!” he shouted at me, “Let’s talk about rights!”

I ignored him, and continued on my way, leaving the white man sitting alone at his table.

As I opened my car door, a border patrol unit slowed down in front of the café, and then sped away, the patrolmen off to do their duty.

I looked back toward the café, the sun shining off of the front window. Inside, the movie was coming to a close. Astrid told me later that there was no applause at the end of the show, but that there were sandwiches, quiet talk and some music. And, I am sure, at least two immigrant women were speaking about how to humanize a frightened world, perhaps with art, or with music.

Medicaid Matters

I am too old for this, I told myself, as the alarm chimed brightly at 3:25am.

I crawled out of bed, pulled on my yellow “Equal Voice” tee shirt, and my grey and green tennis shoes (the ones that make me look like I run faster than my speediest thoughts), and headed out the door.

I was joining 54 other people from Brownsville to make a six-hour bus trip to Austin.  There we planned to march on the capitol with about 3,000 other people, to urge the Governor of Texas to accept the Medicaid Expansion part of the Affordable Care Act. Rick Perry has said that Texas can take care of its own poor people.

Texas has 6.2 million uninsured people. Over a million of them are children. None of us are happy with the way Texas has taken care of its poor people.

That is an item worth fighting for, we had decided--thus this early-morning activity.

I am pleased to think that I will get to the bus a little early; maybe I would get an aisle seat—or even a front seat. As I pulled into the parking lot, though, I saw that I am amongst the last to arrive. As I clambered aboard the bus, I was handed a bag with a potato and egg taco and some cookies in it. Sister Phylis Peters, a Daughter of Charity, has saved me an aisle seat, for which I am grateful.

Sr. Phylis is one of our heroes down here. After a few moments with her, I always feel that I should retie my flashy tennis shoes. Otherwise, there is no way that I could keep up with her.

We arrived in Austin in due time, found our place in line, put on our yellow caps, and joined a sea of people from all across the state to make the long walk up Congress Avenue. I was delighted to see fifty or so folks in wheelchairs—over the years I have learned that disabled people are fearless when it comes to raising their voices.

And so we raised our voices—on the capitol steps and in the offices of elected officials.  Our message was simple—Medicaid Expansion will insure hundreds of thousands of Texans. If we refuse the expansion, the monies will go to another state who has acted on behalf of the uninsured, and has accepted the expansion, some place like New Mexico, or, God forbid, Arkansas.

Nearly half of the representatives in the Texas State House are new to their job. Many of the reps that we visited had no idea what we were talking about. But the organizers of the protest (Texas Well and Healthy) had done a great job, and the written material was clear and to the point—and well footnoted.

It was a long day, and as 4pm rolled around, our Brownsville contingent reboarded the bus. As we settled in for the ride home, I asked two of the younger people how their day had gone. Gabriela frowned a bit, and said, “Well, at one office we went to, the staff made fun of us. I guess we weren’t dressed up as nice as them. I don’t know, it was embarrassing.” I asked her, that after that experience, if she would participate in another one of these actions some day. She smiled and said, “Oh yeah, and the next time I am bringing more friends.”

There was a bit of a pause, and then Gabriela added, “You know, this wasn’t about me. It was about my mom and her getting insurance. That’s important to me.” She looked down at her phone and began texting someone.

I settled into my seat and thought for a bit about civic engagement and the young woman who was going to end up spending twelve hours on a smelly bus, who had spent three hours walking and standing around in a protest and who had been humiliated in the offices of an elected official.

I reached down and retied my shoes, for I was surrounded by fiery women, and I best be ready to keep up with them.

As for Rick Perry, he wears boots.

He is doomed.

The Witness

I remember him at odd times, a small quiet man whose scars on his thumbs spoke far more about his suffering than his own words could. He had come to the United States after witnessing Guatemalan army soldiers decapitate his wife and children.  He himself had escaped death by leaping from the cliff where the soldiers had brought the family to die. All of this took place back in 1983 in the Quiche region of Guatemala, while the Guatemalan military waged war on their fellow citizens.

The soldiers had bound the poor man’s thumbs together with copper wire; thus the scars.

His name was Francisco.  I met him in 1988, when he came by the parish office looking for a couple of nights’ hospitality while his asylum application was processed. His family’s murder had been a part of Plan Sofia, a military  “pacification” operation that targeted Mayan Indians for extermination.  Francisco’s grounds for asylum would seem ironclad, but in his case, the evidence for the claim were inconvenient for the US government. Operation Sofia was planned, ordered and carried out by American-trained and supervised military leaders. This connection to us (the US) bears repeating. Our responsibility for the atrocities has been documented by peer-review quality research papers, captured in movies, published by the Archdiocese of Guatemala City, and found, as well, in the scars on Franciso’s thumbs.

Photo by Hugo Muralles

Further documentation of this genocide can be found, of all places, on the fence that surrounds the Cathedral in Guatemala City. The names of some of the 200,000 victims of the systematic murders are etched on the stone facings of the columns that hold up the fence. Ironically, paradoxically, tragically—poetically—the cathedral shares the central plaza with the offices of the government’s ministries’ offices. Courage and socio-pathology, side by side.

Francisco’s case was given a preliminary “Ok, we will check this out” and he was allowed to travel north to start a new life. I have not heard from him ever again, and hope that he is well.

He did come to mind last week when I heard that Guatemalan authorities had charged Efrain Rios Montt, the Guatemalan dictator during Plan Sofia, with genocide. For anyone with even a passing familiarity with Guatemala’s history, this is an extraordinary event. Rios Montt’s actual conviction is, of course, quite another matter.

For the moment, Rios Montt, under house arrest, is not speaking. Unlike his victims, he will not be tortured, he will not be forced to sign fake confessions, he will not be starved to death, and his wife and children will not be killed in front of him.

The newly-elected president of Guatemala, Mr. Molina, served as a major under Rios Montt during the massacres (Mr. Molina denies this, but there are photographs and documentary evidence establishing his presence and activity there). Mr. Molina is campaigning for military aid from the United States, claiming to want to battle drug traffickers.

Amongst the many allies and companions of the crimes of Rios Montt and Molina are a special group of commandos called kaibiles. These special forces’ soldiers received training straight out of Fr. Benning, Georgia, at the School of the Americas. The most recent infamy of this relationship between our military and the Guatemalan military  was the desertion of several of these well-trained killers (kaibiles) to the most violent drug cartel in the hemisphere (the Zetas).

The evil circles back on itself, much like the copper wire around Franciso’s thumbs.