I am sitting in a hotel a few blocked from the Universidad de San Pedro Sula (USAP) in San Pedro Sula, Cortés, Honduras. I arrived yesterday to begin a three-week education series for UNESCO. I saw the news reported in The Guardian and on CNN en Español and wanted to add my remarks.
I was born in México and first came to the USA on a student visa/scholarship in the mid-1980s. I married a US citizen in 1989 and became a US citizen in 1996. I have worked in the USA, as well as México, Central America, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Spain and the UK. My wife and I raised three children in San Diego county and we are grandparents to three as well. My voice in the USA has always been local but have taken to a number of online communities to share my stories and my views to help people understand a given situation.
First, the news that you may have seen here and elsewhere
At least seven people of Venezuelan descent were murdered by a driver in Brownsville, Texas this morning.
The Guardian is reporting:
Seven people have been killed and at least six others have been injured after a car plowed into a crowd outside a shelter serving migrants and homeless people in Brownsville, Texas, on Sunday, and investigators believe it may have been intentional, according to authorities.
The car careened into the crowd of people who were sitting on the curb at a bus stop near the Ozanam Center at about 8.30am, the police department in Brownsville, which is near Texas’s border with Mexico, said. That came four days before the scheduled expiration of Title 42, the Covid-19 era policy that allows border patrol agents to swiftly expel migrants at the US’s southern border.
Shelter director Victor Maldonado told the Associated Press that upon reviewing the shelter’s surveillance footage, he saw an SUV run a light and plow into the crowd of people who were at the bus stop. The majority of those who were injured or killed were Venezuelan men.
These people have names. These people have souls. These people have human rights.
Local ValleyCentral.com television news has more details:
Luis Herrera said he and his friends were waiting to go to the airport when they were struck.
“We were going to the airport and it happened unexpectedly because a woman in a car passed by and advised us to separate and moments later the killer was coming in the car gesturing and insulting us,” Herrera said.
According to CNN, Brownsville is nearly 95% Latino (people of Hispanic descent). If — and it is highly likely — this killer was also of Hispanic descent, this incident will only prove to be more fuel for the incessant inhumanity of those who oppose the law of the land: the lawful migration of non-U.S. citizens.
Humans — the same as you and me
People from Mexico do not vote as a block. People from Venezuela do not vote as a block. People from Central American countries do not vote as a block. (Older generations of people from Cuba did — but that is another story.) This is allowing for the fact that not everyone is allowed to vote. Many people who arrived here generations ago have intense hostility for those now attempting to come. (I received some of that hostility from other people of Mexican descent in the early 1990s when I first moved here.) But hostility gets escalated when political ‘leaders’ and ‘news’ organizations remove all humanity from the situation.
My friends of Mexican descent tell me the stories: you are planting flowers in your front yard of the home you have owned for over twenty years and someone pulls over, shouts a nasty, hateful remark and tells you to go home.
My friends of African descent tell me the same stories: you are walking down a sidewalk or getting out of your car in a parking lot and had a car pull over and shout nasty, hateful things at you and makes a ‘joke’ about lynching.
My friends of Asian/Pacific Island descent tell me the same stories as well. You are buying dog food and someone says you are to blame for COVID.
Sometimes, they throw things: garbage, soda cans, lit cigarettes, dog excrement, rocks, chucks of wood or brick, and so on. Sometimes they call the cops on you. And then they will lie — even when there is video evidence.
Now we have state-sanctioned approval to murder people that we are told to hate. Protesters screaming in our faces outside a women’s health clinic cannot be touched. Supporters outside of a drag show event are open targets. Stand up to support a community that wants to live freely and safely and you will become a target as well. Literally, your life is in danger.
Scientifically, it makes no sense at all. Religiously, it doesn’t either! (Mr. Pence, show me in your holy book where this is okay.) But dehumanization helps some people sleep at night. It helps justify hatred — hateful words and actions.
The path ahead
My dear, sweet 85-year-old Florida-born mother-in-law, who is one-quarter native American (descendant from Seminoles) once got in an argument with someone over speaking English. She calmly noted two things: (1) that maybe the native languages should be the USA’s ‘official languages’ and (2) so many words used in the USA every day originated from other languages and cultures. The richness of expanding our cultures and understanding of the world around us provides so much more to humanity than dominant group-imposed boundaries.
Hate is taught — very carefully with precision and force. Removing reason and compassion are insidious endeavors that have been well-practiced for thousands of years. Undoing that starts early and often in a person’s lives. It starts with undoing the paragons of hate: the voices that dehumanize people, protect hateful actions and words and block true, natural community building. I have been in a number of communities that felt boxed in by the imposed rules by those in power. I have been in places where words turned you into a ‘disappeared’ person. (It was an unfunny joke: if the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina marched now, every hater would have immunity to use them as targets.) This hate is somehow immune to morality.
But what do we have? Stand together? That’s it?
How do you legislate something that a small but powerful sector of state control will not enforce?
I am in Honduras today — a country that has struggled with those same questions. Fortunately, I believe the USA has more options — and more powerful counterbalances to this extremism. Use them — use every tool of love that we have. Use them with love and compassion and understanding and… that wonderful dream that we all have to live in a safe, accepting world where we have the opportunity to pursue our dreams and raise a family (if we so desire) in a better place than we are in right now.
I am going to borrow a moving song from my friends of African descent — “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (lyrics by James Weldon Johnson and music by J. Rosamond Johnson):
Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
Thank you for reading.