About the day I looked into the eyes of a refugee child and understood: when trauma cuts deep, childhood is but a mirage
Matamoros, Mexico: Epiphany Sunday, 2020
The Adoration of the Magi, Cristóbal de Villalpando, Mexican Baroque painter, 1683, public domain
In the Christian calendar, January 6th marks the start of the Epiphany celebration, when the Magi, aka Three Wise Men, rocked up into Bethlehem, having been guided there by a star. They came to meet the baby Jesus. They brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the story goes, gifts fit for a king.
On the Sunday before Epiphany in homes all over Latin America, families gather to exchange gifts and share a Sunday feast topped off with King’s Cake, Roscón de Reyes. Each Roscón has three figurines of babies baked in, representing Jesus, the Wise Men, and the Holy Trinity. Whoever bites into one is anointed king or queen for the day and is gifted a gold crown and a chocolate wrapped in gold foil, like a coin.
On this day in Brownsville, Texas, in the year 2020 CE, Dr. Melba Salazar-Lucio pulled into the bus station parking lot with enough Roscón de Reyes to feed a small town — for that is exactly what she intended to do. One of five Team Brownsville leaders, the group of self-organized humanitarians Jim and I worked with the night before, she was heading across the border with a large company of volunteers to bring to a close a project that had been in the works for weeks.
The project started in December with a literacy lesson. Melba, who heads the Team Brownsville Escuelita de la Banqueta (Sidewalk School), had all her teacher-volunteers coach the children of the Matamoros migrant tent city in writing letters to Santo Clós or Los Reyes Magos, following their own family traditions. They asked the kids to express their thanks as well as their dreams of what they might like for Christmas.
Despite all that these children had been through — all the horrors they may have witnessed back home, or at the hands of criminal coyotes, or menacing cartel members, and now from an unwelcoming US president and nation — they gave thanks to God and the camp volunteers in their letters. And their present requests were not for toys or video games, but for basics: warm socks and something soft to cuddle at night.
Melba collected all those lovely notes of thanks and dreams and dispersed them to teachers all over the United States. They, in turn, put together drives to fulfill the wishes of each kid, throwing in a few extra goodies besides.
She was flooded with gift-packs, from New Jersey and Oregon and everywhere in between. She placed their contents, along with a note from each giver, into brand-new child-sized backpacks, and tagged each one with the name of its recipient. She even stuffed a few extra backpacks for the kids of asylum seekers that had arrived at the border and been kicked back to Matamoros after the letter-writing campaign ended.
Team Brownsville & La Escuelita de la Banqueta
It was Jim and my second full day in Brownsville. When we rolled up that morning, we greeted our friends from the previous day — Lindsay the North Carolina librarian and dairy farmer’s wife and the delegation from Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. Then met the group from Austin. They’d been coming south one Sunday every month to help out with Melba’s open-air school since it began in fall 2018. We stacked jumbo boxes of Three Kings Cakes into twice as many wagons as held last night’s dinner, along with legions of tiny packs, lined up in orderly squads of pink and blue, plaid and tie-dye.
The weather was perfect. So was the joyous energy among the volunteers as we made our way back over the bridge. The name tags fluttered in a gentle wind.
School before cake! Melba instructed from behind a small, blue megaphone. Wearing a bright-yellow high-visibility vest, she was easily spotted in the crowd.
Out of the supply tent — aka La Tienda #1 — stocked and managed by Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías and Abuelas, came a stack of folded square plastic tarps. These were unfurled and laid on the asphalt plaza where we’d fed the asylum seekers the night before. Where one tarp ended, another began. They covered the plaza drive from La Tienda to within a few feet of the already congested US-bound traffic lane.
Each tarp constituted a “classroom” big enough for a teacher and 6-8 kids. Teachers each claimed a tarp and pulled out their lesson materials.
In the “classroom” closest to La Tienda, two Latinx 30-something men tag-teamed reading The Cat in the Hat, first in Spanish then in English. One held the book high in his left hand so the children, sitting in a semi-circle around him, could see the pictures. The other sat adjacent, his eyes trained on the book as he read. Parents also wanting to enjoy the read-aloud stood at the edge of the “classroom,” for no footwear were allowed on the tarps.
Dr Melba Salazar-Lucio’s Sunday Sidewalk School
(photos: Sarah Towle 2020)
In another “classroom,” a volunteer from Austin practiced basic numeracy skills with children, using dice and some pre-printed worksheets. A teacher from Brooklyn taught an English lesson through song. And all the way at the end, closest to the traffic, Lindsay introduced her students to the names and sounds and habits of farm animals, using the cardboard goats, cows, sheep, etc., she’d been cutting out when we met her at the bus station the day before.
I claimed a tarp and read aloud a beautiful bilingual book by Irma Uribe Santibáñez, a Mexican author. She’d written it after visiting the Mexico City stadium-turned-shelter for the 7000-strong migrant caravan of mostly Honduran refugees that left crime-ridden San Pedro Sula on October 13, 2018, en route to El Norte. The same caravan Trump famously labelled “an invasion” and used to gin up more fear and loathing in his base, urging them to get out and vote Republican in the 2018 mid-term elections.
Trump alleged that "many gang members and some very bad people” were mixed into the caravan, adding to the rapists-and-murderers-are-coming-for-your-daughters-and-jobs narrative of the 2016 presidential campaign. What Irma found were bruised, battered, and exhausted, yet hopeful, people on the run from the region’s long-term endemic problems: gang violence, drug wars, police corruption, and virtually non-existent economic opportunity.
Because the Northern Triangle is notorious for having one of the highest murder rates in the world, where migrants and the poor are often kidnapped for ransom or people-trafficked by gangs who force them to work as runners for the drug cartels, this group of Hondurans organized to make the 2,700-mile trek to the US together. Before COVID-19, there was safety in numbers.
Trump claimed it was the idea of US Democrats.
The Blank, Glassy Stare of Trauma
A face of trauma in a Guatemalan refugee (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)
Michael Benavides, Team Brownsville co-founder (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)
In October 2018, Trump deployed 5,800 troops to greet the migrant caravan at the US southern border. He had Customs and Border Patrol lace more concertina wire into the border fence from Tijuana to Mexicali.
Meanwhile, sympathetic Mexicans, like Irma, brought mattresses, blankets, food, and water to the stadium shelter, offering the footsore parade of men, women, and children a respite mid-way through their journey. They talked with the migrants. They listened to the stories. They asked them why, knowing what might befall them in Trump’s America, they had given up everything to go to El Norte. The answer was simple and always the same:
They were running for their lives.
The book that resulted from Irma’s experience with the caravan migrants, Bolay, introduces a mythical jaguar who welcomes and aids those seeking a better future by leaving paw prints that mark their way to safety. It’s a freedom-trail story for today’s immigration crisis.
The people we met that Epiphany Sunday were still on their traumatic journey. The children huddled on my tarp ranged in age from about 3 to 12. One little boy shivered with fever. I gave him the sweatshirt I’d removed with the heat that accompanied the rising sun.
A joyful curly-haired 5-year-old jumped up and wrapped her arms around my neck on learning that we shared the same name. I would see Sarita from El Salvador everyday I spent in Matamoros.
My oldest pupil, an unkempt Guatemalan girl, appeared to understand neither Spanish nor English. She stared not at the pictures, but at my mouth as I read aloud in alternating languages. Her long, dark, unbrushed locks surrounded delicate features. But it was her peculiar gaze that pierced my heart. In her light-brown eyes was unfathomable sadness.
“It’s the look of the traumatized,” Team Brownsville co-founder, Mike Benavides, schooled me.
Mike knows. A veteran of Desert Storm, part of a bomb squad, he returned home to Brownsville from the Gulf with greatly reduced hearing and PTSD.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” he says. He had a loving family as well as a medical and psycho-social safety net provided by the US administration of Veterans Affairs. It took a long time, but through counseling and medication he finally overcame the worst of his anxieties and was able to rejoin society again. He’s now a Special Ed teacher in the Brownsville public school system, and loves his work. In fact, all the Team Brownsville co-founders — Mike, Sergio, Melba, her husband Juan David, and Andrea Morris Rudnik — are educators and colleagues.
When he looks in the faces of the asylum seekers stranded in Matamoros, Mike sees deep trauma caused by the wounds of dark experiences. “It’s a blank and fearful expression — the same thing I used to see when I looked in the mirror.”
It’s something he says these people will never overcome without the appropriate help. It’s something that is only exacerbated by the heartlessness of Trump & Co’s Remain in Mexico policy, which leaves them forgotten and in limbo.
A World on the Move
Dr. Melba Salazar-Lucio’s tent city lending library. The books are always returned. (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)
When our hour of lessons and read-alouds came to a close, the Roscón de Reyes were finally passed out. My quiet little friend gripped her cake with both hands. She savored it, eating slowly, without a word, staring into the middle distance. In fact, except for the chatter of volunteers, the entire camp of 2500 or so people fell silent.
I got up from my classroom tarp. After an hour sitting on the hard pavement, my hips and back were screaming at me. Behind her blue megaphone once again, Melba herded the Sunday Sidewalk School students away from the plaza so we teachers could clean up our “classrooms.” We picked up our tarps, shook off the crumbs, folded them up, and returned them to La Tienda.
I noticed the regular teachers returning their books to a battered metal mobile book cart: Melba’s Library, they told me. She keeps stacks of donated children’s books available at all times for the asylum seekers to borrow. They always get returned.
I added Bolay to the rows and neatened them. That night, I would see that someone had taken care to cover the cart with a tarp to shield the books from the elements.
I joined the remarkably well-behaved scrum of humanity and watched as Melba began reading out names and handing out backpacks, one by one. The children were so patient. But there were so many of them!
The world is currently in the midst of the largest movement of people since World War II. An estimated 258 million people, or one in every 30, are now living outside their country of birth. This includes expatriates, or economic migrants, like me. But an unprecedented 70.8 million of us, from Honduras to Bangladesh, have been forcibly uprooted by conflict, persecution, climate-related disasters, and crushing poverty.
Of the 70+ million displaced people worldwide, roughly 50% are children. This is in stark evidence in Matamoros.
An Epiphany of Epiphanies
The Matamoros migrant tent city, January 2020, before it was swept back up off the plaza to the Rio Bravo levee (photo: Sarah Towle, 2020)
The backpacks once distributed, we were famished. We reconnected with the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue group to pull the now empty wagons back over the bridge. Once wiped clean, folded, and put back in the Team Brownsville storage shed, Jim and I hopped into our rented red Kia Sorento and made a bee-line for El Ultimo Taco, where the $5 plates of four tacos of your choice made it one of our go-to meals along the interstate. Then we rejoined our adopted group of volunteers at the Good Neighborhood Settlement House to spend the afternoon preparing that night’s meal.
Back at the bus station, on our way to transport and serve with the dinner shift, I spied Sergio, our Team Brownsville leader rom the previous evening. He was sitting with a young man in a brand-new, still-stiff baseball cap. An orange mesh string bag slumped on the floor at his feet, the mark of one just released from detention. Headphones passed over the cap to cover his ears. Music blared from them so loud, I could hear it from where I stood several feet away. I tried to catch the young man’s attention, but he avoided my gaze.
He’d just been released from a child detention center run by Southwest Key, Sergio informed me. It was his 18th birthday today, so they could no longer hold him. Sergio was helping to get him on his way.
“Where will he go?” I asked.
Where he should have gone all along: to the sponsor or loved one that had been waiting for him since his arrival in the US over two years before.
“But wait,” I said, doing a quick mental calculation, “Family separation started in April 2018. It was over by June. That’s less than two years ago.”
“Oh, the government was taking children long before that,” Sergio responded.
That comment sent me down a rabbit hole of research, from the plight of children caught in Trump & Co’s web, to the money that it costs to house and feed them with taxpayer dollars, to the profiteers who, rather than welcoming the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, instead feed off their misery.
My time now run out, that will be the focus of the next installment of my tale. For now, suffice it to say, this was for me an Epiphany of epiphanies.
Sergio Cordova and Michael Benavides, Team Brownsville Co-Founders
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”