The Ordeals Behind the Headlines

I dreaded going to the trailer at St. Leo’s today--dreaded hearing the stories of the undocumented as we help them fill out forms for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Reading about these migrants with my morning coffee is painful enough. Sitting with them, looking at their eyes as they describe existing in sheds, caves, lean-tos--seven men living in a one-car garage until it caught fire and two died--is something else.

Somehow they have survived ordeals we don’t want to hear about. Yet we expect them to document their last five years. How do they come up with rent receipts when they hid in tunnels, slept in fields under tarps?

How do I tell Hector he will be able to stay in the United States, but since his 14-year-old sister, Maria Concepcion, arrived only in 1983, she doesn’t qualify? How do I tell Benito he can remain, but his wife and two sons can’t join him?

It’s hard sitting in a trailer filled with anxiety--even the applicants who have been there before are wary, afraid one of us volunteers is an INS agent, scared they will be picked up even on church grounds to be bused home.

Home . . . in many cases the rubble of an earthquake. Even in romantic Mexico City--”city of lovers”--houses of relatives my husband Vic and I visited were destroyed in 1985. We have traveled those same dirt roads many immigrants used to get here; we’ve seen the tar-paper shacks and abandoned cars their families still live in, as they try to earn money to send back to impoverished villages. We cringed as we watched ancient women making tortillas in second-story restaurants long into the night. What looked cute to us--children beside thatched huts dangling dead iguanas hoping tourists would take their pictures and give them a few coins--turned out to be the only support for younger brothers and sisters.

I tried to keep my distance from the applicants’ pain. I smiled politely and tried to forget the element of fear that has been part of their lives since they came to California. But I couldn’t put out of my mind the Saturday I was right in the scene with them, unloading groceries in Vons parking lot, when I saw an unsuspecting brown-skinned family come out of the store only to be herded into a green INS van and driven away--their milk and bread dumped in the back of their pickup. I felt their humiliation, shared their helplessness . . . thought of our own children. As I listened to each story in the aging trailer this afternoon, I remembered why we had gotten involved.

A year ago, our family gathered at San Dieguito Park for our daughter Katy’s birthday. We were amused at the huge birthday party going on at the tables next to us--pinatas, balloons, pots of barbacoa, beans and rice, cases of Pepsi, cans of Budweiser. It seemed half the Mexican aliens in North County were helping a handicapped 9-year-old celebrate her big day.

Rancho music blared from a radio. We smiled at the Sunday-best clothes, the ruffled dresses on the little girls, the spike heels on the women aerating the grass.

Our smiles turned to bewilderment as we saw their party come to an abrupt halt. Suddenly, people were running in every direction--to the rest rooms, down the ravines, to the cars. Then I saw the green van. Mothers with babies were herded aboard. The searchers combed the park trying to capture more.

Why was our family allowed to have a party in the park, undisturbed? Were my relatives who came over on boats to escape the poverty of Ireland any better than these people hiding in the bushes? It wasn’t fair. . . .

We loaded our car and drove home in silence. Once there, we sat in our driveway, too drained to walk inside.

“What can we do?” I asked Vic.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” His voice cracked as he said, “Maybe change the laws. . . . “

By the time Congress did pass the controversial law seven months later, Vic had been asked to become the link between the Mexican people of St. Leo’s Church and the Anglos of St. James Community. But it was after we got to know a family from Oaxaca in January that Vic knew he had to work with amnesty.

A man from Whispering Palms called one day, asking for help for the young couple and their three children. He described the one-room house they live in, which has no heat or running water, one light bulb and a hot plate. Serufino, the father, fills the tub in the yard with water from a hose. Four-year-old Oscar usually has a deep cough. Margarita, the tiny mother, had to get rid of the orange velvet sofa someone had given them when she realized rats were nesting in it. She killed five of them.

This family qualified for amnesty by working along our coast for more than five years; their children were born here. Serufino told Vic he was happy laboring in a Del Mar tomato field even though there were no sanitation facilities. He had dug a slit-trench latrine on the hillside, but because others were not as particular, health officers shut down the operation until the owner provided portable toilets.

Without money, the five stayed on the beach until it grew cold. Strangers saw them trudging along a back road, gave them jobs cleaning house and washing cars, and helped them rent the room they now occupy.

We drove them to The Saints’ thrift shop, where the staff found warm clothes and sleeping bags for them, a bedspread and curtains. Several calendar-type pictures sat on a shelf. Somehow I knew Margarita would like the still life with the beautiful roses. When I asked which one she wanted, her eyes lit up and she pointed to the bouquet. Returning to their primitive quarters, she hung it on a nail, all smiles.

Vic was so touched by this family that he wanted to help them and those like them get work permits and legal status. They are hard-working people who contribute to our economy. They have a right to decent jobs and a good home, just as we do. But they needed English-speaking people to help them. Vic joined church leaders in asking for volunteers. More than 80 from our area offered their time and talent.

Now, trained teams at St. Leo’s interview migrants from many countries, making certain that they have all their documents to present to the INS. They, too, dread hearing the tragic stories, seeing the pain etched on the mostly brown faces as they complete forms and take fingerprints and photographs.

As we finished the session at supper time, I glanced around the trailer with its chartreuse shag carpeting, well-worn by Sunday School classes, and noticed the rain-stained ceiling. I smiled at the children’s drawings of flowers captioned “I take good care of the garden of my life.” The vibrations of anxiety in the room had changed to expectation. My dread had changed to hope.