A fond farewell to the director of the Office of Hispanic Catholics in Philadelphia

Anna Vega, the director of the Office for Hispanic Catholics of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, is retiring after 17 years. A staunch advocate for immigrants, Vega has been instrumental in so many initiatives for the Latino Catholic community (and the Latino community as a whole) it may take a battalion of people to replace her.

I've worked with her as part of the committee for the annual Hispanic Heritage Mass, and on a regular basis in consultation about the Spanish-language page of the Catholic Standard & Times. I've partaken of her stellar pernil and coquito; I've cried on her shoulder and mostly I've laughed, a lot, with her.

I'll never forget walking into her office one day to hear her get a desperate call from a day worker picked up, with many others, from the parking lot of a local Home Depot and taken to the police station. His first call was to the Office of Hispanic Catholics. Because he knew of her, and knew she would try to locate family, contact the council person for that district, ask priests and immigration advocates to go to the station - essentially, do everything in her power to help. And so she did.

There is little doubt that even after retirement Vega will continue to advocate and fight for the immigrant and Latino community of Philadelphia. I am going to miss her, though, and so are many other people who are part of the Latino community or engaged in building it and advocating for it. I'm attaching some videos I shot yesterday at her retirement party. (In English here and here; in Spanish here.) They paint the portrait of a woman with dozens of wonderful qualities - and still don't manage to capture the full measure of who she is and the impact she's had.

Oye, Anna - no te vayas demasiado lejos ¿de acuerdo?

March 4 America - South Philly to D.C.

You can do it, we can help

On Oct. 13, 80 jornaleros (day workers) gathered early on the parking lot of Home Depot on Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia. They were hoping for a day's work, a day's wage.

At 8:30 a.m., two police officers from the second district drove on to the lot and told them to disperse.

Parts of what happened next cannot be verified.

One of the day workers may have refused to leave the parking lot. Perhaps he became belligerent. Or perhaps he argued -- as other jornaleros would say later -- that the store's management had never before complained about them trying to get work on that parking lot ....

In any case, the eyewitness who called the Office of Hispanic Catholics of the Archdiocese moments after the incident occurred alleged that the jornalero in question was beaten with a nightstick and taken into custody by the police, his face bloodied.

The eyewitness, also a jornalero rousted that morning from the parking lot, didn't want to talk about it to anyone other than the staff at the Office of Hispanic Catholics. He didn't trust anyone else.

And that, as much as any other part of the story, is the story.

Not all day workers who gather outside of stores to find work are undocumented, but many are. They don't know each other's names or documentation status but they know some things:

1) If they taken into custody and found to be undocumented they'll be whisked off to a detention center. They may end up being repatriated so fast their names never make it on to the lists of those held for deportation. Their families may not find out where they are or what has happened to them until weeks after they have disappeared. Or, conversely, they may languish in detention centers for months, even years.

2) They can't report crimes or even come forth as eyewitnesses for fear that any such action will precipitate their deportation, or an investigation of the documentation status of their families, coworkers and friends.

3) They can turn to the Catholic Church in whose priests, sisters and committed laity they have found advocates for humane and compassionate treatment -- no matter what their documentation status.

Within minutes of the call from the eyewitness, the director of the Office of Hispanic Catholics, Anna Vega, had called the second police district trying to ascertain whether the jornalero who had been picked up had been injured. She had called the office of Councilwoman Marion Tasco (in whose district the incident occurred) and Regan Cooper, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition to make sure they were aware of the incident.

And she had called the archdiocesan Vicar for Hispanic Catholics, Msgr. Hugh Shields, to recount what the eyewitness had said.

By the time I found out about it, Msgr. Shields had already been to the second police district, where he had been able to confirm that an African American man was taken into custody that morning from the Home Depot parking lot. But without a name, the police officer he spoke to could not release any other information -- not whether the day worker was still in custody, what he was charged with, not even whether he was hurt.

Msgr. had also been to Home Depot, where a few day workers, at the edges of the parking lot, had re-gathered. Speaking to them in Spanish, he asked them if any of them had been there during the earlier incident. A few nodded their heads.

"We received a call that the man who was taken away was hurt," he said. "Did any of you see that?" Again some nods.

"Do you know his name?" This time the jornaleros shook their heads.

"And he was a Latino?" Msgr. asked.

"Haitian, Father," one of the jornaleros answered. After a beat he added, "It's the same island."

Haiti, the nation that shares its island with the Dominican Republic, isn't Hispanic. Haitians speak French and Creole, and ministering to the Haitian immigrant community isn't, strictly speaking, the purview of the Office of the Vicar for Hispanic Catholics.

But mercy and loving-kindness know nothing of purviews, or distinct languages, or man-made borders dividing one landmass into separate nations.

The Catholic Church has an incredible tradition of saints, blesseds and servants of God who have seen Christ on the breadline, in lepers, in the abandoned elderly -- in society's underclasses throughout the ages and throughout the globe.

Why not in the parking lot of Home Depot on Roosevelt Avenue?

Why not in the frightened day worker who feared his fellow human being was hurt and called those he knew would care?

Why not in the voice of a man, waiting for work, who recognizes that our world and our shared humanity means it's the same island for all of us.

Go fly a kite

Today, All Saints Day, people in Guatemala are flying kites at cemeteries (see www.dailymotion.com/video/x3cm0s_festival-de-barriletes-dia-de-los-m_people for a great little video of the festivities in one Guatemalan town) as part of the two-day religious celebration of All Saints and All Souls that is a particular favorite for Catholics in Mexico and Guatemala.

If you wait out the video’s introduction of the year’s Queen and Princess of the Kites, you’ll see the amazing kites themselves – pieced from tissue paper and mounted on light wooden armatures. They are part catechetical picture-book, part sampler of the textile motifs found in the traditional garb of the town, and wholly Guatemalan.

You’ll see the blue and green-painted mausoleums of the cemetery, the sea of marigolds adorning gravesites, and the atmosphere that, despite being a Solemnity of the Catholic Church, can hardly be described as solemn.

For many years I think I saw this tradition as a marvel of folk art – the need to create that finds expression in ordinary people and everyday materials and turns into something extraordinary. But now, eight years after the death of my mother and four after the death of my father, I see in it something else.

It is like visual prayer, this kite flying.

The armatures, enormous and unwieldy, seem incapable of flight, and yet they soar high above us – where we envision the heavens, the communion of saints and Church triumphant, to be. It is the community as a whole that gets those kites into the air. Some of it is skill, sure, and experience from past years. But most of it is faith that the kites can fly, and that by grace they will fly.

The same can be said of something that is happening in the Philadelphia area tomorrow, on All Souls Day. The first Spanish-language Mass to be televised across the region will take place at 6:30 a.m. on Telemundo WWSI-TV 62.

This, too, has been a community effort: Catholic entrepreneur Jorge Fernandez; the network’s general manager Clara Rivas; Msgr. Hugh Shields and Anna Vega, both from the archdiocesan Office for Hispanic Catholics, have had this in the works for a long time. Cardinal Justin Rigali is the celebrant of the Mass --and it is a joy to hear the Archbishop of Philadelphia’s beautiful Spanish during the liturgy.

Getting this Mass on the air has been as much a labor of faith and shared commitment as getting those huge Guatemalan kites in the air. Both leave me a bit in awe of the sheer devotion they evince: to God, to the vitality of the pilgrim Church on earth, to traditions and heritage.

And ultimately, for me, there is no way to talk about heritage, to talk about these days of commemoration of the departed, without talking about my parents. That’s them in the photo at the top of this blog entry. It will be their gravesite I will visit at St. Joseph Parish cemetery tomorrow after the All Souls Day Mass.

In keeping with the Guatemalan and Mexican cultural traditions I inherited from my mother, I will bring yellow and orange flowers that resemble marigolds to place around their headstone. In keeping with the Catholic faith I also inherited from my mother, I will read: “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.”

I will talk to my parents at their gravesite as if they were in front of me, and tell them how much I miss them. Then, I’ll come home and cook the foods they liked, to remember what we’ve shared across tables both literal and symbolic.

Two days later, I will enter a voting booth in the exercise of a right I inherited from my father; my citizenship earned by his blood. I have been accused of turning everything into an argument for reforming our existing immigration laws and quotas, but in truth I cannot think about my parents without thinking about the ways lives are being shaped by our broken immigration system.

My father’s father, Leander Panayotis Vourvoulias, was born in Turkish-occupied Smyrna (what was then called Asia Minor) in 1894. He was the son of a Greek barber. According to a very skimpy bio that was written about him many years later when he was winning an award from the Consular Corps as Consul of the year, he had a college degree from American college in Smyrna.

It is unclear how my grandfather ended up in Havana, Cuba working for the National Bank of New York, but that same bio says he spent time in Chicago training in a bank before he moved to Cuba.

What is clear is that it was fortunate that he was in the Americas when his younger brother, George, was of the age to be forcibly conscripted into the Turkish army. My grandfather secured documents that allowed his brother to emigrate first to Cuba, and later, after coming to the U.S. via Key West, to Chicago, Ill.

It was to Chicago my grandfather also eventually returned, with my grandmother, for a year or so before moving to first to Colombia, and later to Mexico. My father was born in Chicago, in that sliver of time they lived in the U.S.

If this were happening today, my grandfather would never have gotten a visa to enter the United States as anything but a tourist. Because he would not have had an advanced degree or a post as an “outstanding professor or researcher” or be possessed already of managerial or executive status with his employer, he would not have qualified for the first two categories of employment-based visas issued in the U.S.

He might have qualified under the third employment-based preference, which gives first priority to those with bachelor’s degrees, second to skilled workers and third to unskilled workers. But the total annual quota for all three of these categories under this preference is only 40,000 visas a year.

If my grandfather’s story were happening today, even if he had lucked out and gotten a visa and then applied for either permanent residency or citizenship, our family history would be quite different.

As a citizen, it would take him 6 to 12 months to get papers to have his wife join in Chicago legally; if he were a permanent resident, it would take him five years, or longer.

Today, as a citizen, my grandfather could expect to wait seven years, or longer, to be able to bring his brother out of harm’s way. As a permanent resident, he wouldn’t even be allowed to try.

Let’s face it, if today’s quotas had been in effect during the great waves of German, Polish, Italian and Irish immigration of the past two centuries, the majority of us would not be able to claim American citizenship.

Skilled laborers like the German and Italian stonemasons responsible for some of our most beautiful architectural structures would have ranked penultimate on the visa quota list. And forget the unskilled laborers who built the infrastructure and kept us in food – the nation would have welcomed with open hearts only those who were already privileged, educated and white-collar.

As we do now, with our existing quota system.

It should not be lost on anyone with immigrant roots that the 14th Amendment – the one that says you get to be a U.S. citizen if one of your parents is one (jus sanguinis) or if you were born in the United States (jus soli) – has been the target of anti-immigrant rhetoric during this electoral cycle. Two early candidates in the race advocated eliminating the jus soli right for children born in the U.S. of undocumented parents. They still advocate it.

On All Saints/All Souls, I hope more than just Guatemalans fly some prayers up to heaven.

I hope that in commemorating our beloved departed we can hear clearly the stories they have for us – stories of love and faith and family, of how we are all immigrants seeking sanctuary, saved by amnesty and in search of Promised Land.