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Out of the
Shadows
By Edwidge Danticat A few years ago, I
flew to Port-au-Prince from New York while my cousin
Laris was flown in the cargo section of a jet from
Miami. Once I’d slept past the initial fright of
takeoff, I strapped on the free headphones and chose a
song by the rock group Midnight Oil from the in-flight
CD selection:
How can we dance
while the world keeps turning?
How can we sleep while our beds are burning? |
At the same time on
one of the flight’s pretaped news shows appeared a clip
from an old speech by Pat Buchanan, calling for a
timeout on immigration. If America is to survive as a
nation, he declared, we need to bring down the curtain
on hyphenated Americanism.
Across the aisle from
me, a man in a wrinkled brown suit shuffled a few papers
on the tray table in front of him. He had been escorted
by immigration officers past the security checkpoint,
right through the gate, and into his seat on the
airplane. He was a deportee. While looking over at him,
I thought of my cousin Laris, who, in his own way, had
also been cast off. At thirty, Laris had died of a
mysterious illness that he’d been too poor and too
frightened to seek medical care for because he’d come to
Miami by boat and was undocumented.
I’ve been thinking
about Laris a lot lately as I have watched the massive
protests in support of the nearly twelve million
undocumented men, women, and children currently in the
United States.
Already forced to
live, and sometimes die, in the shadows, they could have
been driven further underground by the threat of
draconian measures that would criminalize not only them
but those who’d attempt to help them—the doctor who
tends to the sick, the teacher who educates a child, the
priest who shelters the dispossessed.
Much has been made of
the types of flags waved and the languages in which
placards were written and slogans spoken at these
demonstrations. But much more notable is the courage of
such a large number of undocumented workers to leave,
for a day or two, jobs at which they have no
protections, to make their presence known to the rest of
the country and indeed to the entire world.
In post-9/11 America,
where protests are easily pegged as anti-American, more
so if the participants are not U.S. born, it is truly
remarkable that those whose place in our society is most
precarious would gather in nearly every major city of
the United States for what in some cases have been the
biggest demonstrations recorded to date. These protests
are bringing at least some measure of dialogue between
segments of the population that would wish to deny the
existence of the others. And for once the exchange is
not only between pundits and politicians but involves
the concerned parties themselves, those whose children
would be turned away from schools, who would be denied a
doctor when sick.
True to the spirit of
this nation as a land of immigrants, a community that is
used to finding safety in invisibility has emerged to
speak in its own voice. For at the center of this debate
is the redefinition of America itself—and as in decades
past, with immigration at the forefront of that process.
There is perhaps more
discomfort now in the fact that a large percentage of
the twelve million undocumented are poor and brown and
from the developing world. For years, people like Pat
Buchanan have bemoaned the fact that there was no
melting taking place in the pot. They consider
un-American what they see as the immigrant’s backward
glance at their sometimes poverty stricken and
politically heated homelands.
Monies sent back are
equated with taxes not being paid. Newborn babies are
health care thieves. And since good fences make good
neighbors, especially when only one neighbor can afford
to build or would seemingly benefit from the fence,
images of barbed-wire topped walls with armed Minutemen
on the other side dance around in wistfully nativist
heads.
At the heart of these
protests is also the obligation of a country that needs,
yet despises, those who comprise a large percentage of
its fundamental workforce. Should we desire in our midst
a group of people only when they’re willing to do for
less pay the work that our own citizens find too
grueling, too demeaning, or too hazardous? The moral
question aside, what does it say about our own societal
structure that we cannot within our own borders make
these jobs more appealing and more humane for our own
citizens?
The bottom line is
we’d like our immigrants to be disposable, to work when
we need them, then disappear when we don’t. We don’t
want them to have children because we worry that their
children will crowd our schools and we’d rather have
them taking care of our own. We don’t want them to get
sick because we worry that they’ll fill up hospital beds
alongside the other forty-five million uninsured
Americans, at our expense.
We don’t want them to
get old, at least not within our borders, because we
don’t want them to have to touch the diminishing Social
Security funds that many of them have been steadily
contributing to.
But as our children
have grown, so have theirs, and they see this country as
their own. It was these children who were, for the most
part, the ones walking out of schools with their
friends, marching down the streets with the flags of
their parents’ homelands, honoring the duality of their
existence. These children, along with their parents, are
now saying that they are tired of living in the shadows.
The immigrants who
rallied are tired of losing loved ones to national
tragedies such as 9/11 without receiving the comfort and
compensation enjoyed by other families. Citizenship is
the highest honor this country can bestow, and they know
it. That’s why so many have fought and died in Iraq only
to be naturalized posthumously.
I am sorry, Mr.
Buchanan, but it is too late now to bring down the
curtain on hyphenated Americanness. Perhaps it has
always been.
For some, this is a
matter of politics and rhetoric, but for many of those
who marched and will perhaps continue to march in the
weeks and months to come it is a matter of life and
death.
My cousin Laris lived
and died in the shadows. However, as these
demonstrations have shown, others don’t necessarily have
to. No matter where we go from here, thousands in cities
throughout the United States have finally risen from
their burning beds to demand not only recognition, but a
fair and reasonable solution.
Edwidge Danticat
was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and is the author,
most recently, of “The Dew Breaker.”
Source:
http://progressive.org/mag_danticat0606
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posted 29 May 2006 |
