Posts
8/19/22
All I can say, all I have found to say, is that we should make sure that somebody sees these children, and that these people who travel toward the North Star need to be seen. That we can never let them become the vanished, the disappeared. That we honor them by witnessing them. And by witnessing at not only the margins of national territory but the margins of humanity. And that we see, not just them, but ourselves, by standing on those margins.
8/8/22
Journey for Justice, December 2022
Witness at the Border will make a Journey for Justice, beginning at the mouth of the Río Grande on the Gulf of Mexico, reaching the Pacific where a cruel wall cuts into the sea. Join our border pilgrimage in Brownsville, Texas on December 2, or anywhere along the way on this 2-week journey, ending at San Ysidro, California on December 17.
8/3/22
Today is the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called "the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history." A shooter motivated by what he called a "Hispanic invasion" and the racist concept of "replacement" killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
Martín Espada wrote a poem dedicated to his dear friend Camilo Perez Bustillo and El Paso: "The Faces We Envision in the Scrapbook of the Dead." It's about the El Paso Massacre and more--about an advocate for migrants in El Paso, his Mexican children, that haunted feeling that "it could have been us."
7/21/22
People will do what they have to in order to survive, in order to see their children and families have a good life. A life that gives them a chance to have those moments of joy that are possible when they have enough to eat, a place to shelter. And there are people that find that they need to migrate to make that happen. As people have done for as long as there have been people, starting long ago in a place in southern Africa. Where we all came from, to move, to find better sources of food, better climates, less war. And those moments of joy that humans are apportioned in their short sojourns.
7/8/22
We ought to be grateful to the leadership of the Lone Star state. They cut right through the muddle and the sanctimony of our country’s position on the arrival of those driven from their homelands to our border. They don’t pretend, as so many do, that deep down we are working to rebuild a system that acknowledges our common humanity, that our failure to establish humanitarian protocols is just because there is a crisis, among other crises that need our attention.
6/29/22
NEW: Episode 15 of WITNESS RADIO, "Alvaro Enciso's Desert Monument to the Dead." Listen, rate & review at https://apple.co/39WoqZe.
"They never [understand] that when you're poor and this is your only option, you are desperate. You do it anyway....You run out of options in your life."
6/28/22
We face another day in a country, in a world, that does not want to admit a very simple truth, that people have the right to migrate in order to live. …Look at the stacks of bodies left to suffocate in a tractor trailer near San Antonio. …Yes, another day for us to mourn and wonder how it is that we live, and that they no longer do.
