Page 56 - Catholic Extension Magazine Winter 2019

victimizers and ask, ‘What do you 33. Older generations of El Pasoans is a physical reminder of the failure
fear?’ Their families, petrified, took still talk about entrenched attitudes of two friendly nations to resolve
their bodies across the river into against Latinos and how the system their internal and bi-national issues
Mexico for burial. This experience was stacked against them growing in just and peaceful way. It validates
of persecution at the hands of state up. Latinos were excluded from James Baldwin’s fear that Americans
authorities was the experience of political life by a closed network are addicted to innocence. It is a
many families in this region. Their dominated by White, wealthy men. destructive force on the environment.
stories were brutally suppressed and Latino children at school didn’t see The wall kills families and children.
their pain has been passed down themselves, not in the faces of their There will be a day when after this
in intergenerational trauma. The teachers or school leadership, but wall has come crumbling down we
ripple effects of this campaign shape only custodial and cafeteria staff. It will look back and remember the wall
perceptions of law enforcement and was expected that they would be as a monument to hate.
immigration enforcement to this day confined to schools and neighbor-
in our region. hoods south of the I-10 highway. 36. Everyday in El Paso there are sub-
It was forbidden to speak Spanish tle ways that the voice of the poor
31. We can see uncomfortable paral- outside the home or at least highly is removed from them. Our biases
lels in the treatment of asylum seek- discouraged. Names were frequently prevent us from seeing that the slow
ers from Mexico during the time of anglicized and many were denied erosion through active neglect of our
the Mexican Revolution in the early opportunities for higher education communities south of the I-10 high-
1900s and in current policies like the and pigeonholed for low-wage jobs. way, as well as the loss of schools,
deployment of troops to the border, Many Native Americans felt even housing, and culture to gentrification,
the punitive Remain in Mexico policy more homeless, doubly discriminat- are really an attack on the right to
and the forced detention of families. ed against, and sometimes still feel a good and dignified life. Our bias
Then as now, fears were callously impelled to hide their roots. won’t let us feel within our bellies
whipped up and there was talk of the injustice of the environmental
‘invasion’ which led to brutal actions 34. The wall is a powerful symbol contamination in the Chamizal and its
against refugees. In 1913, ‘Texas in the story of race. It has helped effects on their children. Those com-
governor Oscar Colquitt dispatched to merge nationalistic vanities with munities, too, have every right to be,
over 1,000 state militiamen and the racial projects. Wall building at the as Pope Saint Paul VI said, ‘artisans of
Texas National Guard to appease border didn’t start in 2016. El Pa- their destiny’.
residents of Brownsville and El Paso’. soans have watched its growth in fits
These soldiers transformed the bor- and starts. We saw steel barriers go 37. The Mexican farmworkers who
der into a militarized zone, replete up at the time of NAFTA; at the very pick our pecans, pistachios, onions,
with ‘barbed wire, spotlights, tanks, moment when NAFTA ensured the tomatillos and chiles often sleep on
machine guns and airplanes used to right of wealth to cross the border our streets downtown. Invisible to
surveil Mexican residents’. A prison freely we limited and criminalized many of us on the street and in the
camp was constructed for refugees human mobility. fields, they labor to exhaustion to
across 48 acres at Fort Bliss, which produce abundance on our tables
included electrically charged barbed 35. Some cannot understand the but are still paid little more than slave
wire. Deployments like these would visceral reaction of many in the wages, without adequate health,
happen again and again. borderlands to the wall. It is not disability or retirement benefits. Why
just a tool of national security. More don’t we reward their efforts and
32. The legacy of hate towards Lati- than that, the wall is a symbol of their skills when the work they do is
nos is not just part of the distant past. exclusion, especially when allied to so essential for our life and health?
Many in our community are the proud an overt politics of xenophobia. It is
children and grandchildren of brace- an open wound through the middle 38. After 9-11, our people felt the
ros, Mexican workers who supplied of our sister cities of El Paso and interrogating stares of authorities
agricultural labor needs from 1942 to Ciudad Juárez. The wall deepens and fellow citizens, questioning
1964, including the time of the Sec- racially charged perceptions of how whether they belonged. Today,
ond World War. Just as the Chinese we understand the border as well as darker skinned residents and citizens
were greeted with harsh repressive Mexicans and migrants. It extends are routinely asked to show identity
measures after the completion of racist talk of an ‘invasion’. It perpet- cards by border enforcement agents
the railroad, many braceros were uates the racist myth that the area when crossing in the middle of the
forcibly deported back to Mexican south of the border is dangerous international bridge while lighter
after laying down roots here in the and foreign and that we are merely skinned individuals pass by unimped-
United States as part of the infamous passive observers in the growth of ed. Recently we saw the frightening
Operation Wetback, the largest mass narco-violence and the trafficking of presence of armed militia from out-
deportation in American history. human beings and drugs. The wall side our community herding migrants