The news from the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas continues to be grim and heartbreaking. The Texas Public Radio affiliate of NPR provides an ongoing update of the Valley’s COVID-19 struggles and as of today there have been over 1700 deaths and 48,000 cases in the Valley’s four counties.
On death in the Valley, in yesterday’s Washington Post article entitled Coronavirus Has Left The Rio Grande Valley Riven by Death and Anxiety, writer Arelis Hernandez provides gut punch details such as this one:
“Graveyard workers lower caskets into the earth three or four times a day instead of once or twice a week. Masked mourners surround fresh mounds of dirt by the hour.”
As the article conveys and as I saw for myself when I lived in the Valley, this is a close-knit community. With 1700 deaths and 48,000 cases, every family, workplace, church, neighborhood, and school is impacted.
“When you start seeing several obituaries for people who were in your high school senior class,” says Valley native Danielle Lopez in the Post article, “you know something has gone terribly wrong.”
At age 36, Lopez speaking of classmates dying is speaking of young victims. But right in line with a Valley ethos of pitching in to help that I experienced, when Lopez saw her people begin to die, the article reports that she suspended her pursuit of a doctorate to return to the Valley to assist anyone and anyhow she could.
As it struggles with this pandemic, the Valley has several strikes against it. It’s along our southernmost border, sharing the Rio Grande with Mexico, and therefore, out of sight and the cares for and of most Americans. A third of the population is in poverty and uninsured. The pandemic has also been minimized after being mishandled by both the Trump Administration and Texas’s Republican governor Greg Abbott, so the Valley’s crisis does not play well for Trump and the governor. And then there is systemic longtime discrimination as the Valley is well over 80% Latino; public health resources and other resources are scarce and come late.
No community deserves this level of tragedy and despair, but since I saw for myself the Valley face tragedy and pandemic before and with grit, love, and generosity, it’s especially heartbreaking and grating to see it have to struggle like this in 2020.
I moved there in 1989 to help McAllen and Sister Marian Strohmeyer open and manage one of the country’s first free-standing AIDS and cancer hospices.
From my vantage point as Casa del Consuelo/Comfort House’s first resident manager living at the hospice and helping Sister Marian and the Valley AIDS Council with public relations events and AIDS awareness trainings, I saw firsthand the Valley’s brave and magnanimous response to such a hospice in the midst of the HIV pandemic. Instead of making people with HIV and AIDS (still widely misunderstood back then) and cancer feel like pariahs, people in the Valley wanted to know how they could help.
Last October, after visiting the Valley for the thirty-year anniversary of Comfort House, I detailed the Valley’s generous reception in A House With Many Rooms: The Opening of A Cancer & AIDS Hospice Thirty Years Ago, an article for the Valley newspaper, The Edinburg Review:
“With respect to outfitting the house, she [Sister Marian] had found that her money was no good in the Valley. No one would take it; everyone was donating, whether it was electric hospital beds, furniture, appliances, wheelchairs, wheelchair ramps and even a pickup truck.”
(Also, inserted is a photograph of a McAllen newspaper clipping I’ve saved from 1989, showing the Valley’s wide support for the hospice.)
We also had a large volunteer force ready to go, Valley volunteers ready to spend time with the hospice’s residents, and to welcome and care for them in way that did not make people feel accepted.
All this while the Valley also supported two of the state’s largest and most influential refugee shelters during the humanitarian crisis created by civil wars and persecution in Central America. With the Catholic Church’s blessing, Sister Marian ran one of those shelters, Casa Merced, as part of the Sanctuary Movement’s underground railroad on a ranch in McAllen.
Finally, from that year in the Valley, an especially deep and moving part of my first weeks in Texas was listening to an entire community grieve--everyone in the Valley--as they tried to come to terms with one of the nation’s worst tragedies, the school bus crash on Sept. 21 at Alton that had taken the lives of 21 of the Valley’s junior and high school students. They helped each other get through that.
Thirty years later, it was obvious from my trip last October to the Valley that the community has continued to support the hospice, refugees, and other causes.
As I said above, no community deserves what the Valley is experiencing. But since it has risen time and time again to help others—many people in the Valley both pray AND they directly help people—the Valley is as deserving as any other community for our attention, assistance, and admiration.
To help the Valley: Besides calling your federal representatives to draw more attention to the Valley’s situation, I recommend contacting the following organzations who are on the ground in the Valley: The Red Cross (for the specifics of volunteering in the Valley during the pandemic, read here.), the United Way, and Volunteer South Texas.
