Legendary performer Linda Ronstadt was among the recipients at the Kennedy Center Honors this month, where she was recognized for a lush, decades-long career that has spanned musical genres, languages, and generations. But what’s not often as recognized—and should be—is the Grammy winner’s activism, especially on the issue of migrant rights. The Mexican-American performer grew up in Arizona and discussed her work along the border in a September interview with The New Yorker.
“I spent time out in the desert when I was still healthy, working with a group of Samaritans who go to find people that are lost,” she told The New Yorker. “You meet some guy stumbling through the desert trying to cross, and he’s dehydrated, his feet are full of thorns, cactus, then you see this Minute Man sitting with his cooler, with all of his water and food and beer, and his automatic weapon sitting on his lap, wearing full camouflage. It’s so cruel. People are coming to work. They’re coming to have a better life. You have to be pretty desperate to want to cross that desert.”
When the Trump administration tried to imprison a No More Deaths humanitarian worker for leaving food and water in the desert for migrants, Ronstadt urged the public to support the group’s life-saving mission. "I can think of no more compelling crisis than that now facing the borderlands and my view is this: Every individual has the right to receive and the right to give humanitarian aid, in order to prevent suffering and death—no matter what one’s legal status," she said at the time. "To criminalize human kindness is a dangerous precedent."
“People have been caught in this web of suffering, dying in the desert,” she continued in The New Yorker interview earlier this year. “They’re incredibly brave and resourceful, the people who make it. A C.E.O. of a big company once told me—when I said, ‘What do you look for in hiring practices?’—she said, ‘I look for someone who’s dealt with a lot of adversity, because they usually make a good business person.’ And I thought, You should hire every immigrant who comes across the border.”
While Ronstadt’s singing career has been tragically halted by Parkinson’s disease (she retired from performing a decade ago and now spends much of her time in San Francisco), her will to speak truth to power has not. During a recent State Department event for Kennedy Center honorees, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo apparently mused about when he would be loved, a reference to Ronstadt’s hit song, “When Will I Be Loved.” She reportedly shot back, "I'd like to say to Mr. Pompeo, who wonders when he'll be loved, it's when he stops enabling Donald Trump.”