YOLANDA CHAVEZ LEYVA
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Waiting and hoping at the border

12/23/2022

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Migrants waiting on the streets in Barrio Duranguito, December 2022.


​Last week my partner Diana Bynum and our grandson Joaquin Leyva joined the Journey for Justice, a caravan organized by Witness at the Border to bring attention to the distress of migrants coming to the United States and to call for justice. The caravan travelled the entire 2,000 miles of the border.
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Together with his grandmother Diana, Joaquin rode hundreds of miles, stopping at border crossings where local communities told them about the suffering of migrants and what they were doing to help ease it. For Diana, it was important to do something in this moment of crisis. To witness what was happening in other communities. Here in El Paso, Diana had volunteered many hours, feeding migrants, doing arts and crafts with children, making shoelaces, and more. ​​
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Journey for Justice banner at Tornillo gathering December 2022

​In a poem reflecting on that experience, Joaquin wrote
“On the caravan I
Saw new things.
Mountains made
Of boulders.
Deserts filled with
Cacti.
Walls built to isolate.”
 
Diana and Joaquin returned from their journey to a crisis at this border, our home, El Paso. A few days ago, the Texas governor called in the National Guard who placed concertina wire along the border so that no one could cross. Each day, hundreds if not thousands of migrants wait on the international bridges on the Juárez side of the border. US immigration officials are releasing up to 1,000 migrants per day in El Paso and hundreds are on the streets as the temperature drops below freezing. Non-profits and churches are quickly organizing to provide shelter for the people on the streets. Shelters on both sides of the border are overwhelmed.
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Migrants waiting in Barrio Duranguito, December 2022.

Many migrants are from Venezuela. Venezuelans are now the second largest group of migrants encountered by the Border Patrol, surpassed only by Mexicans. In the past eight years, millions of venezolanos have left their homes in desperation.  They go to neighboring Latin American countries. They come here. In their home country, over 75% live below poverty, defined globally by the World Bank as $1.90 per day. The daily minimum wage is less an $1.00. Inflation is unbelievable. In 2018, it hit 130,060%. It hovers around 500% now. A cup of coffee is beyond reach of most people at the U.S. equivalent of $2.50. While that may seem affordable to us, it is more than a day’s wages for many Venezuelans.
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Migrants waiting outside Parroquia Sagrado Corazon in the Segundo Barrio, December 2022.

The migrants wait. It’s ironic that the Spanish word meaning to wait and to hope is the same—esperar. The migrants here at the border do both. They wait, sitting on sidewalks surrounded by bags of meager belongings, covered in blankets, or in lines waiting to eat or be taken into the warmth of a temporary place to stay. And they hope. Hope that the long journey here will allow them to wait out the crisis in their country. Hope that they will be able to work and find security and stability. Hope that their children will thrive. Hope that someday they will be able to return home.
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The border is always a place of contradictions. To live on the border is to be constant witness to the inhumanity of government policies and the generosity and kindness of people. El Pasoans are volunteering at shelters, and providing water, coffee, blankets, and coats from cars parked in areas where migrants wait. They donate meals to shelters and give of their time. It is a generosity of spirit that we have always shown on the border, perhaps because we have little. Perhaps because so many of us remember our parents and grandparents who came seeking a better life.

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Joaquin ended the poem by writing,
“No matter how
Dim the light may be.
There is still a
Little bit of hope.
And a little bit we can do to help.
And if we can do
Just that, we can
Create bigger
Change.”
 
As I drive past the hundreds of migrants on the streets of El Paso, I hold on to that little bit of hope. For them. For us.
 
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Mural by Diana Ramos at Barrio Duranguito
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Walking in my father's footsteps: Reflections on the old "East El Paso"

12/7/2022

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PictureJerry Leyva and Esther Chavez, 1929











​Presented at Corazón, Historia, Raíces/ El Paso, Texas
November 5, 2022
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 ​I am so pleased to be here to share a bit of history about what was known a century ago as East El Paso, my father’s ancestral barrio. Many thanks to Commissioner David Stout and Dr. Cynthia Renteria for the invitation to participate in “Corazón, Historia, Raíces.” What we now know as South Central represents all three to me. During my childhood, I spent many days visiting my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousins who lived on Pera Street and many of my father’s stories were grounded in the historic eastside, south of the railroad tracks and east of Piedras. I realized when I matured as a historian that his stories reflected the growth of a community and its institutions. I see them as glimpses into the building of community. Family. School. Church. Also popular culture. Growing up listening to his stories as we drove south on Copia, passing Alameda, eventually making our way to Pera Street rooted me to this barrio on the U.S.-Mexico border. The drive always evoked his childhood memories of the eastside.



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Sanborn Fire Map 1910/ Graphics by Angel Ortiz

Arrival to US

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In 1914, Isidro Ruacho called for his family to join him in El Paso. Emeteria Leyva responded, crossing into El Paso with their four children: Ausencio, Julia, Petra, and Gerónimo. Isidro was tired of the fighting he endured during the Mexican Revolution. His son Gerónimo remembered his mother sending him into the battlefields to look for his father’s body. He talked of walking among the dead men, putting small rocks on their eyelids in order to keep them shut. It was a childhood memory that remained with him throughout his life.
For Isidro and Emeteria, and thousands of other migrants, El Paso represented an escape from the violent chaos of the Revolution. It represented stability. For 3-year-old Gerónimo, however, coming to El Paso embodied the unknown. In a 1978 oral history, Gerónimo remembered crossing the border and walking on El Paso Street, knowing they were now in the United States but having no idea what that meant. Frustrated because he was crying, his brother Ausencio grabbed him by the hand. “Mi hermano estaba ya grandesito y me traía de la mano, hecho a la mocha.”

By the time of their arrival to El Paso, historic Chihuahuita (that included the Segundo Barrio) was the most densely populated area of the city. As the population of the Segundo exploded in the 1910s and into the 1920s, exceeding the capacity of tenements and schools, newly arrived Mexican immigrants began moving eastward along the river into places like the “East El Paso addition.” While the neighborhood was originally populated by “Americanos,” that changed as Mexican immigration transformed the demographics. Isidro and Emeteria were part of this movement to the newer barrios of El Paso in the early 20th century, settling first in a presidio, a one-story apartment building that reminded people of military barracks, on Frutas. Soon after, they moved the family to Pera Street, which just a few years before had been known as Pear Street. Emeteria would live on Pera from the 1910s until her death in 1967. It was a neighborhood of presidios and small, one family homes, and small businesses lining narrow residential streets.
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As a child, Gerónimo’s homelife was culturally Mexican, living in a community just recently uprooted from Mexico, that spoke Spanish, and working to maintain Mexican culture. His contact with English-speaking “Americanos” happened only at school or at work, which he began as a child. Every time we drove on Pera to visit his mother at her home, he would laugh. “Mija, yo andaba en estas calles, un chavalito descalso.” His stories reflected the poverty in which he grew. Even shoes were a luxury.
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From “History of Beall School”https://scholarworks.utep.edu/hist_honors/11/
Church

Like Beall Elementary, another community institution opened in 1908, Guardian Angel Catholic Church.  Italian Jesuit priest Carlos Pinto, known as the “Apostle of El Paso,” founded Guardian Angel or Santo Angel Catholic Church on Frutas, which originally catered to English speaking parishioners. By 1915, as the Mexican community grew, it became a Spanish-speaking congregation and in 1918, the church was turned over to the Mexican Jesuits. There, Gerónimo attended mass and danced as a matachin under the leadership of Marcelino Serna. 

Church was an vital institution to Gerónimo. During my childhood, we attended Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Church where matachines danced to la Virgen on her day, December 12. Every year, after mass, as we stood with others in the courtyard, watching matachines dance their prayers to la Guadalupana, as had generations before them, my father recalled his childhood dancing as a matachin at Santo Angel under the tutelage of highly-decorated World War I veteran, Marcelino Serna. Serna, born in 1896 in Ciudad Chihuahua, crossed into El Paso in 1916, went to Denver to find work, and volunteered to enter the military when the United States enter the war. He served on the front-line in France and his valor on the battlefield was acknowledged by numerous countries. He was unable to be promoted above private, however, because he did not speak English. In 1924, an article published in the Sioux City Journal describing the “San Lorenzo dances” that took place yearly. “The leader in one of the groups in the El Paso dance is Marcelino Serna, a young Mexican Indian who distinguished himself by killing Germans recently, as his fathers may have distinguished themselves in killing Spaniards or members of alien tribes.”   As a World War II veteran, my father was proud that he had danced under the leadership of Serna. 


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Marcelino Serna
Washington Park
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1918 was a momentous and terrific year across the globe as the misnamed Spanish flu killed millions. In El Paso, hundreds became sick every week. Six hundred died here in the first months of the epidemic. The City closed schools, theaters, and churches. Gerónimo fell ill. He remembered, “I was sick, very sick, y no habia medios de ver doctor ni nada.” He was fevered. He couldn’t breathe. His mother Emeteria went to Washington Park and picked leaves from the fresnos there, the ash trees. She made a bed of the leaves on the floor and had him lay down on them. In traditional healing (including Chinese and European), the ash tree is known to reduce fevers and help with arthritis, gout, and other afflictions. “Pero gracias a Dios no nos murimos nadie de la familia. Y de eso me acuerdo mucho también,” remembered Gerónimo.
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Washington Park
Mission theater

In August 1917, the El Paso Herald Post announced the opening of the Alameda Theater [1] under the ownership of  Jose Soltern  and the management of Jesus Ontiveros. The theater was part of a growing number of movie theaters in El Paso that catered to its expanding population. Often when driving on Alameda returning home from my grandmother’s house, my father would point to what was later the Mission Theater, the headquarters of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, and eventually the Mine and Mill Bar. “Look at that theater, mija. I used to sneak in there with my friends to watch movies.” According to historian David Dorado Romo, over a dozen movie theaters were constructed in El Paso between 1910 and 1920. Often the theaters catered to the more wealthy Mexican refugees who were seeking entertainment. For impoverished children like Gerónimo, who also wanted entertainment, sneaking into the theater was the only way to enjoy moving pictures.

          In the 1940s, the Alameda Theater was purchased by new owner,  remodeled and renamed the Mission Theater. The management sought to appeal to “white patrons,” living on the east side.  
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The Mission Theater
Orphanage

At some point in his early childhood, Gerónimo’s mother left him with a señora for six months. He never knew why she suddenly left him or why she unexpectedly reappeared, but we know that Mexican families often struggled to provide for their children and arrangements were made between families. In the 1920s, after the death of my maternal grandmother, her youngest living son was placed in an orphanage for several months when the family was unable to care for him. In Socorro, Texas, the County Poor Farm took in who they called “abandoned and neglected children,” mostly Mexican beginning in the 1930s.

El Paso proper had a number of orphanages early on. First, there was an orphanage for white Protestant children, followed by an orphanage for white Catholic children. It was not until the second decade of the twentieth century that Mexican children in El Paso could rely on an orphanage of their own and it was located in East El Paso where the current Father Yermo school is located.  In February of 1920, the Sisters of the Society of the Servants of the Sacred Heart and of the Poor, whose motherhouse was located in Puebla, Mexico, opened an orphanage for Mexican girls.  Lacking the support of El Paso's Anglo Americans and with the Mexican community lacking the resources to provide for the children, the orphanage depended on the work of the sisters and the orphans for survival.  The Sisters sold flowers and taught the older girls how to embroider.  Through the sale of flowers and their embroidery, the Sisters and the girls earned over $3,000.  To make ends meet, they also grew their own vegetables and provided milk to the children through the use of their two cows.  

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Father Yermo High School
John Lucas and Felicitas Ruacho

East El Paso was also home to African Americans, many who worked at the nearby railroads. All my life, I heard about my father’s aunt Felicitas who had married a Black man named John Lucas. Unexpectedly one day several years ago, I found mention of them in a tiny announcement in the January 29, 1920 issue of the El Paso Herald.  There, next to an ad for the “calyx skirt” and just below an article pitting the intelligence of brunettes against that of blondes, was an article, “El Pasoans wed in Las Cruces.” The couple married in Las Cruces, no doubt, to escape Texas’ anti-miscegenation law. Despite our treatment as second-class citizens, Mexican Americans were legally defined as white. In the early 20th century, Las Cruces, New Mexico provided opportunities to Black El Pasoans that were denied by Texas law, including the right to marry a “white” woman and get an education at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts.

In the early twentieth century, as Felicitas and John wed, Black men and Mexican women created intimate relationships while facing criticism and threats from the judicial system. The classification of Mexican and Mexican American women as “white” made Mexican-Black marriages illegal in many states, including Texas. It didn’t matter that some of the couples were married in places where they could marry (Mexico, for example). Their marriage was still against Texas law. As one observer wrote, the men were in trouble for marrying their color, but not their race. The day following the arrests, numerous Black families moved across the border to Ciudad Juárez. (See chapter 2 in Porous Borders for more on this story.)  A Texas law passed just five years before Felicitas and John married made intermarriage a criminal offense punishable by two to five years in the penitentiary. A 1925 Miscegenation law declared interracial marriage a felony and nullified interracial marriages even if they occurred in a place where these marriages were legal.  Despite their efforts, Felicitas and John found themselves breaking the law through their marital relationship. Texas' anti-miscegenation law remained on the books until 1967.        
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The couple resided on Palm, just west of Beall School. A look at the 1920 census shows that the two block long street was home to both Mexican and Black families. The male heads of Black households worked for the railroads while Mexican heads of households held a variety of positions. The small Mexican and Black street was just a 15 minute walk from Douglass Elementary School, El Paso’s segregated Black school.
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African American railroad workers
Conclusion
          I am grateful for my father’s stories, for the way they ground me, for the way they allow me to see history.

Sources

Vamos al cine: Film Exhibition and Moviegoing in El Paso, Texas, 1935–1955 - ProQuest
Access Newspaper Archive Institutional Version | Viewer (oclc.org)
Access Newspaper Archive Institutional Version | Viewer (oclc.org)
A History of Beal School, El Paso, TX 



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Refusing to be silenced

9/24/2019

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Last month, a little over three weeks after the Walmart massacre, I stood in front of a packed room at my university and spoke about white supremacy. Everyone in that room had been affected directly or indirectly by the massacre. On the morning of August 3, a 21-year-old white supremacist opened fire at an eastside Walmart in my hometown, killing 22 and shooting another 24. He took the lives of people from both sides of the border, from ages 15 to 83. Witnesses said he walked into the Walmart confidently, calmly, like he had a mission, carrying his AK47 style weapon. He drove 650 miles from the Dallas area to kill Mexicans living on the border. He was a foot soldier for white supremacy. He hoped to be a martyr for white supremacy.

In my talk, I asked what it meant if people whose words and actions reinforce white supremacy (like Trump) denounce white supremacy in the aftermath of an event like the Walmart massacre. I wanted to understand it beyond the obvious hypocrisy of such denunciations. I don't want to remain at the rolling my eyes stage when I hear Trump speak against white nationalism. I want to understand how criticisms of white supremacy by people like Trump actually serve to bolster the system of white supremacy, to make it invisible, to  make us comfortable again.

My questions drew an immediately backlash.

Shortly after my talk, a blogger put a video of my talk on his page and consequently, a conservative online newspaper picked up the story. As soon as the video went up, I began to experience online harassment that has lasted weeks. The spamming and hacking have been time-consuming and irritating to deal with. Online harassment is a classic right-wing strategy to silence people. Doxing and swatting are extreme examples of this strategy. Journalist Ijeoma Oluo writes about the terrifying attacks she and her family have confronted because of her work on race. You can read about it here.
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Ijeoma Oluo
What caught my attention the most, however, was a comment that harkened back to a time when physical violence was regularly used to silence Mexican Americans.

Art Crosby, a frequent contributor to conservative websites, wrote: 
“Not too liong ago (she Wouldn’t of had that job in the 1st place) That would have earned her a trip to the nearest Tree.” (Typos and grammatical errors are in the original post.)
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“A trip to the nearest tree” taps into a long history of lynching Mexican origin people that has only recently come to light through the work of historians.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Mexican-origin people were lynched from the mid-19th century well into the 20th century. The "Refusing to Forget Project," and historical monographs The Injustice Never Leaves You  by  Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands by Villanueva Jr., Nicholas, and Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928 by William Carrigan and Clive Webb are among the investigations into anti-Mexican violence.

"A trip to the nearest tree" is a horrifying reality.

The violence also reminds me of the generations of women who have refused to be silenced. In the late 29th and early 20th centuries, journalists Ida B. Wells and Jovita Idár documented the violence against their communities despite threats of violence. Wells began investigating cases of lynching of Black men in the 1890s and immediately experienced death threats. Her newspaper, Free Speech, was destroyed. White supremacists forced Wells to leave Memphis but she continued her work in Chicago.

Twenty years later, Jovita Idár wrote against lynching in South Texas. When the Texas Rangers showed up in 1914 to close down El Progreso, a newspaper that featured articles by Idár critical of President Wilson sending troops to the border, Idár stood up to them. You can listen to an oral history with her brother describing that day here. She continued her work despite the threats. 
History is filled with examples of Black and Brown women who have refused to be silenced in the face of violence and threats. I don’t want to romanticize it. It’s scary. Frustrating. Enraging. In these times of anonymous online trolls, it is terrifying. White supremacy fights to survive in any way it can and uses anyone it can to fight its battles.

​But what choice do we have? To return to writer Ijeoma Oluo, “If you live in this system of white supremacy, you are either fighting the system or you are complicit.” There is no in-between.

I don't want to be a martyr and I won't be scared into silence. Continuing to speak up is what I owe the women who came before me who faced threats because of their words and it is something I owe my grandchildren and their children. 
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What comes next after the Walmart massacre?

8/12/2019

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The Saturday before last, my grandson and I sat in my car preparing to go to a movie to celebrate his 14th birthday. He is a compassionate, creative, funny boy who notices the way that the sun makes the trees sparkle at my work. He writes poetry every day. He works hard to do the best he can while living with autism.
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I had just heard the news. “Mijo, there’s a live shooter at the Walmart at Cielo Vista.” His immediate response was, “Abuelita, they want to kill Mexicans.” I was shocked at his statement. “Did you hear that on the news? Are they saying that?” “No, I just think that. I know that.”  The police report proved him right.
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"The defendant stated his target were 'Mexicans.'"
Meanwhile, early reports were blaming it on gang violence, something that most of the people I have spoken to immediately dismissed.

On August 2, a young white supremacist drove close to 650 miles to my hometown to carry out a massacre. He killed 22 people and injured over two dozen more. The murdered ranged in age from 15 to 90. Police attribute a racist, rambling essay to him that was published on 8chan shortly before the killing. In that document he talked about responding to the “Hispanic invasion” of Texas, an ahistorical statement that I addressed here.
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#SayTheirNames
​El Paso is not a small town but we function as one. I know people who were in the Walmart when in happened. The mother of one of my closest friends tells her story here. I know people who lost family members to the white supremacist. I know many people who wake up each day frightened now.  Students are reaching out to me to talk about their futures. I am scared.
Many of us are retraumatized by the massacre. My friend Teresa talked about this in a public meeting the other day where we discussed what actions to take now. On the border, we are constantly traumatized and retraumatized.
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For almost three years, I have worked with the people of Barrio Duranguito, the first platted neighborhood in our city and an area that the mayor and City Council have pledged to demolish for a sports arena. The neighborhood is low-income with an average annual income of $9,000. It is majority women over 65 and it is almost completely a barrio of renters who are vulnerable to negligent landlords.

When residents began to organize against their displacement and the destruction of their historic neighborhood in 2016, the City and the landlords responded violently. The property owners hired a manager who harassed the residents day and night, calling them endlessly, knocking on their windows at night, threatening to have their utilities cut. While the City had to offer financial assistance to the residents by federal law, it was the constant threats and the effects on their health that pushed many out.

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90-year-old Antonia Morales of Barrio Duranguito with police as they watch the City of El Paso install a fence.

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Last November, the City shut off access to the street by installing a fence. It has isolated the remaining residents on that street. They wake up each morning to an ugly, green fence. The mayor has a thing about fences, we know.

I think back over just the past year and reflect on the trauma and suffering we have witnessed on the border. The constantly changing federal policies imposed by Trump that keep us in a continual state of imbalance. My partner and grandson were preparing meals for asylum seekers at shelters through the refugee meal program at the Borderland Rainbow Center. They never knew how many people ICE would release that day—would it be 50? Would it be 200? For community organizations and volunteers, it was a matter of never knowing how to prepare to assist the refugees, day by day.

We saw hundreds of asylum seekers penned in under the international bridge, like animals, sleeping on the gravel. The bridge is just six miles from my home. It was heartbreaking. Once,  I gave a ride to a young mother and her toddler. Her daughter had a terrible cough and when I asked why she was sick, her mother told me they had spent five days under the bridge, suffering the night time cold weather, eating frozen burritos given them by ICE, and sleeping on the ground.


Recently, I interviewed another mother whose 5-year-old became so sick during their time jailed under the bridge, that she became unresponsive. When the mother begged for medical care for her daughter, the officer told her, “Don’t worry. She’s not dead yet.” After they were released to a detention facility, the little girl would not eat. She could not talk for days.
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The inhumane treatment of asylum seekers gained wide media coverage such as this article in TIME.

​Last Wednesday, a white supremacist from Houston came to our city where he harassed mourners at the memorial created for those killed in the Walmart massacre. Later that day, he went to Casa Carmelita, a shelter for migrants, with a loaded gun and a knife. The El Paso Police Department detained him but later released him, telling the organizers at Casa Carmelita that “he had rights.” Casa Carmelita is not the first place he has threatened. There is a stock photo of him in from of the library that was hosting an LGBTQ event in Leander, Texas.
PictureScreenshot of a stock photo site featuring the white supremacist who came to El Paso following the Walmart massacre.
Last Friday, I visited Respettrans, the LGBTQ migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez. It is a welcoming place. It is more than a shelter, it is a home for the transwomen, gay men, and lesbians who are seeking refuge. When I arrived, the founder of the home, Grecia Hernández, had just returned from the morgue. Each time a transwoman is killed in Juárez, the authorities call her to see if she can identify her. She didn’t know her, but the details of the murder were not unusual. “Another woman beheaded,” she told me.

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Alondra Garcia QEPD #SayHerName #JusticiaParaAlondra Cortesia de FB de Cheros Ac

Violence, individual and structural, against the poor, against migrants, against women, against queer people, against Brown people, against the most vulnerable among us is everywhere in my city.  
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It is also true that my binational community is filled with caring people who will and have come together to help others.  There are people here who have very little yet will give what they have if someone is hungry. We have always been that kind of place.  

We are both: a place of violence and a place of love.
 
My family, my friends, my students ask where do we go from here? What do we do now? Organizations in the city are providing counseling, as is my university and our school districts. This is an important first step to deal with the shock we are experiencing.

I’m grappling with what to do next. I’m talking with folks about what specific actions to take next, both individually and as a community. I’m looking to history to see how our ancestors fought white supremacy and what worked and what didn’t work. I’m writing, finally, after a year because it is therapeutic. And I’m turning to my spiritual practices to ground me.

​It is a time for us to come together to talk in a real way about the hatred and white supremacy in our city, in our state, and in our nation. It is not new and the fight against it is not new either. Join me.
 
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Remembering COCO: a Dia de los Muertos tribute

11/2/2018

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Today, on el Dia de los Muertos, we re-publish a blog from last year about the beauty of remembering our ancestors!

This week Pixar’s movie 
Coco opened to glowing reviews. I took two of my grandchildren to opening night and at the end of the film, the audience applauded. People sat in their seats during the almost interminable list of people who had worked on the film, intrigued I think by this film that finally presented our cultura in a beautiful and complex way. I think every generation can identify with the film, from the young like my grandchildren who recognized in Miguel their own struggle to follow their own dreams to  those of us who recognized the 1950s black and white movies starring handsome Mexican entertainers (in the movie, Ernesto De La Cruz, a handsome entertainer wildly beloved even in the afterlife.) For those of us fortunate to have known our abuelitas or who have witnessed our own parents age, abuelita Coco reached our hearts with her beautiful, wrinkled face and her childlike smile.
 
In the film, the Rivera family, renowned for their skills as cobblers, have rejected music for generations. Coco’s father, a musician, abandoned the family when she was a child and her mother, once a lover of music blessed with a beautiful voice, forcefully eliminates music from their lives. In obedience to the family tradition, five generations of family live without it. As Miguel grows, he must hide his love of music and his talent as a musician and singer, retreating to a secret hideaway, filled with tributes to his idol De La Cruz.
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The film is framed by el Dia de los Muertos, increasingly popular in the United States as a day of face painting and parades, altar building, and celebration. Traditionally, it is a day when our dead visit us and in a twist, Miguel ends up in the land of the dead, a glorious place of shining lights and shimmering buildings. Accompanied by his dog Dante, the film gives us a nod to Mesoamerican traditions where a xoloitzuintle acts as our guide in the underworld.
There are so many ways to write about this film. As I watched the film, alternately laughing and crying, what stood out to me most was how beautifully it presented intergenerational healing. My maestras and maestros have taught me that it is possible to heal across generations, backwards and forwards. As a historian and a healer, I have often reflected on the ways knowing our history can heal us. History is a tool of oppression and of liberation. It is a reflection of power and resistance.

Over the decades as an educator sharing little known histories with my students, I’ve caught glimpses of this healing. Once, a student told me that she thought her family was “crazy” and “stupid” because they had returned to Mexico in the 1920s after already having migrated here. “It was something about getting land,” is all she knew.  When I told her the history of the Mexican government offering land to entice Mexicans back to their patria post-Revolution and how so many saw this as an opportunity for their families, she looked at me wide-eyed. “So they were not crazy. And that story about land was true.”  Her ancestors were not crazy, illogical people. They had the family in mind as they made the momentous decision to return to their homeland. They had future generations in mind. They had her in mind even though it was decades before she was born.

Teaching the history of Mexican-origin people in the United States has given me the opportunity to witness many such moments. In this article, I write about how learning about the vicious, violent policies against speaking Spanish in the schools took Spanish away from generations of people who were so traumatized that they didn’t teach Spanish to their children. These children grew up often resenting their parents for having taken away the gift of being bilingual. It was a decision that made sense to our ancestors, however, who were thinking about us, the future generations. They did not want us to experience the violence they had confronted. 

In It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, Mark Wolynn centers recent research that shows that a family trauma, even if it is forgotten or silenced, can live on generation after generation. These trauma manifests themselves through behaviors, depression, obsession, anxieties, and addictions. In an interview, Wolynn talks about the “ancestral alarm clock” that goes off when we hit a milestone related to the traumatic event we may not even know occurred. For decades, Indigenous scholars have written about intergenerational trauma. Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and Dr. Eduardo Duran are pioneers in these discussions. You can view a summary by Brave Heart here. 

As I watched Coco, I wasn’t just thinking about Miguel, however. I was thinking about his great-great-grandmother who had been abandoned and about her daughter, Coco, and his abuelita and his parents. I thought about the dead who also needed healing. Hector, who helped Miguel navigate the land of the dead, mourned that his photo had never been placed on an ofrenda and that soon, no one would remember he ever lived. He would experience the final death, the end of memory. I believe that the dead call on us to remember them.

​It is not easy to heal the traumas. There are stories that we cannot speak. In my own family, I was not allowed to ask my tia abuela about my family's repatriation back to Mexico in the 1930s even as I conducted research on the million Mexican origin people who returned under duress, including hundreds of thousands of US-born children like my cousins. It would be too painful to remember, my mother told me. So I scoured newspaper articles, government reports, and the interviews of other repatriates to understand my own family's silenced history. My younger aunt, Maria Jesus, had died in Mexico City and it was a source of great grief that she had died so far from home.  One year on a visit to el DF, I went to the Cathedral and paid for a mass to be said in her name. I wanted her to know that she was still remembered. 

Our dead want to be remembered. They need to be acknowledged and loved. Whether we know their particular traumas or not, we can learn the broader histories in which they lived and acknowledge them that way. We can pray with them and for them. We can reach out to them through meditation and reflection. We can honor them by thanking them for helping bring us to the world. We can share their stories, both the happy and the sad, and remember them that way.  

I cried when Coco​ ended because knowing that learning the true history healed the living and the dead.  We, too, can heal ourselves and our ancestors and our descendants. And we don't have to wait until El Dia de los Muertos. Our dead, our ancestors, are with us always, in our DNA, in our favorite foods, in our anxieties and our character strengths. Remember them and may we all heal.
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The day I discovered my mother was American

8/23/2018

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I remember the day I discovered that my mother was American. I was in Mexico City with a friend doing research. She invited me to her suegra's house and after a couple of bus rides, we found ourselves at a lovely home, welcomed by her in-laws. Her mother-in-law had prepared a wonderful meal based on the traditional cuisine of Veracruz, her home state. She was very proud of her roots and her ability to offer me the delicious dishes of her homeland. As we sat around the table, she asked me: "¿Cuál era la comida tradicional que su mamá cocinaba?" What was the traditional dish that my mother cooked? I thought for a while: what was my mother's traditional food? I wanted to say something very Mexican because I thought of my parents as very Mexican. 

"Meatloaf," I answered abruptly. I loved my mother's meatloaf.

The suegra wasn't sure what I was talking about and my friend laughed. (How would you say meatloaf in Spanish, anyway?)

That was the moment I realized my mother was American.​
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 My mother in front of the presidio apartments  where she lived in El Segundo Barrio, 1920s.
My mama crossed the border from Chihuahua to Texas as a nine-year-old, eventually entering El Paso's first "Mexican school," Aoy Elementary. When the school district was first created in 1883, students who did not speak English were not allowed to attend. In 1887, a newcomer arrived, Olivas Aoy, and with the support of Mexican parents who wanted an education for their children, he founded the Mexican Preparatory School. Later, after his death, it was renamed in his honor. Aoy, a Spaniard, is an enigma and not much is known about him before he arrived to the United States.  In a newspaper interview, Aoy told the reporter that until a child learned English, he remained "just a Mexican." By the time my mama entered Aoy in the early 1920s, the idea of Americanizing Mexican and Mexican American children was entrenched in the curriculum and in practice.

Policies against speaking Spanish in the "Mexican schools" were widespread across the Southwest. Teachers and administrators humiliated,  mocked, and corporally punished students for speaking Spanish on school grounds. Yet, in the so-called "American schools," white children were taught Spanish since they would be the future employers of Mexicans. In the 1960s, with this policy still in place, teachers castigated my older cousins who attended one of the historic "Mexican schools" for speaking Spanish. As I prepared to enter first grade, my parents forbade me from speaking Spanish-- they didn't want me to be punished. They continued to speak only Spanish to me while I responded in English. What they didn't know was that my elementary school was one of the "American schools" and I attended Spanish class my entire time there.

After being fluently bilingual as a small child, this new rule to speak only English while my parents spoke only Spanish confused me. It made them seem even more "Mexican" to me. My mother laughed when I tried to speak Spanish so eventually I stopped. I remember my mother's older sister laughing at my mother's Spanish. "Ay, you don't even know how to speak Spanish," she would say. My mother's face took on a pained look. I didn't understand why my aunt would say that-- Spanish was my mama's language. My aunt, who was fifteen when they crossed the border, had attended school in Mexico. My mother had been educated here. My aunt saw my mother as pocha as my mother saw me. Pocho, long used as a pejorative term indicated a Mexican American who was not fluent in Spanish.

As a teenager in the twenties, my mother wanted to be like the other American teenagers. She asked her father if she could cut her hair in a bob. He said no. She did it anyway. She worked washing dishes for neighbors in order to buy enough red bandanas to make a dress. When her father saw it, he tore it up. A popular 1920s song from San Antonio, "Las Pelonas" ("The Short Haired Women" or flappers) captures my mother's story:


Los paños colorados
Los tengo aborrecidos,
Y ahora las pelonas
Los usan de vestidos.

Red bandanas
I detest,
And now the flappers
Use them for their dress.



Sometimes, even in her sixties and seventies, she would dance the Charleston in our living room, recalling her days as a pelona.
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My flapper mother in the late 1920s
 I heard these stories my entire life but that day in Mexico City put them in another perspective. Growing up as the English-speaking daughter in a Spanish-speaking home, I uncomfortably felt very "American" and my mother seemed very "Mexican."  Now, I could see that she was indeed American, the product of Americanization programs and American popular culture.  I felt close to her in that moment, pocha to pocha.
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A Century behind the Fence: Do we care? YES!

6/28/2018

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Title: Detained at the Refugee Camp. Creator: Walter H. Horne, 1883 - 1921 Date: ca. 1910 - 1918  Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library. 
The photographs startled me as I sat in the serene setting of the University of Arizona Library Special Collections that day, 23 years ago. The refugees stared at me from the black and white photographs. Women and men and children stood still for the photographer. Some serious. Some with confusion in their eyes. The children sometimes looking blank and sometimes smiling. There were photos of their preparing food on camp fires. Photos of families and children standing in front of tents or accompanied by soldiers. The captions told me that the location was Fort Bliss in 1914.

Following Pancho Villa's victory against federal forces  in the Battle of Ojinaga, a battle with over 1,000 casualties,  in the winter of 1913, thousands of federal troops and civilians crossed the Rio Grande at Presidio. Throwing themselves at the mercy of the US government, this "steady stream of suffering humanity," as one government official put it, walked four days to Marfa, accompanied by US troops. There they were transported to El Paso via train. Fifty babies were born along the way. 

According to historian Nicolas Villanueva's The Lynching of Mexicans (University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 5,000 refugees were "corralled behind barbed wire as 'guests' of the United States." Why place refugees behind a barbed wire fence? Villanueva writes that Americans feared that the thousands of refugees would enter the nation and "swell the impoverished neighborhoods in El Paso."  He writes that the American press characterized the internment camp as so wonderful that hundreds of El Paso's Mexicans tried to break into camp. There is no evidence of this other than the English language media's propaganda. Historian Ligia Arguilez has uncovered another history-- one of fear, trauma, escape attempts. 
This is the history that came rushing back  when I heard the news that on Tuesday Fort Bliss had been chosen by the Department of Homeland Security to house 12,000 asylum seekers, families.  Fort Bliss will house families while Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo has been chosen to house children. This is not the first time in recent history that children have been detained on military bases. In 2016, Fort Bliss housed hundreds of unaccompanied minors. Under the Obama administration, numerous military bases were used to house children crossing the border.

A century after the "steady stream of suffering humanity" was corralled behind barbed wire at Fort Bliss, we are witnessing the upcoming internment of possibly 12,000 refugees on the same military base.
​
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"How close can I get to you and yet do I really want to get that close?"
​Art work by Lucia Martinez (2004)
On Saturday, July 30, hundreds of thousands of people will march in "Families Belong Together" rallies. In DC, 300,000 are expected to participate. The rallies have been organized in every state of the Union as well as at international locations. It is a strong response to the question posed by Melania Trump in her recent visit to a children's detention center in Texas on June 21. "I don't care. Do u?" Yes, hundreds of thousands of us care enough to rally in public for families and children. As I sat in the offices of the Border Network for Human Rights last night in a room full of people making posters for the upcoming rally, I knew the answer.
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​Here on the border, in El Paso where Fort Bliss engulfs us more and more with each passing decade, we know we have to be vigilant beyond the rally. Growing up less than two miles from Fort Bliss, I thought of it as the place my daddy went to work every day to inspect the clothing and items left behind by soldiers who had left. Today, I know it is the largest Army base with 1.2 million acres that spread from West Texas to Southern New Mexico. It is located in the Chihuahuan Desert. In the summers, it is unbearably hot. 12,000 refugees can easily disappear into this behemoth.

Rallies are important-- we've seen the impact that they have. Beyond the rally is just as important. People have asked me how to help, especially if they are far from the border. Keep up with the news. Donate if you can. Spread the word.

For more information, check out these orgs.

Families Belong Together

https://www.familiesbelongtogether.org/

Border Network for Human Rights (El Paso)
http://bnhr.org/
​
Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services
https://www.raicestexas.org/

Movimiento Cosecha
http://www.lahuelga.com/

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This Saturday I will march with my 12 year old grandson and hundreds of thousands of others to tell the federal government that Families Belong Together  and not behind barbed wire.
​

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My father used to tell me about sneaking into this theater to watch movies as a kid in the 1910s. It showed Spanish language films. In the 1940s, it was transformed into a "whites only" theater but that didn't last long. By the 1950s, it was headquarters to the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers Union, a radical labor organization. Before it closed, it housed the Mine and Mill Bar.
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This message is painted on the east side of the old Mission movie theater.
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The bell tower of Guardian Angel Catholic Church, built in the 1910s to serve the growing Mexican immigrant community in what was then the "east side" of El Paso.
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This pinata shop caught my attention as I was driving west on Alameda Street on my way to work.
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Hawaiian dancer, Alameda Street.
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Unicorn pinata on Alameda Street.
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Proud graduate pinata.
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Love message on the east side exterior wall of the old Mission Theater.

Segundo Barrio
Father Rahm Street
​July 2022

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Looking into Padre Pinto Plaza, Sagrado Corazon Catholic Church.
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Treasures on the window sill.
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La bici
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Tres vatos.
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Esperando el bus.
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Two generations.

 La Virgensita en la frontera
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Woman reflected on la Virgencita, Segundo Barrio, 2021.
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La Virgen de Guadalupe, 12 de diciembre 2017, Centro de Trabajadores Agricolas, El Paso
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Protecting Barrio Duranguito 2019

 Cd Juarez downtown
​December 2017
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Raramuri father and son musicians, downtown Juarez, 2017.
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The smell of copal, downtown Juarez, December 2017.
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Ciudad Juarez limpia, downtown, December 2017.
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Selling at the mercado, downtown Juarez, December 2017
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Telcel payaso, downtown Juarez, December 2017


 La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, 2017

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Dos perros, La Mariscal, December 2017
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Mujer con cabello verde, La Mariscal, Juarez, December 2017.
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Beautiful death, La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, December 2017.
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Tin Tan, La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, December 2017.
 
Montana Vista 2019
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Red high heels in the desert 2019
 El Centro July 2022
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A tree reaches out to Oscar Zeta Acosta (mural by Lxs Dos), El Paso, Texas July 2022
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