YOLANDA CHAVEZ LEYVA
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Share the journey

12/25/2017

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Last week, I participated in a posada navideña, the re-enactment of Joseph and Mary seeking shelter before the birth of Jesus. The ceremony's history goes back at least 400 years in México and is celebrated in communities throughout Latinoamérica and the United States. It is a powerful recreation of a family seeking refuge. It is especially timely in these days of the global movement of refugees.

​I write this in the spirit of the Posada and inspired by Associate Pastor of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in El Paso, Fr. Rafael Garcia, SJ, who asked us last week to meditate on migrants seeking refuge as we walked through Barrio Duranguito. 

The United Nations reports that there are 28,300 people forcibly removed from their homes daily, representing 65.5 million globally. There are over 23 million refugees, half of them women and children. At a time when the numbers are growing globally, there is an increasingly hostile environment towards refugees and migrants. In the midst of this, Pope Francis has called on us to "share the journey."  He asks us to see the people rather than just the numbers and to listen to the stories. 

A hundred years ago, as today, refugees cross our border seeking safety, seeking asylum. I invite you to read this story from 1919, written by reporter Harry Morgan who wrote for the El Paso Times about the refugees crossing the border during the Mexican Revolution and consider how much has changed and how much has, sadly, remained the same:


Genuine pathos marked the flight of the Mexicans. Half clad women, their hair loose, fear written on their faces, ambled across the bridge, holding scantily dressed, and crying babies to their breasts. Shawls and blankets trailed in the dirt. To them the night of terror was just another page in Mexico's lengthy chronicle of revolution. To flee from their homes, leaving behind everything they possessed of worldly goods which, meager as it might be, was their all, was only a repetition of former experiences. To leave their humble homes in the wake of war and at the mercy of their fellow countrymen was not a novel thing, but its repetition made it no less terrible. Little children old enough to walk but incapable of understanding tagged along at their mothers' skirts, their eyes tearful, yet full of innocent wonderment. They had been born in the throes of revolution, and to them life had been little more than a recurring series of bloodshed. ​​
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Mexican refugees crossing the border, 1914, Otis Aultman, courtesy of El Paso Public Library.
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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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Unicorn pinata on Alameda Street.
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Love message on the east side exterior wall of the old Mission Theater.

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Tin Tan, La Mariscal, Ciudad Juarez, December 2017.
 
Montana Vista 2019
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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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