As her Puerto Rican immigrant mother had done with her as a child growing up in Chicago, Jennifer Bonesz sent both of her daughters to Catholic schools. Athena, 14, attended from preschool through eighth grade, and Damary, 8, from preschool through third grade.
"Panico." That's how Joel Navarette, the coordinator of the youth group at St. Agnes Church in Phoenix, describes the reaction to SB 1070, an immigration crackdown that Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law in April.
Despite opposition from the U.S. bishops, polls have shown broad local and national support of the law and desire for similar legislation in other states.
Lady Liberty has seen many tempest tossed generations set foot upon these shores. With each new wave of immigrants, the American Catholic Church has become a harbor that gets wider and deeper by the year.
Last April I was working on a video documentary on the U.S.-Mexican border. It was Holy Week. Each day I talked with undocumented immigrants, church workers, coyote smugglers, and border patrol agents, trying to capture something of the complex and painful drama of illegal immigration.
Sounding Boards are one person's take on a many-sided subject and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of U.S. Catholic, its editors, or the Claretians.
She brought her children here from her country because she feared gangs would kill them.
“I left because of the delinquency of El Salvador. The situation there is very delicate. A mother has instincts toward her children, and, well, I saw a very dangerous future for them,” Maria Ayala says.
The Salvadoran civil war—which killed some 70,000 from 1980 to 1992, including San Salvador Archbishop Oscar Romero—spawned gang violence by groups like Mara Salvatrucha.
It may surprise red-white-and-blue Americans fixated on preventing the Hispanic reconquista of the Anglo Norte, but many of the folks they howl most about agree with them. They don’t want to come to America any more than these Americans want to let them in.
During Mass each Wednesday at Casa Juan Diego in Houston, immigrants speak of not eating for days, having nothing to drink for a week, seeing people die of thirst or because they drank irrigation water with chemicals in it.
In the colonial period the destitute and desperate escaping the poverty of European backwaters made their way to America as indentured servants, signing away the only commodity they had to offer: themselves. Frequently used up to the end of human endurance by their "employers," these earliest members of America's working class experienced a dehumanization that was only exceeded by the treatment of Africans brought over as slaves.
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