Strangers in a Strange Land: Exile, Immigration, Survival and Identity

Judah has gone into exile with suffering
And hard servitude;
She lives now among the nations,
And finds no resting place;
Her pursuers have all overtaken her
In the midst of her distress.
----Lamentations 1:3



The experience of being foreigners, immigrants, refugees, and strangers in the land is a common theme in Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Joan M. Muruskin, Washington representative for Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program, has described the Bible as “the ultimate immigration handbook.” Israel’s story is a story of migrations. The collective formation of Israel’s own identity is tied to their experiences of being strangers in strange lands. Israel’s experience of being slaves and foreigners in Egypt was seared on their moral conscience. Their status as strangers within Egypt became God’s reference point for legislating their own treatment of foreigners once they came into the land of Canaan (Exod. 22:21; 23:9; Lev. 19:34; Deut. 10:19).[1] God’s promise of their remaining in the land was contingent upon Israel’s treatment of the stranger in their midst (Jeremiah 7:6-7).

Hospitality to the stranger was a crucial cultural and religious practice in the ancient Mediterranean world. Abram’s welcome of three strangers by the oaks of Mamre became a tradition that reminded Jews and Christians that in welcoming the stranger one might be welcoming God or angels (Genesis 18:1-8; Hebrews 13:2). Among the transgressions the prophet Ezekiel recognizes as bringing Israel/Judah within God’s judgment and exile is mistreatment of the alien (Ezek. 22:29). In their exile in Babylon God’s people once again tasted the bitter brew of being strangers in a strange land. Within this exilic context elite Jews from Judah had to forge a new collective identity.

Survival and Identity in Exile

The experience of the exiles in Babylon was one of deep anguish (Psalm 137). Being uprooted from their homeland, culture, customs, and people tore at their collective identity. Those Judeans taken captive to Babylon were separated from land and temple, essential elements in their identity as a people. Loss of land and temple made a critical impact on the exiles’ collective identity, experience and understanding of God. How could they worship God in a foreign land? Even more so, who was God and where was God in this alien land? Had God been overpowered by the armies of Babylon? For a people whose spirituality was intertwined with their collective identity the dislocation of the exile caused a fracture in their self-understanding.

Migration of groups through a forced movement by a state or for economic survival to an undesired place has a significantly different impact on self-identity than the migration of individuals through personal decision to a chosen location. In forced migrations collective identities are tied longer to the homeland from which they were exiled. Their hope for return lingers. If there is an alienation from the new environment and strong identity ties to the homeland, integration into and identification with the new society is much slower. The exiles in Babylon experienced a forced migration, had string ties to their homeland, were alienated from the new culture, and longed to return home. These factors were ripe for reinforcing a separatist minority identity within the empire of Babylon. Maintaining a distinctive religious and cultural identity was a significant element in the survival of Judah in exile, but without becoming totally separated from the dominant culture of Babylon.

Preserving ethnic identity as a minority community within a dominant culture becomes a matter of a people’s survival. In their study on refugees and identity Ruth Krufeld and Linda Camino note:

Despite experiences of being violently or forcibly uprooted and plunged into discord and disorder, refugees demonstrate the strengths of innovation for survival, as well as the vitality to create and negotiate new roles and behavior to achieve both necessary and desired ends. By doing so, they reveal the multi-layered, richly contextualized meanings of their lives and traditions as they act to re-affirm self and community.”[2]

Self-preservation was a major concern of the exiled Jews in Babylon. It was not simply a question of physical survival, but how they were to survive as a peculiar people in a foreign land. A new identity, a counter-culture within the dominant culture, would have to be forged. Diasporic peoples must learn to reconfigure their collective identities in foreign lands in order to survive. How could the Jewish exiles preserve its own religio-ethnic identity, while at the same time engage the dominant culture?

Exilic Survival and Jeremiah’s Mandate

Standard schemas for understanding the relationship between immigrant, refugee, or minority communities and the dominant culture include: 1) assimilation- The melting-pot theory whereby immigrants blend into the dominant culture by shedding their own unique ethnic and cultural identity; 2) separation- The creation of distinct communities separate from the dominant society through discrimination and/or as a means of cultural self-preservation; 3) isolated integration- Selective elements of the culture of the dominant society are integrated into the lives of immigrants; 4) hybridization- The immigrant lives bi-culturally taking on two cultural identities. Preservation of one’s religious, ethnic, and cultural identity will take a different shape depending upon the relationship the immigrant has with their primary and secondary community and culture.

Preservation of self-identity among minority, immigrant groups within dominant cultures requires survival tactics. One major survival tactic is for immigrant groups to create collective enclaves as a form of self-chosen isolation. An alternative society is recreated like those in their homeland forming a type of subculture, in the manner of early Mennonite and Amish communities. Recreating social structures, leadership patterns, rituals, and storytelling serve to maintain clear religio-ethnic boundaries. The story of Daniel, a hero of the Babylonian exile, is a prime example of Hebrew resistance literature, exilic storytelling which functioned to reinforce self-identity within a dominant culture. Resisting the dominant ethos is easier within these self-contained, isolated “ghettos.” Self-identity is preserved within such diasporic communities, but often through isolation from the wider community.

The prophet Jeremiah called upon the exilic Jews to practice a particular form of exilic survival and religio-ethnic self-preservation. Jeremiah proposes an exilic model of engagement with the dominant culture. While the prophet Hananiah promised the exiles that they would return to their homeland, Jeremiah called upon the Judaeans to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce; take wives and have sons and daughters” (Jeremiah 29:5-7). “Build, plant, and marry” are a traditional formula of blessing within the land. They exiles are to participate in what blessings their new land has to offer. In Deuteronomy images of “building, planting, and marrying” are formulaic elements that construct reasons for military exemption from holy war (Deuteronomy 20). They symbolize nonviolent forms of engagement with the community. Jeremiah promotes a program of seeking the peace (shalom/welfare) of the city where they dwell in exile. Rather than a disengaged, isolated waiting for a return to the homeland, the prophet advocates a nonviolent engagement of the exilic community with the dominant culture.[3] The exiles turn their captivity into an opportunity for self-preservation and corporate mission. They learn the language and interact with the dominant Babylonian culture, while living without sovereignty and maintaining their own religious heritage. The creation of the model of the synagogue, collection of the Hebrew canon, and the maintenance of a diasporic identity during the exilic period speaks of a thriving community amidst a foreign environment. It is through a balance of preserving peculiarity along with peaceful, constructive engagement with the dominant culture that the exiles recreate their identity as resident aliens within a foreign land.[4]

Immigrant Survival and Identity in the United States

Economic survival is an overriding agenda of alienated and uprooted peoples who find themselves strangers and exiles in the land in which they live. Survival operates on both a cultural and physical level. The need of immigrant peoples to survive makes them vulnerable to economic exploitation by the dominant culture. Economic exploitation was at the heart of the experience of Judah in Babylonian exile. The empire of Babylon focused upon “the domination and exploitation of non-Babylonian populations for the benefit of the ruling elite.”[5] Exploitation of the Judaean exiles for their labor made them virtual slaves of the empire. [6]

There is a real sense in which many immigrants are in the U.S. as “economic exiles” or “migrant slaves.” I grew up on a lemon ranch in Oxnard, California that depended upon migrant workers to pick the lemons. My father moved our family from Oklahoma in 1955 (later than the “Grapes of Wrath Okies” that came during the dustbowl years in the 30’s) to become a tenant farmer among the lemon orchards. I remember the “braceros” (literally “strong arm,” refers to a “hired hand”) who regularly came to the ranch where I lived to pick the lemons. The Bracero program (1942-1964) brought Mexicans from across the border to work on farms, such as the one where I lived in my youth. It was developed due to the shortage of farm labor after WWII. Braceros accounted for 93 percent of the temporary work force. In 1954, the Department of Immigration reported 1,108,900 undocumented workers in farms in the U.S.

Mexican migrant workers in the Bracero program were exploited for their labor. Pay was extremely low, often based on the number of boxes of crops picked, and housing conditions were appalling. But, they endured these conditions in order to survive. Rigoberto Garcia remembers the bracero experience with a mixture of anger and resignation. “When you work for someone else, the profit from your work stays with them…Because here you work just to survive, and you don’t own anything. You just survive and survive, but someone else owns your labor.” [7] He recalls a rather humiliating experience:

Thousands of men came every day (from buses on the border to work places). Once we got there, they’d send us in groups of two hundred, as naked as we came into the world, into a big room, about sixty feet square. Then men would come in in masks, with tanks on their backs, and they’d fumigate us from top to bottom. Supposedly we were flea-ridden, germ-ridden. No matter, they just did it.[8]

In 1958, when I was 9 years old, César Chávez was sent by the Community Service Organization to Oxnard, California to organize “la colonia,” the Mexican American community. Chavez worked to document abuses by the Farm Placement Service, and organized a boycott of local merchants, along with sit-ins and marches to protest the lack of jobs for local residents. The exploitive Braceros program was eventually ended in 1964. The nonviolent resistance tactics Chavez used became standard techniques he would use with the United Farm Workers Union.

Exploitation of migrant farm workers for their cheap labor is common in the United States. The need among migrants for economic survival opens the door for exploitation and a virtual slave system. Many immigrants hired as nannies and maids in private residences in the U.S. are being forced into virtual bondage.[9] Recently a four-year boycott of Taco Bell by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in southern Florida was ended after immigrant tomato pickers won an increase in wages and a code of conduct for Florida tomato suppliers. Jonathan Blum, senior vice president of Yum, which owns Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, A&W All American Food Restaurants, and Long John Silver’s, said, “Human rights are universal. Indentured servitude by suppliers is strictly forbidden.” A major corporation had to make an edict that forbad virtual slavery of immigrant workers.[10]

Living as economic exiles, resident aliens, and virtual slaves has been a significant part of the experience of many immigrants. Since September 11, 2001 there has been an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment. The dominant culture has created a xenophobic and racist environment in which undocumented immigrants, and other minority communities, find themselves acutely alienated and feeling in el exilio, strangers in a strange land. The profiling of immigrants and people of color for potential terrorist scrutiny has resulted not only in unnecessary detainment and false imprisonment, but the alienation of their communities. The call for “English-only” legislation and vigilante patrolling of the Mexican borders (and not the Canadian borders) are fueled by fears of the U.S. becoming an “Alien Nation.” Our post-9/11 environment has become a hostile environment for publicly advocating or advertising a collective self-identity that is distinct from the dominant culture.[11]

Survival and preservation of ethnic and cultural identity were key elements in the experience of the Judean exiles in Babylon. They are also key elements in the experience of contemporary immigrant populations. The prophet Jeremiah offers an exilic model of how strangers in a strange land can nonviolently negotiate engagement with the wider culture, while surviving and preserving their own distinct religious and cultural identity.

Living in el exilio

The exile can serve as a metaphorical lens to help us look at issues surrounding immigrants, refugees and the church’s place in the world. John Howard Yoder, Mennonite theologian, saw Jeremiah’s exilic model of “seeking the peace of the city” as a way of nonviolently engaging the empire. At the end of his essay he wondered if the Jewish exilic experience might speak to other migrant and refugees peoples.[12] Alain Epp Weaver brings Yoder’s exilic theology into conversation with Edward Said’s appropriation of the exile motif to speak to the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland. In his essay Weaver makes an important statement about the misappropriation of the exilic metaphor:

European-American Christians, particularly those in urban and suburban settings whose livelihoods are not dependent on the cultivation of the land, could be tempted to confuse Jeremiah’s vision for life in exile with the rootless, virtual reality of much postmodern thought.[13]

There is a new trend to identify the experience of the postmodern, white, Euro-American church with exilic images as a counter-culture of “resident aliens”[14] and “Christian exiles.”[15] Although the exilic metaphor may be helpful for the dominant, white, European church in constructing an identity counter to the empire, there must be care taken to understand that there are other peoples and communities whose lived experience more readily fits the realities of exile. Those who share the power and privileges of the dominant culture should take care to avoid a too easy appropriation of the exile as a metaphor for a church that is a primary beneficiary of the empire.

If the white, Euro-American church wants to identify with the realities of exilic experience, it should begin in solidarity with those whose daily existence more closely reflects the diasporic experience---immigrants, refugees, displaced peoples, and people of color communities. The spiritual, ethical, and political stance of the Euro-American church should be shaped by the biblical vision of hospitality to the stranger (Deuteronomy 10:19), justice for the oppressed (Luke 4:18-19), and resistance to systems that alienate people (Mark 11:15-17). The prophet Jeremiah provides an exilic model for immigrants, refugees, and other “minority communities” for survival, preservation of ethnic, cultural, and religious identity, and a way of nonviolent resistance and engagement with the dominant culture.

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[1] A postcolonial reading of the Exodus story, which is tied to the conquest of Canaan, would question it as a liberative model from the perspective of peoples who have been displaced from their homelands. See, Robert Allen Warrior, “A Native American Perspective: Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians,” R.S. Sugirtharajah, ed., Voices From the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1991), 287-295.
[2] As cited in Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 78-79.
[3] I am indebted to the insights of Daniel L. Smith, The Religion of the Landless: The Social Context of the Babylonian Exile (Bloomington: Meyer Stone Books), 1989.
[4] For an application of Jeremiah 29 to Chinese refugees in Hong Kong, see Archie Lee’s essay “Exile and Return in the Perspective of 1997” in Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, eds., Reading from This Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective, Vol. 2 (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1995), 97-108.
[5] David Stephen Vanderhooft, The Neo-Babylonian Empire and Babylon in the Latter Prophets, HSM 59 (Atlanta: Scholars, 2000), 6.
[6] Daniel L. Smith argues that the Jews were “slaves” in Babylon. Daniel L. Smith, The Religion of the Landless, 38-41.
[7] “Immigrants: The Story of a Bracero,” Riboberto Garcia Perez, interviewed by David Bacon, April 18, 2001, http://dbacon.igc.org/Imgrants/24Bracerostory.htm.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Stephanie Armour, “Some Foreign Household Workers Face Enslavement,” Common Dreams News Center, www.commondreams.org, November 20, 2001.
[10] Eric Schlosser, “A Side Order of Human Rights,” Common Dreams News Center, www. commondreams.org, April 6, 2005,.
[11] In an environment of xenophobia, racism, and cultural homogenization Latino scholars have proposed an agenda of “cultural citizenship.” It is the utilization of cultural particularity to claim political rights within the wider dominant culture, while maintaining a distinctive local identity. See, William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor, eds., Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights (Boston: Beacon), 1997.
[12] John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 78.
[13] Ben C. Ollenburger and Gayle Gerber Koontz, eds., A Mind Patient and Untamed: Assessing John Howard Yoder’s Contributions to Theology, Ethics, and Peacemaking (Telford:Cascadia, 2004), 173.
[14] Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abindon), 1989.
[15] Erskine Clarke, ed., Exilic Preaching: Testimony for Christian Exiles in an Increasingly Hostile Culture (Harrisburg: Trinity), 1998.

Broken Walls, Crossed Borders: a meditation on Ephesians 2:12-22

In Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall he quotes an American aphorism “Good fences make good neighbors.” In this truism, or should I say “falsism,” fences, borders, walls are believed to create good relationships. This may be true for some middle-class families living in the suburbs, who don’t want their gardens trampled on by their neighbor’s dog, but it is generally not the case with walls that divide communities, nations, and cultures.

Often walls are created out of fear of our neighbor or the need to control. The wall that runs through Israel-Palestine is one such wall. It is a wall erected not only by fear of terrorist attacks, but for re-appropriating and controlling Palestinian land for Israel’s advantage. A recent edition of National Geographic magazine, Charles Bowden in his feature article on the U.S./Mexico border wall, said:

Borders everywhere attract violence, violence prompts fences, and eventually fences can mutate into walls. Then everyone pays attention because a wall turns a legal distinction into a visual slap in the face. We seem to love walls, but are embarrassed by them because they say something unpleasant about the neighbors—and us. They flow from two sources: fear and the desire for control. Just as our houses have doors and locks, so do borders call forth garrisons, customs officials, and, now and then, big walls. They give us divided feelings because we do not like to admit we need them.

Just like many U.S. employers do not like to admit that they need immigrant workers. Not long a go a California construction company with a contract to build a 14 mile stretch of wall between San Diego and Tijuana was fined 5 million dollars for using undocumented Mexican workers to build the wall that was supposed to keep them out! How ironic! It only reflects the economic realities of the U.S. and Mexico that the wall does not solve.

Borders and walls can serve as metaphors for exploring the boundaries and landscapes of human differences, personal identities, and the clash of cultures. Gloria Anzaldua, a chicana feminist, in her book Borderlands: La Frontera uses the metaphor of the border to explore how conceptual boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and sexual orientation create limits that when transgressed cause one to be labeled as unacceptable or an outsider.

The writer of Ephesians uses the metaphor of the wall to describe the religio-cultural differences that separated Jew from Gentile. This dividing wall was symbolized by the differing views of the Jew and Gentile Christians concerning “the law with its ordinances.” The law served as a type of border between these two cultures and people groups. The law defined the borderland of Jewishness through prescribed ways of eating, drinking, socializing, working, praying, worshipping, ritualizing, and being family. Public association of Jews with Gentiles was a questionable activity. This “border document,” so to speak, created a social consciousness of who was in and who was out. Walls and borders are intended to divide people and to keep their separate identities clear.

The Gentiles, who lived on the other side of this Jewish border or law, did not recognize the border as valid for them. Because they did not observe Jewish purity laws, the Gentiles were technically labeled as “unclean.” The temple of Solomon even had literal walls constructed within it that separated Jews from Gentiles, Jewish men from Jewish women, and the priests from the Holy of Holies. Within this sacred space walls reinforced their social divisions. Sacred space, temple, church, religion reflecting the social and national walls that divide people? Surely that doesn’t happen today in our world.

Walls create hostility and violence. Charles Bowden, in his National Geographic article described walls as “attracting violence.” The writer of Ephesians describes the border wall between Jew and Gentile with the term “hostility.” There was no real peace between the two sides of the Jew/Gentile border.

“Christ is our peace,” says the writer of Ephesians. He has broken down the border wall that created hostility between the Jew and Gentile. Did Christ just break these walls down, as the text says, “through the blood of the cross?” Not just in the cross. Jesus broke these walls down when he ate with tax-collectors and sinners, when he met in a public space with a Samaritan woman, when he touched lepers, when he was willing to learn a lesson about ethnic prejudice from a Syro-Phoenician woman, when he sent his disciples across the border into Samaritan land, as he related to a Roman centurian. Jesus was a border-crosser, a boundary breaker, a social transgressor.

The law, as a social, religious, and cultural boundary-maker between the two groups, was removed in Christ. Gentiles no longer needed to become law-observing Jews to be accepted. So, in Christ there was no longer two separate groups, but one new humanity, thus making peace. When we see people from different cultures, nations, people from across social, racial, economic, and national borders as part of one humanity, there is the possibility for creating a theological foundation for peace.

Christ came and proclaimed peace to those on both sides of the border, people divided by literal walls and walls of the heart. In Christ there is a new creation without borders and boundaries. The borders make some people strangers, aliens, illegal, and non-citizens. In Christ we “are no longer strangers and aliens, but are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”

This new reality of Christ’s community, that transcends borders and boundaries, shapes a different understanding and practice around borderlands and boundaries. In Christ’s new community labels like “hostility,” “illegal” and “alien” have been replaced with words like “peace,” citizens,” “saints,” “members of the household of God,” “sisters and brother.” Words and walls that separate and divide have been torn down. Christ is our peace, who has broken down the dividing walls.

Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall, begins with the line: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Let me be so bold as to say, “There is someone that doesn’t love a wall.” That someone is Christ. Whether it be in Israel/Palestine, the U.S./Mexico border, or the borderlands of the heart. Christ is a wall crasher, a boundary breaker, a border crosser. Daniel Smith-Christopher goes so far as to call Christ a “good coyote,” one who helps others to cross borders. Christ is with us here…. helping us to cross borders of the land, of the mind, of the heart, and of the soul. Christ is our peace, who has broken down the dividing walls.

Immigration

This past week end I attended a planning meeting for an immigration conference to be held in Waxahatchie, Texas at the Lakeview Camp and Conference Center on September 18-20, 2009. It is being sponsored by the Peace and Justice Support Network, Mennonite Mission Network, Urban Leaders Network, and Western District Conference of Menonite Church USA.

During my plane trip I read the book Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the U.S.- Mexico Border by Miriam Davidson. It looks at various immigration-related issues from slices of lives of people on the border. The focus is upon "Ambos Nogales," the twin cities of Nogales, Arizona, U.S. and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Through the lives of Yolanda Sanchez, Jimmy Teyechea, Michael Andrew Elmer, Dario Miranda Valenzuela, Christina, and Jose and Hope Torres, author Mirian Davidson gives us an embodied glance into the maquiladoras, border crossings, impoverished children living in the tunnels, drug smuggling, border patrol, and a host of other realities of "lives on the line."

As I read the book I began to recognize place names and people I had encountered on a U.S.-Mexico border learning tour I went on in 2007 that connected trade with migration. The book refers to Cecilia Guzman, a former sanctary movement leader who was our tour guide through Nogales and into Mexico. She is a long time resident of Nogales, Sonora and has led many groups to see the realities of border life for BorderLinks, a Christian organization that raises awareness about immigration and border issues: http://www.borderlinks.org/bl/index.htm. I took her photo beneath a crucifix at a church in Benjamin Hill, Mexico where we spoke with a priest friend of Cecelia's who was involved in the sanctary movement in the 80's.

Here is my report of that 2007 border learning tour:

One of the men at the No Mas Muertas station on the Mexican side of the border at Nogales was replacing his shoe laces. I looked at the tennis shoes on the men who were in line to receive food and most of them were without shoe laces. The border patrol remove the shoe laces of those who have tried to cross over the Mexican border so that it is harder for them to run away from the border patrol if they try again. On this trip to the Arizona/Mexico border we heard other stories about how immigrants who were caught trying to cross into the U.S. At several places we visited we heard about how the border patrol didn’t give detainees any food or water to immigrants while they were being held for up to two days. We heard about hair pulling, shoving, punching, and how border patrol would turn up the air conditioning in the immigrants holding cells in the cold of winter as a form of harassment.

This experience was part of Migration and Trade Learning Tour co-sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee, the Peace and Justice Support Network, and BorderLinks, November 10-20, 2007. Ten people, including staff of MCC and BorderLinks, not only visited numerous border ministries to learn about the immigrant’s experience, but also put immigration into a larger context of the negative economic impact of trade agreements like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).

Upon arrival in Tucson, Arizona we stayed at the offices of BorderLinks in Tucson, Arizona. BorderLinks is an experiential education ministry that began in 1987 as an outgrowth of the sanctuary movement. Their focus is on immigration, community formation, and social justice along the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico. Our work began sitting in on a Sunday School class on immigration at Shalom Mennonite Church, Tucson, Arizona. We heard how almost everyone, from teachers to doctors, were impacted on a daily basis by the realities of being near the border.

On our first day trip we met with Frontera de Christo, a border ministry of the Presbyterian church of U.S. and Mexico in Douglas, Arizona, and heard about their various ministries. One of their vital ministries is a Just Trade Business Development Center that works with Just Coffee, another stop on our group’s many visits. After a meal of beans, rice, and fresh tortillas and heard the stories of a number of migrant men who tried to cross over into the U.S., we slept on a linoleum floor at CAME a migrant shelter run by the Roman Catholic church in Agua Prieta, Mexico.

The sun of a new day shone down warm on us as we headed for a Migrant Resource Center located right next to the border fence in Agua Prieta. We spoke with a Catholic sister, who had volunteered at the center to provide basic necessities, first aid, and information to those who are dropped off at the border after being deported.

This was the second time I had visited Just Coffee. It is a fair trade plus cooperative. We heard about the families in Salvador Urbina, Chiapas, Mexico who grow the beans and how this allows them to stay in their homeland, rather than having to migrate north to the U.S. for economic survival. The roasting of the beans, packaging and shipping of the coffee takes place at Agua Prieta. The Peace and Justice Support Network is promoting Just Coffee.

Time was spent at the border fence reflecting on the migrant journey. Names of those who died crossing the border in the desert were read. Tears flowed from those who stood next to the border fence as they reflected on the harsh realities of survival and sustenance, of hunger and hope, of desperation and death.

In the afternoon we traveled in our van to Nogales, Sonora, Mexico and stayed overnight in homes where plastic water tanks are perched on the roofs like dark crows. Again, we ate the staples of the Mexican diet---rice, beans, and tortillas. In the morning the silent air was broken with upbeat Mexican music coming from a small water truck driving through the neighborhood. We packed the van and headed for Casa de La Misericordia, where we got to take our first shower in days. It is the Mexican headquarters of Borderlinks.

At the casa we heard from Francisco “Kiko” Trujillo, director of BorderLinks Mexico, a lifetime resident of Nogales who worked his way up to manager in the maquiladoras (U.S. run factories). Kiko emphasized the impact of NAFTA on the Mexican economy and the migration of Mexicans and Central Americans to the U.S. Later that evening MCC workers went more indepth into NAFTA and its negative impact upon the Mexican economy as a major factor in the migration of Mexicans to the U.S.

Our group got a visual image of the link between workers and maquilas on a trip to the Industrial Park. Together we stood on a hill and looked down on a community where most of the workers of the maquilas came from. As we looked over the hill we could see the poor community with its shacks for homes and meandering dirt roads. When we turned to the other side we could see a number of large maquilas, modern U.S. owned factories and a row of nice houses for managers of the companies. Two communities stood in sharp contrast.

A short trip to the market provided a market basket, cost of living exercise of comparing prices of food in Mexico to the U.S. and what it would take in work hours to purchase these items by Mexicans. For example, it would take about 4 and ½ hours of work for the average Mexican to buy 36 disposable diapers!

The next day we drove to Benjamin Hill. There we went to the train station where many Mexicans hop on the moving train to try and cross the border to the U.S. Many of those who try to hop a ride are injured. On a previous trip to Mexico I heard the story of a young man on crutches who fell off the train and injured his foot.

In Benjamin Hill we walked across a plaza to a Catholic church with a ministry to migrants. An elderly woman greeted us all with a kiss on the cheek and told us stories about migrants as she sorted through beans in preparation for a meal. Not far from there we visited with Padre Ramon Quinonos of Our Lady of Fatima Church. We were inspired by his involvement in the sanctuary movement in the ‘80s, when churches in Mexico and the U.S. provided sanctuary for Central Americans fleeing the violence and oppression, supported by U.S. policies, in countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua. Our lunch discussion over rice, beans, and tortillas revealed some contrasting views between our group and the good padre about women that are connected to a culture of machismo. Still, we left inspired by the stories we heard of bold acts of resistance during the time of sanctuary movement.

Our final day in Mexico started off with a visit to a shelter for repatriated minors. There we heard about their ministry to youth who try to cross the border and children removed from abusive homes or living on the streets. Several young men told us their stories of trying to cross the border to the U.S. to help their families financially.

From the shelter our group went to a section of the border fence that had been decorated with border art. The art depicts the hopes and dreams, struggle and death of the migrant journey in metal figures attached to the border fence. As an artist I was moved by this creative expression in response to the hard realities of the border and the impact of U.S. economic and political policies upon the people.

The warm afternoon sun found us at Grupos Beta, a federally funded Mexican agency that offers basic services to migrants. They travel out in their vehicles to provide just enough water to leave the immediate desert. The migrants are told that they should return home, for the sake of their lives. It was at Grupo Beta that we were asked if we would like to view photos of people who died in the desert. They warned us that the photos were gruesome. We grimaced as we saw the effects of the hot sun as it cooked the bodies of those who collapsed, along with their hopes for a better life, under the hot desert sun. Those snapshots of death was stay with us forever.

At our next stop we saw the vultures circling. The vultures, better known as “coyotes,” were hanging around the No More Deaths site waiting to pounce on some migrant who might want to try and cross the border again. You could spot them by their new clothes and tennis shoes, combed hair, and cells phones. They were there to make a “killing,” or at least a profit off the vulnerable. But, I left thinking that the Mexican coyotes weren’t the only ones “making a killing” off the migrants. I remembered the huge maquilas next to the poor community of shacks and what we learned about NAFTA and how it has benefited U.S. businesses and impoverished the Mexican economy (except for small percentage of the wealthy elite).