Back in 1963, my parents decided to take me and my two sisters and fly to California to visit Grannie, who lived in Chula Vista, south of San Diego. We flew on a Boeing 707, which had only been in service for about 4 years. It was the first jet airplane put into commercial service, and got us from Cincinnati to California in only 4.5 hours. It was very futuristic.
27 years later I flew from Johannesburg, South Africa to Manzini, Swaziland in an ancient 707 that probably had a billion miles on it. All the seats were full, and the aisle between the seats was jam packed with people standing, holding on to the overhead luggage racks. It was a harbinger of the bus system that I was to rely on for the next 4 years in Africa. The plane barely made it off the ground, so heavily laden it was. We bounced 3 times when landing in Swaziland. It was a weird sensation to fly standing up, clinging on to a luggage rack. A testimonial to Boeing that the plane was still in service. But that is not the story I want to tell here.
We enjoyed our visit with Grannie. We went to San Juan Capistrano where the doves come back to every year, and one pooped on my sister’s dress, making her cry. I ate something I had never heard of before, an avocado. You couldn’t get those in Ohio. One night, everyone was in bed, except me and Grannie, and we were watching the news.
The news story was from a reporter, standing on top of a 4 story motel in Tijuana, Mexico, talking about illegal immigration. It was night, and just below the edge of the roof, I could see the wall between Mexico and the USA, standing tall, and made of corrugated tin. Across the top of the wall, on the US side of the border, in the distance, I could see two sets of headlights, one was about 300 yards behind the other, and they were the border patrol trucks making the rounds on the dirt road along the fence. The trucks got closer, and swerved east along the wall.
The second they passed, from out of the dark below the edge of the hotel roof, About 20 tall ladders came up and slammed against the top of the wall, and for 5 or 6 minutes until the next Border Patrol trucks came along, it was an inundation of people climbing the ladders and jumping down into the US from the top of the wall, and scurrying off into the darkness. A literal flood of people, like ants climbing a coke bottle. It was the first time that I ever considered what illegal immigration meant. I was only 11 years old, and in Ohio, not many people talked about it, especially to kids. I asked my Grannie about it. She said it was people escaping oppression and violence, trying to find a better life. I wasn’t sure I understood what that meant.
A week later, Grannie drove down to Ensenada to visit her friend Ann, and took me with her. We crossed the border into Tijuana, and drove south. Ann had a nice house on a cliff over the Pacific Ocean, with saltillo tile floors, and it was very different from Ohio. Outside her house, workers were just building that section of what would become the Pan American Highway, starting in Alaska, and running down to Patagonia in southern South America. It was being mostly dug by manual labor, and the workers had plywood boxes that they slept in beside the road they were constructing. Every week or so, they would deconstruct the box, and carry the pieces down the road a mile or so, and set them up again until the road project passed them, and then they would move them again. Their wives and children lived in the boxes with the workers. Being bored, and eleven years old, I walked over to the boxes and visited the women and children there, and played with some of the kids. We had no common language, but it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Kids are kids, and we played tag and red rover and hide and seek, no matter what you called it in Spanish. While we played there was a constant stream of people walking north along the road. I asked Ann why there were all the people walking north and she explained that they were heading for a better future in the US. That was 59 years ago.
Speaking of the Pan American Highway, you can’t actually drive from Alaska to Patagonia. In the southern tip of Panama, there is a thing called the Darien Gap. It is about 100 miles from north to south, and spans the narrow isthmus from the pacific to the carribean oceans, the end of Central America and Panama, and below it, is the start of South America, and Columbia. The Pan American Highway stops just before the Darien Gap on the north, and starts again in Columbia heading south. Darien Gap is full of swamps, and rivers and mountains, and diseases, and is basically impassible. Several times people have tried to build the road through it, to connect the two continents, but have given up because it was too expensive, too extremely inhospitable. Several motorcyclists have tried to drive across the gap, two made it, and the rest disappeared. It is just too wild. It was originally considered for the site of the Panama Canal, but exploration parties could not get anywhere there, and many got malaria and yellow fever for their efforts, so it was taken out of consideration. More recently, drug cartels have taken refuge in the southern edges, and that has added to the dangers of trying to cross the hundred miles. For a while, there was a ferry that a traveler could take, which went around the Darien gap by ocean, and travel could continue. But there weren’t enough people using it to make it economically viable, and eventually it went out of bidness. Nonetheless, there is a steady stream of people from South American countries, on foot, who make their way across the treacherous gap, on their way to the US for a better future. Some of them make it. And then they only have to cross 4 more countries to get to our southern border. Mostly walking.
Flash forward to 2000, when I first started running the projects for Amigos de Las Escuelas. I would take groups of volunteers from Austin, and drive 5 hours down to Rio Bravo, Mexico just on the other side of the Texas border, and we would build classrooms for schools and various other projects to support education. We built a community center, and had terrific programs there. I made friends with a man in the colonia where the community center was, a guy named Chava. He and I became good friends. When not working for me with the projects, he made his living by taking small groups of this flood of people heading north, and putting them in his truck tire inner tubes at night, and he would swim and push the inner tubes of migrants to the north side of the Rio Grande, and drop them off with other coyotes, and return with his tubes to Rio Bravo until the next group. I spent time with Chava and his family, visiting and eating dinner, and sometimes when the hotel was too full of volunteers, sleeping on his floor.
By then, my spanish was getting better, and often, while relaxing in the shade of his little yard by the railroad tracks, strangers would wander in, asking for Chava. He would put them inside his house, and at night, take them across the river to the north. I often went inside where the migrants were hiding and chat them up. The stories of their hardships in their various countries and in getting to the border of the US were frightening and full of suffering. These chats changed my view of the problem of immigration for the US. Most of the people that I talked to only wanted to be able to work and get paid, and have educational opportunities for their kids. And not live in fear of their corrupt governments. They were hard working people who wanted a better life so much, that they braved the rigors of the journey. A journey full of abuse, being robbed, and for the girls, being raped, often more than once. Their desire to do something about their home situation was strong, and I grew to admire that they were being proactive in order to attain a better future. I am not sure I would have the fortitude to do that.
But I have grown up where I was free to take advantage of the opportunities that America has to offer. And there are many. I love America. Of all the countries that I have visited and lived in, only the US has the freedom that has allowed me to live life on my own terms. And I can totally understand why the immigrants suffer the dangers of the journey.
In return for that freedom, I pay my taxes without using loopholes, I vote every election, I am honest, and a hard worker. I wish we had a system where these migrants, most of whom want the same things that I have, could do the same, pay their taxes, educate their kids, work hard, go to church, vote, and not live in fear.
Over the past 20 years of my philanthropic efforts with keeping girls in school in Mexico, I have often been asked, “Padrino, should I cross over to the other side when I graduate?” I always said no, unless they were willing to wait for a legal visa to come here and live. Which can take 10 years to get. I talk to them about “living in the shadows”, which is what awaits them on this side of the border. It is not an easy life. Even with a college degree, without a social security number, they are not able to work in their field of study. They are relegated to cleaning houses and other menial tasks. And there is always the threat of deportation.
This nation is a nation of immigrants. Our success as a nation is because we offered freedom to those who came. Seeking freedom of religion, and freedom from repression, we came in droves from Europe, yet we repressed those already living here. Where is the fairness in that? We are all God’s children, how have we forgotten that?
I wish I had a solution. In 59 years, we have not done anything to mitigate this problem. The price of freedom is high, and something never to be taken for granted. I think the immigrants are the only ones who understand that freedom is worth the price it costs. We who already were born here have become inured to the price that this freedom is worth. It makes me sad.
Freedom <3
Living a life that supports your beliefs. <3
That’s my story, and Ima stickin to it.