Hiro Nishikawa is a defender of civil rights, and a living witness to one of our nation’s gravest abrogations of them

The memories are all described from the point of view of a young boy.

The way he and his brothers played in the crawlspace beneath one of the buildings, alert to the Gila monsters, scorpions and rattlesnakes that also sought relief from the sun and 110-degree heat in that shaded space.

He recollects, also, the sandstorms that funneled through cracks in ramshackle walls and burrowed into clothing and skin. In another memory, he and his brothers don their good corduroy pants for a rare family portrait taken in front of the barrack they shared with other residents.

The government euphemistically called it a relocation or internment center, but the reality of the 71,000 acres of the Colorado River camp in Poston, Ariz., was much uglier. It was a concentration camp built on American soil specifically to incarcerate those of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Read the rest of this article by clicking here.

New column - Punto y Aparte - appearing weekly in Al Día News

This column appears in Spanish in the March 25-31 edition of Al Día:

The evolution of an identity

I've been thinking a lot about basketball lately. And the strange thing is, I'm not a fan of the sport. But a recent game during the NCAA tournament has made me think of what it means to be a Latino citizen in the United States, and the evolution of our "identity."

I was born in Thailand and I inherited a rather complicated Latino identity. My father was extremely proud to be the first U.S. citizen in his family, but he grew up in Colombia and spent much of his life in Mexico and Guatemala.

My mother was born in México D.F. and grew up there among a bunch of paternal relatives, half of whom considered themselves expat Americans, the other half completely Mexican. The maternal side was all Guatemalan. 

As for me, I don’t remember Thailand, because I wasn’t there long. My childhood memories are all from Guatemala and, though I’ve been a U.S. citizen from birth, for most of my early years I arguably much more chapina than “americana.” 

More than 30 years ago my family moved to the United States, and I finally settled into identifying as a U.S. (i.e. American) Latina.

But when I look back I see strange pattern. Not so much in my perception of my identity as a U.S. Latina, but in those of my fellow citizens.

In the 1970s when my family moved to rural southeastern Pennsylvania, our neck of the woods was unrelievedly Anglo, and very insular. Many of our peers and teachers viewed us as strange exotics.  

The anti-Latino sentiment we heard issue from them was born more of ignorance than malice. Not that I didn’t experience casual -- and not so casual -- bigotry but it was an occasional thing.

Not anymore. 

As the immigration debate has gone both virulent and viral, anti-Latino sentiment has become commonplace and can often be reduced to one word:  “illegals.” That has become our identity as Latinos, regardless of our actual citizenship or permanent resident status.

It was the word flung at my daughter a few years ago after a schoolmate sat through a class presentation in which she traced her Guatemalan-Mexican roots along with her Anglo ones. 

Recently, five members of the University of Southern Mississippi pep band chanted the equivalent -- “Where’s your green card?” -- to a Puerto Rican basketball player on the opposing Kansas State team during the tournament play I mentioned at the beginning of my column. 

But beyond the word-turned-epithet is a even grimmer reality. A number of states, Pennsylvania included, have proposed legislative bills that would institutionalize Latino=illegal thinking along the lines of Arizona’s notorious SB 1070 law. No matter your individual stance on immigration, if you are Latino you should fight like the dickens to make sure that these copycat bills never make it into committee, much less onto the legislative floor. 

Your very identity is at stake.

To read Al Día online go to: http://www.pontealdia.com/

Of Crossed Genres, SFF Portal and good reviews

Dear blog reader:

You've stood with me through a lot of posts that outline the difficulties, the heartbreak, the stories of deportation and detention and immigrant lives shrouded in shadow. You've hung in there as I've railed and cried about the legislative failures surrounding the revision of existing, broken immigration laws and visa quotas. You've read about the DREAM Act and Arizona's anti-immigrant/anti-Hispanic law and efforts to repeal the 14th Amendment (more about that later). You've commented and sent me personal messages ranging from "now that's a downer - LOL - good post" to "Amen."

You deserve a happy post from me. So here it is -- my first in 2011 (and I hope that bodes well for the year).

If you're a regular reader of this blog you know that occasionally -- more occasionally than I'd like, anyway -- I ask you to follow a sort of Ariadne's thread of links, to sites deep in the labyrinth of web that have published my poetry or my speculative fiction. Tonight I'm sending you to a site that reviews just such work. If you click here, you'll get to read a review of the anthology that includes my story "Flying with the Dead."

Writers like me don't get a lot of chance to hear what readers think of their work. Not everyone who reads this blog comments on it, for example. It's tough sometimes to believe -- despite what Blogger and Lijit stats tell me -- that anyone's reading at all. Same thing with the poetry and fiction.

Except then somebody will comment on a post.

Or, in this case, someone will write a lovely review of my story and I'll sit at the computer reading -- with gratitude, and some wonder too, in my heart. Because just like all the immigration advocacy and stories I subject you to here -- the fiction too is really a conversation with whomever reads the story. And I love when it is reciprocal.

And, yes, even in fiction you don't get away from my focus on the lives of immigrants: "Flying with the Dead" has its fantastical elements, but its bones are real.

I'd love it if this blog post and the review I've linked would provide the impetus for you to purchase the Crossed Genres Year Two anthology (it's for sale at Createspace and Amazon) or to support online magazines like Crossed Genres and The Portal. Small, indie magazines like these are a lot like immigration advocates -- they work very hard to widen the variety of voices we get to hear -- and they deserve support.

Plus, they make me dance a jig.

Next post: Did you know 7 states are targeting birthright citizenship? (Click here to read.)

By the way, the great photo at the top of this post has nothing, whatever, to do with fiction or immigration. I just like it because it is so evocative. It comes straight out of CS&T photographer Sarah Webb's portfolio of images. Lovely, isn't it? Check out her photos at cst-phl.com.

An immigrant's Christmas

A child born in mean circumstance, poor but full of promise and hope. He is carried in arms by a young woman in flight from one country to another. It is her bid for survival. The family is desperate, persecuted, and ultimately, condemned.

If the season makes you think it's a synopsis of Christ's life I'm referring to, think again.

Unless.

Unless you see Christ's story in the immigrant story I'm going to tell you.

Every year since I've had a blog I've reposted the same story - the story of Erica, who crossed over the border with her baby in arms, to settle eventually, in Philadelphia. The story of Erica's brother, Beto, who disappeared off a subway platform in the same city, only to be heard from again once authorities had put him on his way back to Mexico.

I retell this story every year for a personal reason: this is the story that made me want to write and keep a blog.

But I also retell this story every year for another reason: things haven't changed for Erica, or her brother, or any number of undocumented laborers who we might pass every day on the street without inkling of the road they've travelled - or are travelling.

"People hate the undocumented because they don't hear their stories." This is what immigration advocates tell me, and I believe them.

Well, then.

Here's Erica's story - why she crossed the border without proper documentation, and how. Here's her brother's story of deportation, as well. And the stories of how people are detained before deportation - while seeking work or even simply while sleeping in their homes.

Why?

-- Because nothing has changed since the original posts (I'll include their original posting dates). If anything, life has become more difficult for the undocumented in the ensuing years. Raids have increased, deportation numbers have skyrocketed, rhetoric has become more vitriolic.

-- Because Jesus, Erica's 5-year-old-son - who will most likely grow up thinking himself an American and remembering no home but this one - will be unable, after last Saturday's DREAM Act vote in Congress, to earn citizenship for himself. No matter if he is a stellar student with promise enough to change the world. No matter if he is willing to put his life on the line in defense of this country. No matter if he wants, with the same desperation his mother showed by carrying him over the border as an infant, to be part of something better and more promising than what he was born into.

I've decided this year, to also include reposts of raids - both at a local Home Depot and in an immigrant's home, so you experience the whole of the undocumented immigrant's experience: crossing over, seeking work, detention, deportation.

During this season when Christians celebrate the birth of a God who enjoined us to see Him in every face around around us, this is Christ's story.

Substitute His name for Erica's, for Beto's, for the others whose names you'll see in the repostings, and then tell me how you feel about their treatment. A

nd tell me who you will stand with - those condemning from some sense of righteous indignation about laws and proscriptions breached, or those who see beyond the immediate to the eternal,to divine law.

This is the radical nature of Christ's commandment to love your neighbor - if you wouldn't abide it happening to Him, you cannot abide it happening to any other.

So sit back and listen to the stories. Again

---

Crossing over
(Original post Oct. 28, 2008)

The 26-year-old who sits before me on the sofa of a Philadelphia parish rectory is small and slight. Her young face is framed by loose, dark curls, and she smiles a lot – mostly when she turns to look at the 5-year-old seated beside her on the sofa.

Though he fidgets, he’s been remarkably good during the two hours it’s taken me to interview his mother. He follows the volley of Spanish conversation with his eyes, answers my few questions to him in both Spanish and English. Dressed neatly in dark trousers and a light shirt, and carrying a child-sized backpack he won’t remove even when he sits down, Jesús reminds me of my nephew or of my older brother at that age. Same dark hair and eyes; same precocious gravity amid childish smiles.

“Do you like school?” I ask him.

He attends a bilingual Head Start program, and an afterschool program at one of the local Catholic churches.

He nods, a serious expression on his face.

His mother watches him answer the question with that look mothers get – admixed pride and wonder and concern.

He is the reason this quiet young woman crossed the border into the United States about four years ago. She carried him over in her arms.

“My motive [for coming here] was my son,” she says to me. “Para sacarlo adelante.”

So that he has a chance. A future.

I think of my own daughter, at that moment probably just getting home from school and sitting down at the computer to do her homework. When she was little I would tuck her into bed telling her I loved her more than the sun and the moon and stars. And I meant it. Still do.

And yet, I find myself thinking, could I have done for her as this young woman did for her son?

“I come from a humble town,” Erica says to me, describing a town in Mexico where most of the parents cannot afford to buy their children shoes.

Erica and her baby lived with her parents, and two of her brothers, 15 and 7 years old.
“There was no work there, no way to make money,” Erica continues. “My parents didn’t have enough for food.”

A few minutes later she adds: “No hay prestamo para comer.”

There’s no loan you can get for food.

Getting a visa to come into the U.S. to work is nearly impossible for someone like Erica. An unskilled laborer, she fits into the lowest priority category of applicants for a pool of only 40,000 visas granted annually.

Even to visit the U.S. with a tourist visa isn’t an option for someone like her, I learn.
It costs $100 to get an interview to see about a visa. And to qualify for the visa, you have to give proof of substantial savings, or hold title to real estate in Mexico.

Erica didn’t have a hope of savings or real estate. But she had hope.

Several of Erica’s brothers had already crossed the border and settled into restaurant jobs in the Philadelphia area. She knew they worked 12-hour days, making about $8 per hour -- enough, she thought, for her son to have something better in his future.

Erica came across the border the way so many of the poor do – by hiring a “coyote” to lead her through some of the toughest terrain in Mexico and the United States.

“No se si aguante,” she tells me the coyote told her when she first approached him. He doubted she could make it across with a child in tow.

Somehow, she convinced him.

She carried her son – and his powdered formula and diapers – through forests and steep gorges and cornfields. She slogged through mud when it rained, and through cold nights.
Others made the journey also, following the same coyote on his trek to, and through, Nogales – a town about 60 miles south of Tucson on the U.S.-Mexico border.

The border patrol caught them, and returned them to Nogales, where the coyote ditched them.

“No se va poder,” he said to them, shaking his head. “It’s not going to be possible.”

But Erica and the others did try to cross again. And got caught by the border patrol again.

It’s not clear to me what side of the border she and the others were on when they were assaulted by a gang of what Erica describes as “cholos” – young men in their 20s who stripped them of their rings, their jackets and shoes, and any money they had.

“They took the diaper off Jesús, and spilled out the powdered formula looking for money,” she tells me.

When they didn’t find any, they wrested the baby from her, beat her and tried to strip off her clothing.

She tells me she believes she might have been raped if a 16-year-old immigrant boy had not stood up to the gang. He claimed her as a sister, and was beaten by the gang in her stead.
Eventually they crossed the border into the United States, and after a 13-day ride in the back of a van, Erica and Jesús arrived in Philadelphia.

Detenton #1
(Jan. 11, 2010)

Immigration Customs and Enforcement broke down doors at numerous homes in South Philadelphia taking 30 suspected undocumented immigrants into detention, according to CS&T sources. More information as we receive it...

UPDATE:
Pre-school and school-age children were in many of the homes raided. Mothers were not taken into detention so they could stay with the children. According to our source, children were "traumatized" by the doors being broken down by agents.

UPDATE AT 1:30 P.M.:
Two of the addresses of houses in raid had been given to ICE several months ago as suspected hubs for human trafficking and/or a prostitution ring. Other homes in the area appear to have been targeted separately , and the undocumented immigrants picked up at those are not believed to be associated with the human trafficking/prostitution ring, according to our sources.

UPDATE AT 4:30 P.M.:
Inside one of the houses raided.

E., who is the second-trimester of her pregnancy, was asleep at 6:50 a.m. today. An insistent knocking at the door woke her. Her husband, and the nephews who share the house with them, had left at 6:30 a.m. for their jobs as cooks -- E. was alone with her 5-year-old son. She didn't answer the door. But in a matter of minutes, eight armed ICE agents where inside her house and then inside the room where she had been sleeping.

"They didn't break down the (front) door," she said, "so they must have done something to force the lock to get inside."

She was terrified, she told me during a brief interview we conducted over the phone, but was grateful that her son was asleep when the men entered the house. Otherwise, no doubt he would have been as frightened as she was, she said.

"Who lives here?" she said the agents asked her.

"My nephews, husband, my son and I," she said she answered.

They asked her whether her child was born here (he's a citizen) and then asked her for the names and birth dates of all of the members of her household, as well as their phone numbers. She wanted not to give them the information, but she complied.

"I was scared," she said. "Pretty much alone in the house with these men asking me questions, and never telling me what it was they were looking for."

The agents looked around her house, E. said, and found a passport that belonged to one of her nephews. They took that with them.

When they left they didn't tell her what is expected of her now (she is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, as is her husband) or whether they will be back when they anticipate her husband and nephews will be home from work -- but that is what E. guesses will happen.

Of course, she called her husband as soon as the ICE agents left.

E. is spending the night at a friend's house tonight; her nephews and husband will also be staying with friends. They don't know for how long, E. said. What's more, they have no idea what they can, should or are required to do now. None of the agents answered any of her questions.

"But I can't go back home," she said. "Not to wake up again like that -- to eight men with guns. In my house."

Detention #2
(Oct. 22, 2009)

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."

Deportation
(Oct. 23, 2008)

The story begins on Thursday, March 15, 2007.

Erica shares an apartment with her three sisters and two brothers. She is still asleep that morning when Beto gets up to go to work at the restaurant where he is a cook.

Usually he leaves for work in the early morning and doesn’t get home until 1 or 2 a.m. He speaks some English, and Erica describes him as “tranquilo” (even-tempered) and “muy cumplido” (reliable). On that day, he wears a jacket and carries a backpack. He has his cell phone on him, and his pay for the past week, some $500 in cash, by Erica’s accounting.

He calls from the subway platform on his way to work, speaks briefly to one of the family members and ends the call by saying he’ll call again later.

At 1 p.m., a co-worker at the restaurant calls the apartment. “What happened to Beto?” he asks. “He didn’t show up for work.”

The family tries to find him. They call the police, who ask for a description, what clothing and shoes he was wearing. One of the family members runs a photo of him down to the station. They worry that he might be hurt or dead – that his girlfriend’s ex has killed him in some fit of jealousy. The next day, they seek her out and she refuses to open the door or answer any of their questions. It seems to confirm their worst fears.

Still, they spend the rest of that day, and Saturday and Sunday also, posting flyers with his photo, and asking around whether anyone has seen him. They call hospitals and inquire about every John Doe. At 3 a.m. on Sunday, a friend of the family, utterly desperate, calls Sister Lorena.

“None of us thought about ‘la migra,’” Erica says to me, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement by its nickname. “It hadn’t even crossed our minds.”

But it crosses Sister Lorena’s mind. At 8:30 a.m. on Monday, March 19 she calls the York County Prison where most undocumented immigrants from the Philadelphia area are taken. By the time they ascertain he was taken there, he’s already gone.

What happened to Beto? Erica recounts the detention story Beto tells her when he is finally able to make a call to them: He’s on the platform at 15th and Market waiting for his usual train. He notices Philadelphia police on the platform checking people’s backpacks, but doesn’t think much about it. At some point, a policeman approaches him, asks him what time it is. When he hears Beto respond, the policeman asks him if he has documents proving he’s a legal immigrant.

Beto, Erica continues, tells the policeman he has papers, even though he really doesn’t. He is loaded into a van with 15 other young Latino men from the train platform, and taken to the local precinct. The police turn him over to immigration authorities in Philadelphia. There, the I.C.E. agents take his watch, his jacket, his wallet and his cell phone. Before Beto is shipped off to the detention center in York, his wallet is returned to him with approximately $100 of his original $500. He has to plead with them to get his cell phone back.

He’s not at York long. Within days he’s taken first to Texas, and then to Arizona, where he is finally able to contact Erica. He’s on his way to be dropped across the border -- Ciudad Juárez, Sister Lorena guesses – to find his way back to their hometown in Puebla. “

Another waitress where I work [as a busboy] knows someone who was picked up the same way, at the same station,” Erica tells me when she finishes recounting her brother’s story.

Then simply, with no drama: “I no longer take the trains."

---

Perhaps you do not think this is a Christmas story to be told a few days before Christmas.

And yet it is.

I open at random the new translation of the book of psalms one of the newspaper's columnists has given me today. It opens to the last lines of psalm 39: "For I am a sojourner with You, a new settler like all of my fathers...."

We are all sojourners.

All new settlers.

Just so.

In thanksgiving for the 14th Amendment (and no thanks to Rep. Steve King)

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), likely chair of a House subcommittee on immigration in the next Congress, has vowed to take on the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship by jus soli ("right of the soil") for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. In an interview with a columnist for Iowa's Cityview (http://dmcityview.com/2010/11/18/columns/mercury.html) King is quoted as saying:

“The framers did not consider the babies of illegals when they framed the 14th amendment because we didn’t have immigration law at the time so they could not have wanted to confer automatic citizenship on the babies of people who were unlawfully in the United States,” King said.

The 14th Amendment was adopted on July 9, 1868 (one of the "Reconstruction Amendments" adopted immediately after the Civil War) guaranteeing (male) former slaves and their descendants the same rights to birthright citizenship as white American men. Setting aside for a moment any other objections to King's comment, let's just consider that a percentage of the population of the undocumented in the U.S. are the victims (and children of the victims) of modern day slavery - human trafficking - and precisely the contemporary equivalent of who the framers of the 14th sought to guarantee citizenship for. The U.S. Department of State reports:

"The United States is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labor, debt bondage, and forced prostitution ... Trafficking occurs primarily for labor and most commonly in domestic servitude, agriculture, manufacturing, janitorial services, hotel services, construction, health and elder care, hair and nail salons, and strip club dancing. Vulnerabilities remain even for legally documented temporary workers who typically fill labor needs in the hospitality, landscaping, construction, food service, and agricultural industries. In some human trafficking cases, workers are victims of fraudulent recruitment practices and have incurred large debts for promised employment in the United States, which makes them susceptible to debt bondage and involuntary servitude ... combined federal and state human trafficking information indicates that more investigations and prosecutions have taken place for sex trafficking offenses than for labor trafficking offenses, but law enforcement identified a comparatively higher number of labor trafficking victims as such cases often involve more victims." (http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142761.htm)

Moreover, the report states that the primary countries of origin for victims of human trafficking are virtually indistinguishable from the primary countries of origin for non-trafficked undocumented immigrants who have crossed borders or overstayed visas:

"Primary countries of origin for foreign victims certified by the U.S. government were Thailand, Mexico, Philippines, Haiti, India, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. Eighty-two percent of these foreign adult victims and 56 percent of foreign child trafficking victims were labor trafficking victims. " (http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2010/142761.htm)

Humantrafficking.org estimates that 17,000+ people are trafficked to the U.S. annually, but all sources of statistics agree trafficking is vastly under reported - and sometimes impossible to distinguish from non-trafficked undocumented immigration. Even in King's implied narrow interpretation of 14th Amendment, a determination of trafficked vs. non-trafficked immigration would have to be made before birthright citizenship was denied to a U.S.-born child of an undocumented person - a logistical and financial (and ethical) nightmare.

Also according to Cityview:

"King wants Congress to pass a ban on 'anchor babies,' place it in statute, and wait for the other side to challenge the prohibition in the courts. If King and his forces lose, they’ll move for a constitutional amendment to change the practice, he said."

I'm moved to think about this as the nation is about to celebrate Thanksgiving - a holiday that commemorates our nation's history of uninvited and undocumented immigration. I have no idea of King's heritage (nor do I care) but unless he is a registered member of one of the Native American/American Indian nations, he doesn't get to use the term "anchor baby" without acknowledging the irony and sheer hubris of it. The vast majority of us are the children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren of "anchor babies." Yes, even charter members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and those who trace antecedents to the Mayflower, the Nina, Pinta and Santa María or any of the European sailing vessels that landed on the shores of the "New World." Jus soli is the only reason many Americans can claim citizenship.

The photo at the top of this post is from one my family's Thanksgiving dinner prep several years ago. I wrote back then how significant it was to me that at that dinner, the family who sat around the table included Britons and Americans born in Mexico, Guatemala, Thailand and New York; the children of Bengali and Guatemalan immigrants; the grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of Greek, German, Welsh and Spanish immigrants.

My own father was what King so disrespectfully calls an anchor baby. My grandparents were in transition from Greece to Cuba to Colombia when my father was born. Who knows what my grandparents' documentation status was - things were done differently then and what I've seen of the official correspondence between my grandfather and consulates leaves much in the dark. But my father was born in Chicago, Ill. - as we say in Spanish, a mucha honra - to his great pride. An American citizen. A veteran of World War II and the Korean War. A Northwestern U. graduate. The CEO of a multinational corporation. A lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. A man who contributed to building up the nation in countless ways.

I'd put my father's bona fides up there against King's any day. And yet, were my father to be born after King takes up the chairmanship of the House's immigration committee, the Iowa representative would propose to deny my father his right to citizenship.

I'm no constitutional scholar (nor even much of a historian) but it seems to me that King's desire to rescind birthright citizenship for a certain "kind" of person born on this soil directly contradicts the intent of Abraham Lincoln and others who sought, through the 14th Amendment, to prevent two types of existence in our nation - one free, the other enslaved.

This Thanksgiving when my immediate family gathers around the long, scarred farm table that holds our board, I will pray in memory of my forebears and in hope for my daughter and her children, that in years to come we come to recognize that not all gifts come wrapped in familiar paper.

And that some don't come with papers at all.

Life is a carnival

As we race toward the end of the year, we're racing also toward the end of the decade.

What were you doing when the calendar rolled over to 2000? How much has your life changed in the ensuing 10 years? (I'm really asking, by the way.)

I rang in the year 2000 with my husband, daughter, parents and Wally Reinhardt, a good family friend, on beaches of the Mexican Riviera - dancing on the sand to live music and watching a "torito" of fireworks burn the first few minutes of the 21st century away. There seemed nothing, nothing at all, that would make a better beginning.

A week or so later, my family would troop to Mexico City for my daughter's belated baptism and the subsequent party - notable for its food and the canary who picked my daughter's fortune from a basket. "You will be happy," my daughter's fortune read. "And although destiny has made you pretty, do not be conceited. Work to keep a noble heart." We were all happy. I remember it on our faces. And around the table, some very noble hearts.

My husband, daughter and I returned from Mexico to our snowy cabin in the woods outside of Hamilton, N.Y. It was - and still is - the little corner of the world best loved by my heart. Coy-dogs and wild turkeys and deer were our closest neighbors. We awaited the yearly crop morel mushrooms, gem-studded puffballs, mayapples and trout lilies on the ground; the crayfish, little jeweled frogs and brown trout in the stream; and the tiny hummingbird nests hidden halfway to the sky.

We settled back into our routines, the day-to-day lives that now, in retrospect, stand as the best of times. Then, little more than a month into 2000, my mother died.

It was the opening salvo of a decade that when it comes to an end on Dec. 31, will have included more sorrows than joys, more destruction than creation, more heartache than heart's ease.

I miscarried a child. And then another and another. We moved away from our beloved woods. My father got sick, suffered, died. Friends I thought I'd never lose, I did. My husband was unemployed for half the decade. We went from poor but solvent to poor and insolvent and worried about just making it from week to week. Depression, PTSD-like effects of childhood sexual abuse, health concerns, surgeries. It seems like the litany of darkness might go on until the end of time.

And yet.

My brothers both married in this decade, as did one of my brothers in law. I have six nieces and nephews now - all amazing little beings as distinct from one another as the leaves I see changing outside the window today. My daughter has grown from an amazing 5-year-old to an amazing 15-year-old and guess what? She's survived my parenting just fine. My husband is employed at a job he loves. Friends I never thought to seek have made their way into my life. I've discovered social media in this decade, and rediscovered every kind of writing I ever loved and had set aside - from journalism to poetry.I also rediscovered the peculiar joy of seeing my words paid, and in print.

Rediscovery has, in fact, been the hallmark of this decade for me.

The social justice activism I set aside after college has re-emerged in advocacy for immigrants. The religion I also wholly set aside is now part of my everyday life. The assimilated Latina gave way to something just a little different - a woman in community. A mucha honra.

I don't think my ups and downs are unique to my decade. We need only look at the highs and lows of the economy; the ways both the best of the American Dream and the worst have taken center stage in our collective lives; the ways we have lived, in Dickens' words, the best and worst of times.

Not too many months ago my family attended the carnival at St. Joe's Parish in Downingtown. Yes, the ferris wheel photo at the top of this post is from that outing. I have always been an adrenaline junkie - no person in news business can be otherwise - and have done my share of facing down fears. Scared of snakes? Then, let me drape myself in them while on a trip to Thailand. Scared of heights? Let me jump out of a plane at 10,000 feet with nothing but a thin tissue of nylon to stop my fall. And still, at the parish carnival, I refused to go on the ferris wheel.(My husband went on it with my daughter.) I had to be coerced, in fact, to go on a horrid pirate ship ride that pitched me forward and backward, with my eyes firmly shut. I'm told the child in the seat in front of me laughed through the whole ride. So, the question is, has this decade birthed fear in me?

The answer is undeniably, yes.

And yet.

I was working on my novel a few days ago (I'll post some other time about how this decade also swallowed whole my last novel). One of the characters is like I was before the calendar page turned in 2000 - seemingly fearless. She climbs as high as she can to get close as she can to the stars. Her explanation? The stars cast their light on us without regard for whether we deserve the illumination or not. Without regard for our fears, or our small, brave stands. Without regard for whether we have become what we imagined, oh say, a decade ago.

This decade has also birthed a sort of awareness of the significant synchronicities in life. The way, if you want (and I do), God sheds light on us. The way, for example, as I'm writing this, my eyes fall on the words of one of columnists in our Catholic newspaper this week:

You know the number of the stars and call each of them by name.

It is a line from the psalms intoned in Morning Prayer - the Divine Office prayed across the globe, every day. I like the rest of the psalm, too. The way it speaks, the way it illuminates the step that bridges closure and beginning:

Heal hearts that are broken, gather together those who have been scattered....

No canary could pick a better wish for a new decade than this. No person could pray for better.

Immigration magic

"A woman. No I.D. Tracked down from the cell phone listing of another detainee."

from Flying with the Dead: http://bit.ly/bqTgfx


Full issue: http://crossedgenres.com/store/print/issue-24-print-createspace/

L.A. will have its first U.S. Hispanic Archbishop

Pope Benedict XVI named Archbishop Jose Horacio Gomez of San Antonio the coadjutor Archbishop of Los Angeles. As coadjutor, the Monterey-born Archbishop Gomez will automatically become the head of the L.A. Arch. upon Cardinal Roger Mahony's retirement. The L.A. Archdiocese has 4.2 million Catholics -- a large percentage of them Latinos.

Archbishop Gomez was here in 2008 (that's a Catholic Standard & Times/Joanna Lightner file photo of him at the head of this post) and here are some of his comments about immigration from the CS&T articles of May 22 and 29, 2008:

"In Catholic social teaching, the right to migrate is among the most basic human rights ... if a person can't find the necessities of life for his family, he has the right to leave his country and to seek these things in some other country. It's very close to the right to life. Why? Because God, our Father in Heaven, has created the good things of this world to be shared by all men and women. [...] No country can deny this basic human right out of exaggerated fears for security or selfish concerns about threats to domestic jobs or standards of living. And Catholic teaching presumes that the more prosperous a country is, the more generous that country should be in welcoming immigrants." (CS&T May 22, 2008, p. 58)

And from the CS&T issue of May 29, 2008, p. 25:

Christ is present in the migrant worker and the undocumented immigrant and what we do to them we do to Christ, he said. "This sense has been totally lost in the rhetoric of the immigration debates. To listen to talk radio or the cable news, and even to some of our politicians, it's as if the immigrant isn't even a person. Instead he's only a thief or a terrorist or a simple work animal. We need to promote solutions to this tragedy that reflect the values of Jesus Christ and the Gospel. [...] Although federal immigration reform was killed in Congress last year [2007] after a bitter debate, more than 240 new laws were passed in 46 of our 50 states. Many of these new laws are harsh and punitive, and already they're creating injustices and economic hardships throughout the country. You can open the pages of the Wall Street Journal almost every day and find evidence that our nation's economy can't prosper, or even operate efficiently, without a large immigrant workforce."

For another post about Archbishop Gomez, go to my post of Sept. 18, 2009.

Can't get to the march? Text instead

I'm counting down to the March for America on Sunday

You know you want to join us. You know you want each step to be a prayer for love and justice. In the name of your parents or grandparents or great grandparents or great-great-grandparents and in the name of the dream that is America....

It is not too late -- go here to see how to join. And if you can't join us in person, join us in prayer on that day.

Here, the amazing Bishop Wester speaks on the need for comprehensive and humane immigration reform. He'll be part of the interfaith prayer service on Sunday afternoon in Washington D.C. as well.

I get e-mails

Well, who knew confessing to falling apart and the ensuing work to keep the faith would generate so many personal e-mails?

So, a number of you seem to be worried about me (don't be too worried -- I'm still writing and working and praying, after all); a theologian I greatly admire but have never met in person wrote to tell me the blog post helped him (!); another person told me (in slightly more polite terms) to suck it up and be a man, and some kind souls made sure to tell me they didn't think I was arrogant.

By far the numerous reactions had to do with the M&Ms. Who knew they were so universally popular, and so often the choice of what to give up for Lent? Perhaps we should consider making them a basic food group.

But until that happens, here's an M&M bribe:

Anyone who joins me at the March for America (for comprehensive immigration reform) in Washington D.C. March 21 gets a handful or two of Ms from me (sans red ones, of course).

See, it's still me.

Go here for info on the March: http://marchforamerica--pennsylvania.yolasite.com/