Yesterday morning, Barack Obama signed executive orders to end the CIA’s secret overseas prisons, ban coercive interrogations (read “torture”), and close Guantanamo Bay within a year. In just his second full day in office, Obama made good on one of his campaign promises, saying that “our ideals give us the strength and moral high ground” to combat terrorism. (Shane, Scott. New York Times) The whole world must have breathed a sigh of relief to see the United States moving back towards its role as a leader in human rights.
Since 2002, this small base in Cuba has housed detainees, many of whom were held without charges, representation, or many basic human rights. As Vince Walker famously said when Gandhi’s followers were brutally attacked and killed by the British following the 1930 salt march, “WhatevermoralascendancytheWest held was lost here today.” (http://lisahendrix.com/2008/06/). As the United States has attempted to encourage countries like Iran, China, and North Korea to cease their violations of human rights, our exhortations have sounded hollow when Guantanamo Bay was in full operation just miles from Florida.
All Americans should applaud this bold move by Obama to move the United States back into its place an international leader. But this must only be the beginning. Within our borders, detention centers are cropping up in every state. Texas is building new “immigrant processing” centers every year, and this for-profit business is rapidly expanding. As the United States continues to balk on comprehensive immigration reform, these containment camps flourish while immigrants languish. Few know where they are, even fewer know the name of a local lawyer who can represent them. Many will sit for months in cold dark cells, some for years. In the last 6 years, from 2002 to 2008, immigrants detained in like centers have skyrocketed from under 21,000 to more than 31,000. Disabled immigrants and those with mental health issues aren’t being served, and often their conditions are worsening steadily. As Equal Justice Fellow at Advocacy Health Services of LA Greg Pleasants, “All protections that exist in other areas of the law (for mentally and developmentally disabled individuals) do not exist for these respondents.” (Tillman, Laura. Brownsville Herald). Just last week, federal immigration officials investigating the tragic death of Chinese comuter engineer Hiu Lui Ng in Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility of Central Falls, R.I, revealed that he had been denied treatment and his cancer and fractured spine had been undiagnosed, leading to his agonizing death on August 6, 2008. (Bernstein, Nina).
Thankfully, some changes have already begun to have a positive effect. Since unaccompanied minors were removed from adult detention centers and switched from DHS (Department of Homeland Security) jurisdiction to that of Health and Human Services, their care has substantially increased and they are being better served. With Guantanamo Bay closed and the United States human rights record looking better, we must continue to encourage our administration to take positive steps to eradicate human rights abuses within this nation. Our immigration system must move towards a day when immigrants are not criminals or numbers but people, families, lives, souls. Please don’t stop at Cuba, Mr. Obama.
In Irun, the small town on the Spanish border with Spain, there has long been a border culture. During their revolutions and civil wars, residents of both countries traversed the imaginary line separating these two lands. A complex culture of smuggling developed, as in most border towns. People, goods, drugs- the rules of supply and demand are never bound by borders, however much governments might like to believe. While in Irun, I was told a story of a man who crossed and recrossed the border every day on his bicycle. The border patrol agents checked and rechecked this man, suspecting that he was transporting some contraband. Never once in the twenty years did they realize he was riding to France on an old bike and returning with a brand new model.
These sort of trickster stories, and the border culture they exhibit, have been made irrelevant by the erasure of borders in the European Union. America’s border with Mexico, though, must be creating hundreds of thousands of tricksters with the increasing militarization of la frontera and the constantly impending border wall now scheduled in Hidalgo County for July.
Driving out of the Rio Grande Valley on either 77 or 83, the only two evacuation routes, one encounters a military checkpoint complete with automatic weapons, drug-sniffing dogs, patrol cars, and heaps of bureaucracy. As I wait in line, my car packed to the hilt with all my earthly possessions, I contemplate that this is one of the many signs that the Rio Grande Valley is considered outside the mainlaind United States. Brownsville, the poorest city in the United States, is left below this second border in a no-man’s land, left to fend for itself. In fact, the talk of the town last week was that the United States Border Patrol was going to be checking the residency status of individuals during hurricane evacuations (Brownsville Herald) . That its citizenry must be questioned and searched before entering the rest of the continental U.S. is a stunning assumption of criminality. When it is my turn with the Border Patrol agents, I am waved along because of my white skin and American accent.
Tacitus once wrote in his Annals, “Once we suffered from our vices; today we suffer from our laws.” Indeed, unjust laws create criminals out of upstanding individuals, and in no area of legislation is this more true than immigration. Extralegal immigrants, many of whom came to the United States legally, are punished by our current law primarily for doing precisely the actions for which we praise our citizenry. The motivation of the majority of immigrants is religious freedom, economic opportunity, family safety, education, freedom of speech, liberty – how can an antiquated quota system cause some to be punished for acting on these principles and others to be praised?
As I drive north, farther and farther away from the Rio Grande Valley I’ve called home for the past two years, I pass the fertile hills of Kansas and the wide expanses of open grazing in Oklahoma and the lush fields of Iowa. I look at these natural wonders and think of how blessed I am to live in this land, and how attractive this must be to people receiving less than 8x the income we enjoy in our prosperous nation. I look at this massive farmland and know that extralegal immigrants know this land far better than I will ever understand; without them, many of these fields would lie fallow, so many of our meals would remain uncooked, so many houses would never be built, so many ideas never imparted, so many languages never added to the multiplicity of cultures here in the United States. Driving through the natural beauty along Highway 35, it is easy to see that natural law and constructed law clash when it comes to the issue of immigration in these United States. If we will only take a good look at our country and realize just how blessed we are, we would be more understanding of people desirous of migrating here. If we would only appreciate the perspectives and culture and language and talents that immigrants always bring, we would see extralegal and legal immigrants as the assets they are. If Spanish were not viewed as a language subservient to English, then perhaps we could learn from the Spanish immigration system as well as from Mexican and Latin-American immigrants themselves. As I leave the border region where the “rights” and “wrongs” of immigration laws are as muddy as the Rio Bravo and as I head north to study immigration law at the University of Minnesota this coming fall, I realize that I will never leave the border because the border is not a place on a map but a place in people’s hearts. In telling stories about the good people of la frontera and in studying the laws of immigration, I hope to turn the borders of American hearts into E.U. borders instead of the walled border in California and Arizona.
The following Letter to the Editor was published in The Brownsville Herald Sunday edition April 13, 2008, as a call to action.
Many people opposed to the border wall might feel that the lion’s share of the work is done. The court ruled a partial victory for UTB Professor Eloisa Tamez in early February, and on March 19 ordered that the federal government could only survey UTB’s campus for alternatives to a border wall. These signs of progress must not, however, be interpreted as a sign that the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which originally calls for 700 miles of wall here in Texas, is null and void. These victories must serve as encouragement, not as final pronouncements.
The government still fully intends to build a border wall here in the Rio Grande Valley, and some of it is slated to be completed by this December. Several members of the No Border Wall Walk this past March 8-16 have continued their efforts by walking door to door in communities like Southmost, and in speaking with these border residents it is clear that the government, far from being deterred by the recent court decisions, is moving ahead with its plan.
We, the people of the border, recognize that this law is an unjust one. In his Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King wrote, “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust;” Valley residents are keenly aware that the Secure Fence Act is an affront not only to human life but also to irreplaceable ecosystems and endangered animals, poor communities and Mexican shoppers, immigrants legal and extralegal.
It is the duty of every border resident to take immediate action to counter this immoral and unjust legislation. What follows are ways which all of us can make a difference right now.
1.) If you have not already done so, please write and call our Texas Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, both of whom voted for this wall in their own “backyard.”
2.) Take part in the numerous nonviolent demonstrations going on here in the Rio Grande Valley. The No Border Wall Walk involved more than 300 walkers, but there are hundreds of thousands of us on the border. Imagine if we were all saying the same thing at the same time…
3.) Encourage your faith leaders, churches, and social organizations to actively work on this issue. Virtually ever faith believes in the moral obligation to care for the immigrant, and a border wall is a devastating distraction from real immigration reform. Already, local faith leaders such as Rev. Juan Trevino and churches ranging from Methodist and Episcopalian to Catholic and Unitarian have taken courageous stands on this issue.
4.) Add your name to the growing petitions such as those organized by No Texas Border Wall. Petitions like this have made an impact in the past; when Hillary Clinton was confronted with thousands of signatures, she mentioned the absurdity of a wall in her UTB speech and on the CNN Texas debates.
5.) Stay informed. Do not let a wall get built here in Texas as it did in Arizona and California, cloaked by secrecy and aided by apathy.
6.) VOTE and/or REGISTER TO VOTE for this November.
The time to take a stand is now. As Martin Luther King goes on to say in Why We Can’t Wait, “
Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
The border wall is not inevitable, but neither is the ultimate victory for our community. May we come together in solidarity to oppose this wall of division, showing the nation and ourselves what power we possess.
During the No Border Wall Walk this part March 8-16, thousands of people honked encouragement as we walked 126 miles from Roma to Brownsville. Thousands of people smiled, dozens of people generously donated food and drinks for us, and scores of churches supported our efforts.
However, when a Brownsville Herald journalist interviewed me at the final Sunday rally, one of her remarks was that some people had been complaining that “Webster” is not a Mexican surname and that this was an event organized by “outsiders.” At first, I didn’t understand these individuals’ comments. As a high-school teacher on the border for two years, I feel invested and accepted by this border community in such a way that I do not feel as if I were a Pennsylvania Yankee or a New York native.
As I regained my composure, many thoughts congealed simultaneously. I probably answered her question too many ways for her to use it in any of the articles in the Brownsville Herald. One of my remarks was that this was not organized by outsiders. It was maintained and staffed and sustained by faith groups all throughout the Valley. Additionally, any one of us who was born in another state was passionate enough about these border issues to move to la frontera, and so even if our birthplace was different our hearts were similar. I also mentioned that this was not the cause of an outsider – I pray to God I would be as passionate about these same moral issues if I were still residing in farmtown Troy, Pennsylvania.
I continued to respond to these desparaging comments by stating that our inspiration for this march, the Selma to Montgomery March 43 years ago, was supervised by a great man who was also criticized as being an outsider. Martin Luther King responded to his countless critics by writing that,
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” (Why We Can’t Wait, 77)
Dr. King realized that no one can ever truly be criticized for being an outsider if they are working to right injustice. If any injustice weakens the entire bedrock of Justice in the United States, it is everyone’s responsibility, “outsider” or indigenous, to strive for a more just system.
Lastly, as the reporter moved on to the next question, I circled back to the idea behind the border wall walk. I teach 130 high-school students every day, and while I do impart the fundamentals of vocabulary, grammar, and literary analysis, it is my utmost desire that they will be more ready for life when they leave my door for the last time, not just for 10th grade. These lives in my charge will be directly affected by a border wall, and so I cannot just simply ignore the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It is precisely because some individuals in this country have deemed certain people “illegal” and criminal, undocumented and therefore undesirable, that such a xenophobic act as a wall is even being discussed. The idea of any or all of the 300+ participants in this nonviolent demonstration being “outsiders” is precisely the idea the No Border Wall Walk targeted. If we were able to educate just a few individuals that the border wall is not going through barren wasteland but backyards, not desert but downtowns, not lonely no-man’s-land but through men and women’s lives, then our walk was a success. I pray we succeeded in bringing people back to a point where they could civilly discuss the issues of immigration and see the issue in terms of people instead of insiders and outsiders, those with rights and those without.
The question of “insider” or “outsider” should only be asked by navel-gazers staring at their bellybuttons. As the Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Colossians, “Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Colossians 3:11 NIV) We must cultivate a national mentality that views people as assets, one which seeks to recognize that divine spark, that image of God endowed in each and every one of us. I wish my response to the readers and commentators of the Brownsville Herald had been, “Well, here there is no Mexican or American, Texan or Tamaulipan, illegal or extralegal, Spanglish Spanish or English, insider or outsider, but Christ is all and is in all.”
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”
Emma Lazarus put these words on the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, years before it would become the beacon of hope which drew over 12 million immigrants to Ellis Island. Despite the fact that Lady Liberty and Ellis Island are now only museums, 12 million men, women, and children today are within our borders, floating on the sea of insecurity that comes without papers. They came from war-ravaged lands, they came to give their children hope, they overstayed visas in attempts to get a job deserving of their education, they came to work menial manual labor jobs because it represented the first rung on the Ladder of American Dreams. They came because they heard Emma Lazarus’s words in their own language, calling them to come to the United States.
The sad thing, though, is that too many corrupt individuals are also voicing these words. Coyotes on our southern border are whispering “Dame sus Cansados, dame sus Pobres.” Too many American employers send recruiters to equate the American promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” with the underpaid, overworked conditions in their factories and fields. Countless individuals without scruples see these people without papers as easy targets for bribery, coercion, and corruption.
A headline in the Brownsville Heraldyesterday stated that over 20 immigrants were hurled from the back of a pickup truck in an accident on March 27 near La Joya, Texas. Three men and women were killed when the F-150 wrecked. The driver, as usual, fled the scene and is probably whispering his smuggler’s promises to a new batch of hopeful Americalmosts.
It is vital that our nation begin to shift its treatment of extralegal immigrants from one of a “lawbreaker” to one of “victim.” The same shift happened in the American Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King did not overcome segregation despite his jail sentences; John Lewis did not lead students to prisons across the South by accident. No, the breaking of these unjust laws was vital to the Civil Rights Movement because it highlighted the fact that these men and women were victims not violent criminals. As Thoreau so eloquently wrote back in 1849, “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (Civil Disobedience). If virtuous men and women are being punished for living on the other side of a law, the American public must come to the realization that this law must be changed.
Extralegal residents, and those who might currently be contemplating a risky transaction with a coyote smuggler because the waiting list for citizenship is 10 years long and growing, do not break the law because they have no respect for America, no respect for the Border Patrol or our polices, no respect for our way of life. In fact, they are coming to America precisely because they honor these traditions and institutions of ours. No, if and when they break laws in order to become residents of this great nation, they are doing it only because they cannot recognize the validity, Justice, or Morality of a broken immigration system.
We must push our nation’s leaders to return to the Table of Immigration Reform which they were seated at two years ago. We must charge them to strike the Secure Fence Act, the only piece of legislation to emerge from those talks. We must call for them to dialogue seriously about real immigration reform so there will be no more immigrants thrown from the backs of pickup trucks, no more residents coerced into corruption in hopes of a green card, no more victims at the hands of our unresponsive immigration laws. The time for change must be now – it is far too late to dismantle Lady Liberty and that poem on which she stands.
It is 4:40 on Monday afternoon. We are already ten minutes late as our caravan heads down Monsees Road to Calle Milpa Verde Street in Southmost. Southmost is a community unto itself in Brownsville – students from this area will answer “Southmost” instead of “Brownsville” if they are asked where they live. The 6 of us are driving these pot-holed streets and close communities because Southmost, like so many other communities along the Rio Grande Valley, is slated to have a border wall before the end of the year.
We drive by the home of Rusty Monsees, one of but a few landowners on the river who is for the wall. In a February 2 article in the Brownsville Herald, Mr. Monsees said he wanted a wall behind his land to stem the drug-running he has witnessed, although he does not seem to mind the occasional immigrant family crossing, people he refers to endearingly as la gente. Mr. Monsees was such a proponent of the wall that he called the United States’ government to ask them to build the wall in his backyard, with one caveat – he insisted there be a gate in the Secure Fence to afford him access to the river. (Sieff, Kevin. “Necessary Sacrifices”)
The road wends its way past the Monsees, up and over the levee which could stand to be a few feet higher at this point. We make our way down Calle Milpa Verde, talking with local landowners, kids, students, dads, teen mothers, grandmothers, aunts, renters, gardeners. Mr. Garcia alerts us that a government agent just visited his house a half hour ago; perhaps if we had not been late, maybe if time had slowed him up and sped up our efforts, we would have been there when the U.S. government man was there asking Mr. Garcia to waive the rights to his property. As it is, we are fortunate – Mr. Garcia has already been in contact with Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid.
Not everyone on Milpa Verde and San Eugenio Streets, though, is as knowledgeable about the federal designs for their property. One old woman has never heard of a muro before, and it is all we could do to make her believe that the government wanted to erect an 18-foot wall on the 8-foot levee behind her tiny house. Other families have signed but are now having second thoughts. Some want to fight it, but thought it would be prohibitively expensive until they realized that several law firms have pledged to do this work pro-bono.
As kids run around, flour tortillas sputter and sizzle in the pan, and barbecue wafts through this tight-knit community, we continue to speak with over 150 people. A group of elementary-age children gets so excited about fighting the border wall that they take off on their mountain bikes, distributing 40 leaflets to their neighbors in a veritable “race towards awareness.” We smile at their passion and their instant sense of indignation at the immorality of a border wall through their lives.
While some individuals bring up the opinions of Monsees, all agree that a border wall would not solve the problems. Far from merely handing out neon-green flyers, this time is meaningful in that it gives all of us updates and perspectives from the “ground.” Even though I live in Brownsville, it is still about 2 miles from the prospective border wall; it is amazing to hear their unique perspectives, their ideas about what solutions would really work, their brainstorms about better ways to spend $49 billion. By the end of the evening, every single one of us wonders if the government even asked the advice of any of these people. We even register three new voters, so at least the government will have the opinions of three more landowners in the upcoming November election.
Time flies when you are meeting new people and talking about an issue dear to your heart. As encouraging as these few hours were, it is daunting to realize that this must happen in every community all along the 120 miles of the Rio Grande Valley. It will take at least two more trips to Southmost to flyer every single house on the levee, and the government is certainly not waiting patiently as we organize. Despite the semi-favorable court decisions the last few weeks, the U.S. government still is adamant about pursuing the Secure Fence Act of 2006. The opposition to the wall is growing in purpose and in numbers, but we must press on. As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in Why We Can’t Wait,
Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. (86)
The border wall is not an inevitable reality, but neither is a successful overturning of this federal legislation. To that end, people on all borders and immigrants of all ethnicity and background must join this effort to oppose a border wall and demand the immigration reform every U.S. resident so desperately needs. Time is only on our side if we are doing something meaningful for a cause in which we believe. The time is right, and ripens everyday.
The Rendon family owns a small house in the tiny border community of Granjeno. The matriarch of the family remembers the 30 years her husband worked on the levees just behind their house. She motions with her hand, pointing over the head of her daughter. “But they haven’t done anything on the levees since he died. The real thing we’re scared about is flooding, not immigrants.”
The families grouped around the Los Ebanos ferry have no idea when or where the government surveyors might becoming. This community, formed around the only hand-pulled ferry on any international border of the U.S., is pulling together in hopes of legally opposing a wall which would cut through the land of families like Daniel Garza, a retired migrant worker who would see his home cut in half. As the Texas Observer article “Holes in the Wall” stated on February 22, 2008, “I don’t see why they have to destroy my home, my land, and let the wall end there.” He points across the street to Hunt’s land. “How will that stop illegal immigration?” (http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2688)
These same questions are being asked all over the Rio Grande Valley “sector” of the proposed implementation of the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Landowner 72-year-old UTB Professor Eloisa Tamez started the fight against the federal government with her 2-month court case argued by the famous lawyer Peter Shey. While not a complete victory, Judge Hanen’s ruling on her case did stipulate that further “land grabs” would have to be adequately negotiated with residents. (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/story)
This past Monday, several more concerned parties from Hidalgo and Starr Counties went to court, including the Rio Grande City school district and Hidalgo Economic Development Corp. The way their court cases are settled could prove a turning point in the public’s opposition to a patchy 370-mile border wall proposal in southern Texas. (http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/hidalgo_85227___article.html/border_fence.html)
Brought to light by the Texas Observer and personal conversations with landowners, the injustice of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 seems to grow by the day. Clearly, lawmakers cannot believe that this $49 billion dollar wall will stop immigration, drug smuggling, or terrorism, since they are not campaigning for a complete wall. In every single public statement, their aim has been to deter these three issues; however, $49 billion could be spent on much more positive deterrents.
The injustice of this legislation is compounded when one walks from Ranchito to Brownsville past the Riverbend Resort, only to discover that this golf-course community has no wall planned in its future. The injustice becomes obscene when one goes to the official Environmental Impact Statement release event to find that the English version is the size of a 600-page phone book while the Spanish version, the native language of most border residents of the Rio Grande Valley, is under 100 pages and without any pull-out maps. Further injustice can be seen in the government “waivers” which have proliferated in the past weeks. Some residents of El Calaboz were given blank documents to sign which gave complete government access to their land. Additionally, groups like the Mennonite Brethren Church, which was on the docket to be sued this past January 31, did not go through the proper chain of command when some concerned parishioners met with government agents and “fixed the problem” by granting unconditional access to their land.
Our nation’s conscience must wake to the fact that injustice is being done on our very nation’s borderlands. Our dispute is not with the Riverbend Resorts or the Hunt family’s Sharyland Plantations which curiously escape the Secure Fence Act – no, our case must be with a government which would cease the homes of the poor, take advantage of the disenfranchised, irrevocably mar the environmental lands it has spent millions of dollars preserving, and consign the poorest counties and poorest cities in these United States to the bleak economic future of a wall. Please meet this system of injustice with the full force of love – please write your senator and congressman about working toward a moratorium on or an end to the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Here in Texas, both Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison voted for the border wall, and Representative Henry Bonilla. For a complete listing to see how your elected officials voted on this act, please visit the Washington Post at: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/109/house/2/votes/446/ Do not wait for this next batch of court cases to be decided – do something now. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
Charro Days makes me happy to live enla frontera. Teenagers too cool to read come to school dressed in native Mexican caporals and anguila boots. Their jangling galas harken back to the first Charro Days some 71 years ago. Charro Days celebrates Frito Pies and tostadas, the indiscernible difference between American tejano music and Mexican norteño songs, the wild festivity of a good grito, the seamlessness of real integration.
Charro Days, Inc., is a sister-city celebration between Brownsville and Matamoros. With the three bridges and shared population between them, these two cities flow into each other like the lazy Rio Grande which separates them. Parades march through both cities, celebrating life and bi-cultural peace on the border. Sombrero Fest brings several of the best tejano bands to Brownsville, while tacquerias flout their best flautas, tacos, menudo, enchiladas, pozole, elotes, carne asada, barbacoa….
This local festival flies in the face of the 2006 Secure Fence Act. This act, which calls for the construction of 700 miles of border wall, some of which will cleave Brownsville from Matamoros, cannot have been made by people who have celebrated Charro Days in Brownsville or Matamoros. No longer is Matamoros a potential haven for drug lords; no more is Brownsville the poorest city in the nation. For these few days, these cities are united in celebrating their history, their interconnectedness, their “inescapable network of mutuality.” The laughter, the bilingual children dancing in the streets, the cowboy hats and Mexican mariachi bands – what place does a wall have here? Even Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton weighed in on the wall’s effect on this tradition, saying, “”It is troubling to me that our country’s current border security plan threatens a South Texas tradition historically created to celebrate the sharing of cultures. As I discussed during the debate at the University of Texas at Austin last Thursday, I believe we need to re-evaluate the border wall as it is currently being implemented.” (Brownsville Herald)
Coming from New York, I thought it strange at first that Brownsville schools do not celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I longed for a special day to honor my personal hero, and I wanted the chance to talk to my students about this supremely important figure of nonviolence and social activism. I could not understand why a celebration called Charro Days was replacing the MLK Day of Service I had always known.
While Brownsville could certainly use a day of service, I now feel Dr. King would revel in the Charro Days’ festivities. Charro Days celebrates his concept of the Beloved Community. For one day, Mexicans and Americans join together to make real the idea that, “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds” (Martin Luther King Autobiography 189). The single garment of destiny Dr. King envisioned looks like a charra outfit worn by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike. In Sombrero Fest’s jubilation or the tremendous optimism of the Children’s Parade, King’s dream is realized as little white girls and little white boys hold hands with little brown boys and little brown girls. Immigrant and resident, legal and extralegal – none of these terms matter as the sounds and tastes of Matamoros and Brownsville mix in the February air.
Smart Borders 