I leave the game early, have dinner at Taco Palenque, a kind of Taco Bell on glamour pills, tonight inexplicably overrun by gorgeous Mexican American women in tight designer jeans, with glittered eyelids and balletic hairstyles à la Princess Leia. As has been the case all night, only Spanish is being spoken, unless English is needed, in which case English is delivered: gladly, genially, and unaccented.
Tonight, America seems like a happy miracle, a Land o’ Plenty where a new ethnicity is being created, an ethnicity that transcends the Anglo/Hispanic distinction, and the primary mascot of this ethnicity is Affluence, accompanied by its beautiful sidekicks Civility, Humor, Kindness, and Relative Absence of Fear. Tonight, America seems like the for-centuries-dreamed-of rescuer of the Little Guy, the place that takes a guy like Hector and puts some pounds on him, sets him on his feet, puts a spring in his step, and ends, forever, his flinching hustle for two-dollar hot dogs.
But first he has to get here.
AMONG THE MENNONITES
The east Texas countryside rolls by: ranches, ranches, elaborate memorials for car-accident-killed Mexican American boys, woven into barbed-wire fences, featuring silk roses and, in at least one case, the small plastic figure of a professional wrestler. It’s been unusually rainy, and treetops jut eerily up from a temporary lake, in which it seems hobbits should be fishing from little bark boats.
In Roma, the World Birding Center overlooks a small Mexican village, from which I can hear the ringing of someone’s old-fashioned phone.
I’m driving from Laredo to Brownsville to meet with some Mennonites who work with the Mexican American poor in the Rio Grande Valley. Many of the poor are, presumably, undocumented immigrants. I’m feeling a little funny about meeting these Mennonites, because I’m not sure I agree with what they do. If there’s a law, and they, even inadvertently, help the undocumented circumvent the law, doesn’t this just encourage further lawbreaking, which, in turn, reinforces this system of law-circumvention, which, in turn, strengthens the illegal smuggling cartels, thus ratcheting up the cycle of high profits, violence, and chaos that Dan Garibay described?
Egads, I think, I am become Lou Dobbs.
Later that afternoon, I’m standing in a circle of pretty young women, Teach for America workers, at a Mennonite church social in San Juan. It’s muddy and sunny, the music’s about to start, across the two-lane is a tract-house neighborhood à la Spielberg, nearby is a movable free-range-chicken shed and an organic garden and a donkey named Pierre, rescued from a neglectful owner by the pastor of the church, John Garland.
John looks more like a guitarist in an indie-rock band than he does a pastor, and his wife, Abby, looks more like the beautiful vocalist in that band than she does a high-school teacher/pastor’s wife. John has started a model organic farm here at the church. The idea is to help underprivileged workers access the “intellectual capital” of their work; immigrants are often expert organic farmers who, if they happen to be undocumented, get stuck working for other people, underpaid, or cheated of their pay.
Around them, John and Abby have gathered a group of similarly well-educated, young, politically engaged volunteers working with the poor in small towns across the Rio Grande Valley.
What have they seen?
You name it: blond Spanish-only speakers; mothers who call the school to say they’ve been deported but will be sneaking back in time for parent-teacher conferences; families in which the kids speak only English and the parents speak only Spanish; families in which the parents speak English but the kids — recent arrivals — can’t; kids who came over illegally as babies and are now fully acculturated American teenagers — excellent straight-A students who, because they’re undocumented, can’t get financial aid for college, which means, given their family economics, no college for them at all.
So what do they do?
“They go to work,” Abby says.
John has told me that although their mission involves “reaching out to those in need”—some of whom, in this area especially, may indeed be undocumented — they don’t have a clue if people have documents or not. Still, remembering my Lou Dobbs moment, I ask John and Abby if they ever have doubts about working with the undocumented, since technically it’s against the law.
John looks at me thoughtfully from behind his glasses.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Just the other day, these two guys walked up here and said, ‘Hey, man, we just crossed the river, we’re really thirsty, we need some water.’ And I looked them over and said: ‘Sorry, friend, you’ll have to take it up the road.’”
Abby nods.
So this is interesting. They are, yes, Christians, and yet they understand that the law forbids—
Then they both crack up.
“Yeah, see that big cross on the front of the church?” says Abby. “That’s actually what it means: Take it up the road.”
“The thing is, when you read the Bible?” John says. “One thing it’s not is wishy-washy about our responsibility toward people in need. Yes, there’s the law, and we should respect it, but there’s also a higher law.”
In Abby’s opinion, the problem with this immigration debate is the level of abstraction at which it’s conducted. If you talk about undocumented workers or illegal aliens, it’s easy to make mistakes. Whereas if you say: This is Valerie, Valerie is my student, whom I love, then whatever you do will make sense, coming, as it does, from the heart, with a real person in mind.
A STORY TOO SAD TO INVENT
Because of the way Lupe Aguilar’s past has been described to me, I expect him to be mean and wiry and street-scarred, but no: He’s white-haired, gentle, and articulate, with a quality of patient abiding that makes me instantly crave his approval. After church, at the head of a long familial table in a Mexican restaurant, he tells me he used to: (1) run wild (his wife’s sitting across the table, and her eyebrows go up, indicating: Oh yes he did), (2) shepherd groups of recently arrived Mexicans into a hotel room, take his fee, then rat them out to the Border Patrol, (3) own bars, party, and fight (a guy he offended once put three slugs in his back). Then he experienced a religious conversion and is now a Mennonite pastor who shelters the homeless — in his house, in trailers behind his house, in the kitchen of his church (as we enter, a smiling, timid family just arrived from Veracruz rises as one, exclaims mucho gusto as one, sits as one), or in the church itself (in the Sunday-school rooms, in the sanctuary, beside the altar), with a disregard for his personal space that I find impossible to imagine. Would I let strangers sleep in my home, at my work, would I let a constant flow of Unknown Quantities stream past my kids?
No, I would not.
And this isn’t just my paranoia; Lupe says people he’s helped have stolen from him (he’s lost three cars this way), insulted him, made indecent proposals to his wife and daughters. He’s not a big favorite of the neighbors, either, some of whom consider him a lawbreaker. But he feels doing this work is his duty. Once, back in his early days as a Christian, a young Mennonite volunteer overheard him use the word wetback and referred him to Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”). Reading this, Lupe says, he was “changed forever.” His goal in life is now “to be humble and meek like Jesus,” and you see this desire working through him, in the things he does and the way he attempts to deflect credit (“Jesus is the doer!”).