I wish I could paint for you the image of a father and son I hold as I prepare to join our First Unitarian delegation for Faith Floods The Desert. Next week, we will join UUs from across the country organized through Love Resists and No More Deaths/No Más Muertes to assert the right to save lives by stocking water caches for migrants walking north across the Arizona/Mexico border. In so doing, we risk the same charges facing the nine No More Deaths activists who provide food and water in the desert. If charged, we will contest those charges and resist government repression of this life-saving work.
The memory of a father and son I encountered in the remote, West Texas desert in April 1999 is what I recall when I feel worried about the upcoming action. Their image reminds me of the strength and determination each person walking for a new life must have and of the dangers of the trek to the United States. What I risk in carrying water into the desert to help people on their journey is small compared to what is on the line for each person migrating for a better life. The father and son are tangible reminders for me. What follows are my reflections on why I feel a personal connection to this action.
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The Chinati Hot Springs are situated in the Chihuahuan Desert beside a creek bed that is dry through most of the year, save the few flash floods that roar through the canyon from the Chinati Mountains down to the Rio Grande. “Chinati” is an Apache word that means “the way through.” For millennia, Hot Springs Creek has been a passage from the wide Rio Grande basin up through the escarpment and mountains to the grassy West Texas plateau. This plateau was once a fertile hunting ground and is now a wide expanse of over-grazed, fenced ranchland traversed by the two-lane Highway 90 that eventually intersects Interstate 10. Migrants who risk the Rio Grande crossing in this sparsely populated land, must walk through 30 miles or more of rugged desert to reach Highway 90 in hope of a safe ride to find work, or reunite with family.
The first time I saw a group of migrants walking through, I was sleeping in the capped bed of my pickup truck, just after arriving at the privately owned, rustic hot springs “resort.” I was there to help the absentee landlord and the reclusive caretaker re-open the springs to the public. I expected to stay about a month in this tucked-away canyon oasis. It was my second night parked down by the Hot Springs Creek, when I was awakened to the sound of feet scrabbling on the rocky creek bed. At first I thought it was a herd of javelina, or maybe some stray cattle. I peered through the camper windows to see a line of men, 20 or so, illuminated by the full moon, walking upstream, not five yards from me. They did not speak. Each carried a jug of water in their hands and a small pack or bag over their shoulders. I went breathless, scared and vulnerable. Surely, a woman sleeping alone in the desert was easy prey for a group of men. They passed quickly but it felt like an eternity before I exhaled.
Next morning, soon after sunrise, I knocked on the ranch house door where Sammy stayed, the only other person living within seven miles. I told him about the group of men in the night, asking who they were out here in the middle of nowhere. I told him how frightened I was. He assured me that the men were little risk. “They’re more scared of you than you are of them. The last thing they want is to be seen and reported. They are walking to find work, and they are together for their safety. This creek is the way through for them to get to the highway and roads out. Just pretend you never saw them, and they’ll ignore you.”
Sammy’s explanation calmed my fears and immediately made sense. I drew on the stories of people I knew, and my knowledge of U.S.- Central American politics, to provide context to the human trains of people on their way through. The sound of their feet completed a mental trail from villages and cities in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras or Mexico through this rugged terrain to cities and towns in North America.
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After I graduated college, I moved home for a spell and got involved with the Sanctuary Movement in Cleveland. In my last semester of school, I had studied the U.S.-sanctioned wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. Cleveland had an active Central American Network (CAN), an organized system of churches and community members who harbored undocumented Central Americans fleeing the violence at home. I wanted to be on the welcoming side of their journeys for a better life. It was one way I felt I could help counteract the effect of U.S. policies in the region. I tutored adults in English while they helped me with my Spanish.
Through CAN I learned of an opportunity to travel to Nicaragua. It was a “Solidarity Brigade,” designed as an immersion experience meant both to offer material assistance to a Nicaraguan community, and to witness the local impact of the years-long, US-maintained conflict. Our brigade spent one month in Northern Nicaragua on a coffee-farm, helping to construct a childcare center. We shared the wooden barracks that were living quarters for the families who had worked the farm for generations, first as de facto indentured servants, and now as cooperative farm workers or campesinos.
The living conditions were miserable and families suffered. There was no sanitation system, the outhouse was covered in feces and the water was contaminated. Women of childbearing years looked to be elders as the hard daily life wore years into their faces. Mothers walked miles into the hills to collect the firewood they burned inside the barracks on wet days for cooking. The chimney-less barrack rooms, flanked by wide wooden bunks, each had one barn-style window where the fire smoke was “vented” by someone fanning the smoke. The barracks were loaded with mice. The mice and the wooden bunks were loaded with fleas, and every person was loaded with fleabites. Though most of the Contra fighting had moved further north from where we were, it was common at night to hear machinegun fire. We were told we should not be scared… these were the sounds of rounds shot into the night air by partying ex-soldiers. Not war, but not comforting either.
These conditions were the legacy of the century of US-Nicaraguan business interests that concentrated the national wealth in the hands of twelve or so Nicaraguan families. The US backed these oligarchs, providing arms and soldiers to support their dominance. Once the revolution took place, the US slapped an embargo on Nicaragua, essentially choking all business dealings, and making humanitarian aid very difficult. We were there as witnesses to the destruction, the saddest of which was the death of two toddlers in our group’s barracks who died of dysentery during our four-week stay. Our project of constructing a childcare center seemed futile given the overall life conditions in this place.
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Several years later, while living in Washington, DC, I became close with a Central American family through a public schools tutoring program. Cindy’s Mom was from Guatemala, was undocumented, illiterate and daily braved the greater DC metro area to clean homes of wealthy people. She was shy and intimidated to take English classes because she did not know how to read. Over the course of a couple of years, I learned that she left Guatemala out of fear. Many young people in the community where her family lived had disappeared, victims of a sustained reign of terror on campesinos; a war that was underwritten by the United States. The U.S. Army School of the Americas was known for training Guatemalan military in counterinsurgency tactics that amounted to a reign of terror. They were notorious for terror tactics such as “disappearances”, torture, random killing and massacres. Cindy’s mother devoted her life to her two U.S.-born children. Though she worked dawn to dusk, it was a better life than where she came from, and she was determined to do the best she could for her daughters.
Cindy’s Dad was Salvadoran. Along with his brother, he fled the 12 year civil war in El Salvador, another bloody conflict between the U.S.-backed repressive government and a broad-coalition of Salvadoran revolutionaries. The Salvadoran civil war was known for the government death squads and people across the country lived in fear. His English was proficient which helped him as a day laborer, mostly doing construction jobs at wealthy Washington, D.C. homes. Also undocumented, he was grateful for the work to help support the family. Early in our getting to know each other, he shared that the violence he fled was not something that he cared to revisit. We never spoke about the details of his life or his family left behind.
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By April 1999, I had been managing the newly re-opened Chinati Hot Springs for a year and was accustomed to occasional groups of people passing through at night. Sammy no longer lived there, but his words continued to guide me. If ever I heard people walking at night, I would move away so as not to witness them.
That second morning at the Chinati Hot Springs, Sammy had said, “They are more scared of you than you are of them.” This simple statement highlighted the power I held as a white, U.S. citizen. Even as a woman alone in the least densely populated county in the lower 48 states, my identity was a potential threat to migrants walking through. I held the power to turn them in to Border Patrol. With one phone call, I could undo their entire quest. One phone call would mean their capture, detention and deportation. A phone call could mean they would not reunite with family, that they would be returned to a place where conditions had compelled them to make a risky journey. A call could mean they would spend years in detention.
With that power comes responsibility. I knew I did not want to be responsible for destroying another person’s quest for freedom. In my mind, the unknown migrants were Cindy’s parents. They were the men and women I tutored in Cleveland. They were the families that lived on the coffee plantation in Nicaragua. They were people who had extended trust and friendship to me.
Many times Border Patrol agents came to the Hot Springs, asking if I had seen anyone. I feigned ignorance. I had been told by neighboring ranchers that Border Patrol had sensors along the hot springs canyon to alert them when groups walked by, so I knew they had some knowledge when migrants were present. But I could honestly say I hadn’t seen them.
One early day in April, during Texas Spring Break, the hot springs were at capacity. All of the cabins were full and several parties camped on the grassy flat below the ranch house. In the midst of the relative bustle in what was usually an isolated and quiet place, I needed a break. It was around noon and already hot, but I decided to walk down the creek with my dog for some quiet.
I was shocked when less than a mile down the creek I spotted about twelve people climbing out of the low canyon and up to the exposed land above the creek. It was mid-day, they could be easily spotted and there were many guests upstream. This was a first. They had seen my dog and me before we saw them, and they wanted no part of interacting with us. I paused, wondering if I should go back, but thought whomever was guiding them must know to circumvent a potential encounter at the hot springs. I kept walking, figuring they would know to stay hidden.
About 15 minutes later, I saw a short man and a teenage boy shuffling heavy-footed toward me. Again I stopped and waited to see what they would do, expecting them to also climb out of the canyon. They were alone, moving more slowly than the earlier group, and the boy’s head hung low. Though they saw me, they kept approaching. The father wore a brimmed hat, they each wore a jacket, even in the hot sun, but they carried nothing. Nothing. And I was alarmed.
They had already walked the seven miles from the Rio Grande empty-handed, and were about to pass through the harsh and parched landscape with no chance of water beyond the hot springs for another 30 or more miles. They would die of dehydration. As they continued toward me, I reckoned fear of their dire circumstances was greater than their fear of me.
I greeted them in my limited Spanish and asked if they were okay. Only the man spoke. The boy kept his head down. The man said he and his son were thirsty. His accent was different than the northern Mexican accent I was accustomed to, and from his speech and their appearance, I guessed they were Indigenous, from Southern Mexico, or Guatemala, or perhaps farther south. No telling how far they had come. Given their pace, I thought the larger group had left them behind.
I asked them to wait in the shade of a canyon overhang while I returned to the ranch house to fetch food and water. It took me some time to navigate the guests, trying not to get caught in conversation and to not be obvious about what I was doing. After about 45 minutes, I returned to the pair. I gave them each a gallon jug of water and a bag with a couple cans of beans, an opener, bread and jam. I also gave the father $40. I worried that giving him U.S. dollars might lead back to me if they were apprehended. I knew that “harboring” undocumented people came with serious consequences, but I could not imagine what they would do once they made it to a road if they didn’t have money. I told them to avoid the hot springs ahead because there were many people there. I tried to explain that the way was dry and long and that after the hot springs, there would not be people for a long, long time. The father thanked me, and the pair then made their way out of the canyon, to the high ground above. As they left, I uttered a prayer for their survival.
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I took my time getting back to the hot springs while I considered how I would respond if any guests had seen the group of men, or the father and son. I tried to devise a plan for how I would respond if Border Patrol asked about them. I was worried for their survival and I considered letting the Border Patrol know about them so that they might be given shelter and food and a chance to live. But perhaps the food and water I gave them would be enough to make it through the next phase of their journey.
By the time I reached the hot springs again, I decided against calling. Who was I to determine that they couldn’t make it? They had managed so far. If I turned them in, they would face detention and deportation, and I knew nothing about the conditions from which they came. Who was I to judge their decisions? Who was I to judge their fate?
Upon reaching the populated hot springs, a white, Texan family approached me, alarmed, saying they’d seen many men, “probably drug traffickers” walking on the high ground other side of the creek. They asked me if I should call Border Patrol. I stalled. I told them not to worry and that I was sure we were safe. I’d been living there for over a year and suspected they were people who knew the area and were passing through. Maybe they were ranch hands. I kept busy with other tasks for hot springs guests, avoiding going inside as long as I could, but within the hour, the office phone rang.
The Chief Information Officer for Marfa Sector Border Patrol was on the line. He asked me if I’d seen anyone walking up Hot Springs Creek. I responded, “A family reported seeing a group of men.” He said they’d gotten word of “illegals” in the area and I suspected that the human sensors they monitored in the canyon had been tripped. I asked the officer to let me know if anyone was apprehended.
The next morning, the Information Officer called me to say they’d caught two groups of men a couple miles north of the hot springs on Sherman Bales ranch; “a large group and a small group”. I asked him what happens to people they capture. His response was vague, saying they would be “processed” and eventually deported. I did not want to reveal I knew anything more, though I assumed the “small group” was the father and son.
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I will never know what became of this father and son. Tears are close as I imagine the people they left behind and what they had already risked by making the trek. I understand that the conditions they left behind are connected to me, through the policies of the country of my birth, the access I have to cheap goods extracted from their homelands, the inexpensive food brought to my table by the hands of migrant laborers like them dwelling on this land. I imagine the powerlessness the father must have felt to be lost and thirsty in the desert, relying on the mercy of strangers, responsible for his son. I see the father’s face, dark brown, round and deeply lined, with eyes full of worry, and I am reminded why I will carry water into the desert for others.
I have felt grateful the two were found alive and I have mourned their quest for a better life. I’ve prayed they were able to stay together, but as I learn that family separation of immigrants has been the practice in the U.S. for a long time, I suppose they probably were detained away from each other. For how long? May they have reunited safe, healthy and whole.
I offer blessings to each soul who walks for freedom, each one a person with a family, a story, a drive for survival. Blessings as well to the people of No More Deaths and Border Angels and countless other caring people who risk legal consequences for leaving life-sustaining water for migrants in the desert. Blessings to our First Unitarian delegation teaming up with the wider Unitarian Universalist action to support these border activists. May compassion for our human siblings help us to be risk-takers for change.
Faith Floods the Desert.