Salvador and Enriqueta Padilla,
my grandparents, journeyed from
Leon, Mexico, to Santa Barbara,
in stages. They battled hardships
along the way, stopping to earn money
as farmhands and railroad section hands.
My grandparents, Enriqueta and Salvador Padilla, made their way to the
United States on foot and on trains during the Mexican Revolution. For part of
the trip, rather than share a freight car with enemy soldiers, all thirteen
family members rode on top. Danger is relative and the soldiers proved the
greater threat. The story goes that my great-grandmother, Porfiria, sold the family
homestead during the revolution so her family could get to safety in the United
States.
As my family journeyed toward the border with the United States,
Grandpa made a little money roasting pieces of meat in the earth over hot coals,
and selling this food as they went. I’ve seen him butcher pigs in his backyard
in downtown Santa Barbara, so I suspect he may have had held onto a few goats
or other livestock to slaughter on their long trek to safety. The enterprise reminds
me of a nomadic version of the taco trucks we see on city streets. Perhaps
Grandma, admired for her superlative Mexican cooking, helped prepare these al
fresco offerings. When they crossed the border in El Paso in 1915, they had $20
left between them.
Salvador and Enriqueta, so busy working to raise and put all twelve of
their children through college, rarely sat still. I knew them hardly at all.
Grandma always wore an apron and never learned English. She communicated with
me in sign language, a big smile on her beautiful face. I learned how to iron
and make flour tortillas by following her nonverbal instructions. Both of my
grandparents went to church every morning at dawn and slept with a large and
rather gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall above them. The graphic natures of
Jesus’ wounds clearly did not dampen their physical love for each other.
These days my significant other, Jim, and I find some of the best
Mexican food at NYC’s Union Square farmers market. Hidden between the farm trucks
and tents, a handful of immigrants dish up similarly complex, aromatic Mexican
dishes from a bunch of coolers, steamers and vats. I’m told they are routinely
rounded up and evicted from the market. We locate them because long lines of
hungry patrons point us toward these accomplished, hard-working cooks like a
stem to a rare bloom. The enterprising women charge $2, a pittance, for the
most delicious tamales you’re likely to eat. And I’ve had to argue to get them
to take a tip.
As I read Deval Patrick’s remarks about the 50,000 homeless migrant
children between 3 and 17 years of age that no one seems to know what to do
with, I do so remembering that I am blessed by my grandparents’ fortitude and
courage, and by the bounty of this country. My gifts — a home, an education, a
daughter, friends and loved ones — were not won by me exclusively. We are all
buoyed by our amazing privilege at having landed in United States, recently or
generations past. Our schools, libraries, roads, systems of jurisprudence that
ensure fair practices in business and in life, our neighborhoods with our town
governments that oversee our safety and quality of life — these are resources I
inherited by virtue of sheer good luck. Except for the Native Americans, we are
all guests here and our occupancy is, indeed, quite temporary. As I see it, we
are stewards with responsibilities that we now must be reminded of.
The 50,000 migrant children who risked their lives to escape dire
conditions we probably cannot imagine, have become, like everything else these
days, a bullet point in a political rationale for why we must do nothing. These
children are but one more proof of Obama’s bad judgment, some politicians aver;
therefore, they are, I fear, fatally tainted. What will become of them is
anyone’s guess. Patrick and those of like kind are going to have to shed additional
and copious tears to get these unfortunate children minimal resources.
According to this morning’s Boston Globe, a woman living in Bourne said
the children should be sent back to their countries. “We will do anything for
illegals, and we won’t do anything for Americans. I don’t have sympathy for
people breaking the law.”
We don’t do anything for Americans? Just look around. Is not Bourne,
on the mouth of glorious Cape Cod, a gift in and of itself? Is not your life,
free of constant threat of rape and starvation and extortion, not a gift our
individual tax payments could never pay for by themselves? Is not that salt air
and the road that leads you home every night from your job in a nursery not a
gift? Is your job, all by itself, not a gift?
These are just children, our Massachusetts governor reminds us. It
bears remembering that these are children alone in a foreign land. He quotes
scripture, though I hasten to insist that we don’t need religion to know right
from wrong. Yes, he’s correct in framing this as a moral issue. We don’t need
Cardinal Sean O’Malley to remind us of that.
But if the idea of God is going to move us closer to helping these
children, then fine. Here’s what Patrick says: “Every major faith tradition on
the planet charges its followers to treat others as we ourselves wish to be
treated. I don’t know what good there is in faith if we can’t, and won’t, turn
to it in moments of human need.”
We should give back, not once with an envelope dropped in saintly
humility, into a basket on Sundays, but every day. We must give of ourselves.
Here on Cape Ann there sits an empty school, with empty classrooms, toilets, a
cafeteria, offices and grounds. This looks, from my uninformed point of view,
like a perfect location to house some of these children for the four months
they are to be housed in this country.
Let us lend a helping hand in the same generous way we daily receive
our own gifts of love and life and freedom — won for us by others who came
before and paved the way.
Posts
