Farewells

In 1989 I was invited to come to live and work in the Rio Grande Valley. I worked in Harlingen, La Joya and Cameron Park. Each one of these places marked my life with unanticipated blessings. After all of these years, I have decided to move on, leaving, with deep sadness but profound gratitude, one of America's treasures, the border between Texas and Mexico.

During my time here, I discovered the Rio Grande Valley as one of our nation's hidden secrets: a culture all its own, a mixing of northern Mexican ways, Rio Grande Valley mores, and American derring-do, perhaps best captured in our language, wrongly called "Tex-Mex" or "Spanglish" or "Pocho-Guess." I learned to delight in the wordplay, the subtle nuances and the brilliance of a language that moves between Mexican and American English and the particularity of life along a border.

And while I reveled in the joy here, I discovered much to grieve over. This is an economically-devastated place (Cameron Park, for instance, has a lower per capita income than Guatemala!). And yet we belong to the state of Texas, a place that generates more money than Austria or Australia.

The Rio Grande Valley, alone in the United States, is a militarized zone. Nowhere else in the USA are grandfathers "checked out" by armed officers while fishing with their grandchildren. Nowhere else in the United States are mothers of American citizen children afraid to go to church or to walk their children to school. The norm in our lovely Valley is often not the trust and respect that is such a part of our culture, but the suspicion and fear that comes from living amidst a drug war, a war on terrorism, and a war on people of color.

That suspicion and fear, and, in the end, hatred, has seeped into our way of life here as well. It is not unusual for a family member to “turn in” a cousin or an uncle to the Border Patrol; it is no longer surprising when elected officials take some of the billions of dollars that flow through here in exchange for turning a blind eye to business as usual.

In the end, we are a border community. A twenty minute drive from my home lands me in the midst of Mexico. My favorite place is a neighborhood called Colonia Juarez, where for the past 18 years I have enjoyed the deepest sort of fellowship with some of the noblest people on God’s earth. These are poor people—living in tarpaper shacks and knowing hunger’s face all too well. They are also extraordinarily strong people—when we have gathered together I have always been impressed with the latent power that pulses there beneath the surface.

I was in such a gathering the other day—a time to say goodbye to these good people. In the midst of the group was Yahaira. I had used a photo of her as a Christmas card some years ago, so much did her expression remind me of Sacred Hope.

But in this gathering, twelve year old Yahaira had also come to say goodbye—to me, but also to the community. That night, she was going to be handed over to a smuggler, who was to bring her to San Antonio so that she could be with her father. She was going to swim the river, and then would have to walk the four or five days it would take to cross the Wild Horse Desert, which lies between the Valley and the rest of the country.

I asked the community’s wise woman what was going on, why on earth was her mother going to put her twelve year at such risk? And she looked at me with her infinitely sad eyes and said, “Sometimes people just don’t think.”

And so Yahaira set off in the evening. She was going to cross the border, a border which remains unsecure—and I don’t mean that the way the Michael Chertoff means, but in the way that the Gospel means. Yahaira will not be safe; the border will not be a secure place for her.

The cynics and the terrified might make noises about her “illegality” and whine about another individual who would be a “burden” on society. I only saw a little girl who was going to be with her father.

It is to this place and these brave people that I take leave now, as I move onto to other places of blessing. I leave with deep gratitude for the lessons offered me. And I pray in a special way for those others, like Yahaira, who take much greater risks than I can imagine, to move on to new possibilities, with hope and in faith.

Deep thanks to all who have supported the work in Cameron Park and Colonia Juarez over the years. God Bless, Michael Seifert, SM

Update: I discovered that, in the end, Yahaira never made it across the river. The Border Patrol was out in force that day and the smuggler decided that it was not worth the trouble. Thank you, Border Patrol!