CW: Death
When I first arrived on the border, I had just left a congregation of unhoused people with whom I’d started a faith community in Boston. I’d worked with the men and women who lived largely on the street—“the brick,” they called it—for almost twelve years, had found a real home with them, and felt alive in ways that were real and true and expanding. I loved my work and relied on the community to teach and form and shape me, both as a person and as a priest.
But for three years, stories of the border had been besieging us all. Children stripped from their parents and put in cages. Dead parents clinging to dead children on the banks of border rivers. Boatloads of people—men, women, and children—drowning in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Thousands walking for days and then weeks and then months through the muddy fields and crumbling, gray towns of Eastern Europe. Newly militarized borders around the world were slamming shut everywhere: in California and Arizona and Texas and France and Italy and Poland and Greece. Across the globe, more people were on the move than at any time since World War II.
During a brief trip to visit my mother in London, I’d snuck across the channel to France to visit the Church of England’s first-ever refugee chaplain in Calais and saw there how migrants’ tents were slashed to shreds—not by thugs or gang members but by orderly groups of uniformed police officers. Gas stations close to the channel were housed in 3D wire mesh cages as they were the places, people said, that migrants were most likely to break into the backs of trucks, or scramble onto their undercarriages, or squeeze onto their roofs in their attempts to get across the water to the United Kingdom. The highways leading up to the coast were fenced in this way too—strips of four-lane tarmac stretched between tall barbed-wire fences, the entire network of roads as fenced off from the surrounding countryside as a militarized airport.
This was surreal, of course. And horrifying. And almost impossible to take in. But in one way, at least, none of it seemed new to me. My mother’s family is Cuban, and every one of my aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents left what they knew for new lives in the States. I’d grown up on stories of Cubans in tiny makeshift boats and oversized inner tubes, setting out from the beaches of the northern coast of the island, never to be seen again. In my mother’s small flat in London, there was always hung a bright array of painted wooden plaques, and framed colored drawings, and papier-mâché statues of Cuba’s patron saint, La Virgen del Cobre. Hovering in yellow robes above tiny people crammed into fragile-looking boats in an angry sea, she offered protection to all those waving their arms in the air in the universal signal of distress.
When I was nineteen, I headed out for a walk before breakfast one morning in Miami and came across a freshly washed-up boat on the beach, lying off kilter in the curly, black seaweed. It was a small white and gray boat, open to the elements, with nothing in it but a few scraps of brightly colored material, empty plastic bottles tied together with string, and, right in the middle, a squat tent made of canvas, under which sat a bulky, square engine. “A lawn-mower engine they used!” my uncle exclaimed in Spanish as he and four other elderly Cuban men clambered over the boat like crabs. “You see that?” he marveled. “It’s a lawn-mower engine!” This was the only thing anyone said. Otherwise, we were silent. Hushed. The boat had made it, but it was empty: a not quite yet acknowledged tomb. Who’d been in it? This was our silent question. And had there been children? The men looked silently for signs.
About ten minutes later, three shirtless young men came limping up the beach. Yes, yes, it was their boat, they said, exulting through cracked lips. And yes, they’d come from Cuba, though they must have been blown off course, because it had taken them four days to cross the ninety-mile passage to Florida. Four days? the old men marveled. Yes. Four days and four nights, they said. But now—what was this?—they simply couldn’t understand it! They’d walked for miles down the beach and could find no way off it into the town that wasn’t barred by fences and tall, locked metal gates. Such is life in America, the old men told them, filled with wonder at these young men’s fortitude and pride of their own hard-won knowledge of the system—and, most of all, of having, for once, the literal key to get them in.
Old men wrapped arms around young men then, leading them down the beach to their apartments, promising places to stay and connections to work. And as I turned to leave, one of the young ones, the one with curly hair now matted flat against his skull and deep white cuts along his lips, turned to me and winked. “Oye, chica,” he said, eyes sparking as if we were meeting in a nightclub, “¿quieres salir conmigo?”
There’s so much to say about all this—too much for now. The point here is only that people who fled from one country to another, and stuck together, and made new lives for themselves even as they upheld the old way of living and talking and eating and drinking and dancing—all with a just-below-the-surface conviction in their own superiority, which Anglos always seemed to miss—for me, this was normal. This was life. The courage and stamina and raw, we-will-not-only-manage-but-thrive approach to life’s difficulties were all to be admired and, if possible, emulated.
No surprise, then, that when it came time to leave the homeless community in Boston, I headed for the US-Mexico border. Like the young men on the boat that day, my family was given the benefit of the doubt when they arrived in this country. They were given a chance. But by 2019, US immigration policies were being shaped not to assist but to crush people just like those I love more than anyone in the world. I needed to go see what I could do—or, better, what we could do together. And to do that, of course, I needed to learn from the only people who could really teach me: the migrants and refugees and asylum seekers themselves.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of The Asylum Seekers.
