This past Monday was the deadline for braceros to file for money owed them from the government of Mexico. During the Bracero Program, Mexico was given money for each bracero, but few received this money when they repatriated. Between 1942-46, 250,000 braceros invested money into this automatic deduction program. The Border Farmworkers Center/Centro de Trabajadores Fronterizos in El Paso participated in the Bracero Program, helping to register some 100,000 Mexican farmworkers eligible for the program. Eight years ago, six migrant farmworkers sued Wells Fargo, the US and Mexican government in a US federal district court. While not admitting they did anything wrong, the Mexican government set up a $14.5 million fund to reimbures qualified braceros with up to $3,500. (El Paso Times)
As evidenced by El Paso’s commitment to registering braceros, they are a largely an immigrant-friendly city. The Mexican Consulate in El Paso vaccinated over 600 Mexican immigrants in 2008. Additionally, the Consulate has offered a free clinic to many immigrants afraid to go hospitals for fear of being reported.
Other groups in El Paso also reach out to a community too often voiceless and without rights. Casa Anunciacion, an immigrant safe house which houses and feeds immigrants as they seek to integrate into American life, look for a job, try to relocate a spouse, or any other host of reasons that causes someone to endure hardships in order to migrate to a new land. The house is a haven for women affected by spousal abuse, who have to wait upwards of a year before receiving relief thru VAWA (Violence Against Women Act). It’s also a haven for teen mothers, or unacompanied children, or new arrivals, or recently jobless immigrants. (Latin American Herald Tribune)
It is strange for me to live on the border again. It feels like home in some ways, full of the life generated by so much diversity and interchange between such large nations. It feels like a return to form to be working with immigrants one step over the Rio Grande and one step towards citizenship. I’m flooded with memories of Brownsville, of the tight-knit immigrant communities all along la frontera, of the machismo but also the deep faith, of the fascination with futbol and the foreignness of the downtown markets.
It is also weird for me to return with people unacquainted with la vida en la frontera. I vaguely remember when my ears perked up at hearing Spanish in the grocery store or when Mexican license plates were second nature. I recall when I thought border life was boring, that nothing was going on because I couldn’t read about much of it in the paper or online. Still, it frustrates me that I cannot fluently communicate my appreciation for the border to a group of Minnesota students, many of whom have traveled the world and are surely bound for great things. I feel an ambassador of the border, and perhaps I am, but I don’t know if I have been able to make them passionate for it as I am.
Maybe it is a slow process. Maybe my law-school friends see it in the faces of detained children anxiously awaiting the outcome of their asylum application. Maybe they recognize the grave injustice in a quota system that makes immigrants wait a decade to come legally to the United States. Perhaps they see the dusty mesquite mountains in a new light after working with an asylum applicant who has been moved from New York to Houston, from Minnesota to El Paso, from Arizona to Harlingen. Maybe they will read stories about immigrants differently now that they can associate names with faces instead of numbers. Maybe…
Smart Borders 