For María

By Melanie Fox on 09/21/2011 @ 10:45 AM

Tags: Immigration, Quakerism

Flashback. September 2010.

Her name was María. Not unlike many girls and women in Latin America who are named after the patron saint of their country and mother of their savior, Jesús. She was 22 years old, the same age that I was at the time. I met her in Nogales, Mexico, at the ‘Comedor,’ a soup kitchen run by a resilient group of Jesuit nuns that provide meals to recently deported immigrants.

The border patrol found María somewhere in the sandy, harsh desert land that is southern Arizona the day prior. After putting her in the back of one of the border patrol cars (that we would jokingly call dog-catchers….they really look like something a dog-catcher would drive around!) they took her to a processing center, probably in Tucson, where they took her finger prints, gave her some water and crackers for the night, and placed her in a room of benches with around 50 others for the night before shuffling them all onto a charter bus around 4:00am, and eventually dropping them off into the early morning light of Nogales, Mexico, just across the border from Nogales, Arizona.

The U.S.-Mexico border wall

María had been living in Minnesota for almost four years where she lived with her husband and their two children. She returned to Mexico in order to bring her other two children, who she left behind four years earlier, into the United States so that they could have the chance for a better education. Her two children, with the help of a large sum of money, had already been transported (smuggled, essentially) by car into the U.S. and had made it safely to Minnesota. And here she was, discouraged by having been caught by border patrol, but nevertheless planning on trying to cross over into “El Norte” for a second time, risking jail time if caught by the border patrol again.

Flash forward. September 2011.

I am walking the mile from my house to work in the early morning. Down Pennsylvania Avenue, onto 2nd Street where grandiose, extravagant federal buildings pass me by. The Library of Congress with its marvelous golden and green dome. The U.S. Supreme Court. “Justice, The Guardian of Liberty,” it reads. The Hart Senate building with finely dressed women and men coming and going. Along the way, I pass many people almost all around my age. All focused on their own lives, their own careers. And unlike María, certainly not worried about their children (who do not yet exist thanks to access to health care and birth control). And I am on my way to my first day at a job with steady income and benefits, without having to worry about anyone stopping to ask for my identification along the way.

The Library of Congress dome

So what really divides these two worlds? In a word, opportunity.

For María, opportunity for herself and her children means crossing over a dangerous maze of border fence, border patrol, drug cartels, and rattlesnakes. Opportunity is a dream that lies on the other side of a wall. Opportunity is something that she can only attain by becoming, in the eyes of some, a law-breaker.

For me and other young professionals in DC (and, frankly, any major city north of the border), opportunity means freely walking down the street not even being chastised by the Capitol Hill police for jay-walking in order to make it to work on time. For me, opportunity is an assumed reality: one that I can find pretty much anywhere in world assuming I have my United States passport in one hand and my college diploma in the other.

The opportunity to financially support yourself and your family should not need to include being separated from your country and your family. Quaker ideals propel me to see that there is “that of God” in everyone, regardless of socio-economic status or location in relation to a particular border. My hope for this year is that I can use my opportunity here at FCNL to pursue changing what and where opportunity is for María and so many others like her.