home is where the heart breaks … but say nothing

20 Wednesday Nov 2024

Posted by in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Although I left Northern Ireland over three decades ago, it is still home. And, it is still the place and time from which it is impossible to emerge unscathed. None of us got away scot-free.

With an apprehension I can’t quite explain, I watched Say Nothing, the series based on the best-selling book by New Yorker investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Predictably, within the first few moments of the first episode, familiar feelings of revulsion and sadness rose in my throat. It is a harrowing scene that recreates the abduction of Jean McConville from her home in Divis Flats, Belfast, in 1972. A widow and mother of ten, she was one of the Disappeared, people abducted, murdered, and secretly buried during the Troubles. The Troubles. A reductive and casual caption for an era that left in its ongoing wake, so many lost, wounded, and emotionally scarred lives.

It wasn’t until I was far from home and in the middle of my adult life that I realized I was probably a Child of The Troubles even though I was always, by nothing other than luck, in the right place at the right time.  It was from a safe distance that I learned to recognize the dull thunder-clap of a bomb, the tremble of our kitchen window in its wake, and the stench of days-old smoke from a pile of rubble that used to be a hotel, a supermarket, a restaurant. In one way, the Troubles were incidental in my daily life, but in another, those atrocities stayed with me—the dates and places, the names of victims: The Miami Showband, Bloody Sunday, La Mon Restaurant, Crossmaglen, The Miami Showband Massacre, Kingsmills, Internment, the bombing of Omagh and Enniskillen, Greysteel, Frizzell’s fish shop, Loughinisland.

The list goes on, hearts grows numb …

Physically untouched by this string of horrors, but changed nonetheless, the images are indelible in the storehouse of my memory. Father Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief; the blood on Market Street in the heart of Omagh’s little market town; the platform boot on the side of the road near Banbridge; mourners at the Ballymurphy funeral on our little black and white television.

So many names. So many ghosts among us.

The Troubles were part and parcel of everyday life. Normalized, but not normal. It was not normal to wait for a boy to check under his car for explosives before he took me to the cinema. A college student who served as a part-time police officer, he was considered a legitimate target. Why would I get in the car knowing that it might explode? I don’t know. I know I should have been afraid, and I know I would be afraid if it happened today. My God. What if this happened to my daughter?

Over fifty years later, we have a better idea of the impact of repeated, extensive trauma on children who grew up in Northern Ireland during those years; trauma that manifests as PTSD, depression, anxiety, and phobias.  Research completed over a decade ago by the Poverty and Social Exclusion project found that during The Troubles, 10% of adults lost a close relative, 11% of adults lost a close friend, over a third witnessed a bomb explosion, and 3% of adults had witnessed a murder. Three of the 17 people disappeared have never been found. In a country the size of Connecticut, that’s a lot of people and a lot of suffering. Statistics—“human beings with the tears wiped away”—can only hint at the true toll. Compounded by relentless pressures from all sides to say nothing about the terrible things that happened during the Troubles the trauma remains raw and unprocessed—for victims, for perpetrators, and for future generations.

Speaking at a panel discussion on the impact of conflict on both civilians and combatants during Creative Brain Week in Dublin in 2023, Dr. Ciaran Mulholland, consultant psychiatrist with the Northern Health and Social Care Trust, said a 2020 study showed one in 20 young people in Northern Ireland had a stress-related mental health disorder.

If a young person’s family has been impacted by the Troubles, they are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder or engage in self-harming behaviour

Throughout the nine episodes of Say Nothing, there were moments where I felt not much different than the 10 year old girl I used to be, sitting in the back seat of the car not knowing the words for what I was feeling when the soldiers questioned my dad; or, listening to a man on the radio tell us about the massacre of The Miami Showband or the bombing of the La Mon restaurant.

I learned, like everybody else, how to live within the trauma of The Troubles, but I did not learn how to stop the past from invading my present.

For my birthday last year, my boyfriend took me to San Diego for a Peter Frampton concert. A lifetime away from my homeplace, I had last seen Peter Frampton perform at the RDS in Dublin, opening for Chris de Burgh and Janis Ian.

I wore a silver skirt for the occasion, a throwback to the 1980s and long-ago rock and roll summers in Dublin. But these were not the memories that came rushing to me as I waited to buy a T-shirt at the merchandise stall. When a concert-goer complimented my skirt, I found myself immediately transported back to a 1970s afternoon at the Antrim Forum, a new leisure centre that boasted a swimming pool.

I am outside, sitting on the ground, and a policeman is wrapping a silver Mylar blanket around my little shoulders. There had been a bomb scare in the town, and we all had to hurry home. I remember nothing other than being small and shivering, running, still wet from the pool in my blue swimsuit. I remember the shiny, silver Mylar blanket. I remember running home. I don’t remember being particularly afraid. I don’t remember if anyone talked to me about it.

Reflecting on the Say Nothing series along with the likes of Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls, Colin Davidson’s Silent Testimony, Susan McKay’s important commentary, or Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast dedicated to “the ones who stayed, the ones who left, and all the ones who were lost,” I see an opportunity for those of us who know better to do better.

In the parlance of home, we have an opportunity to catch ourselves on, to catch our own humanity in others. With this mind, I’m wondering if we could go back in time, what would we say to the children we used to be? What would we tell them about security checkpoints and bomb damage sales in Belfast and why we didn’t go to the same schools as the children who went to a different church on Sunday? Would we be able to explain why somebody would time a bomb to detonate in a restaurant where we used to go with our parents for chips? I’m wondering what we would have to say for ourselves?

when all that’s left of us is love

15 Friday Nov 2024

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November 15 2013

That morning, I was uneasy, unable to shake a feeling that something was wrong. When multiple phone calls to my home in Phoenix home, I finally called my friend and asked her to drive to my house where she discovered my husband had died.

In another time zone, on another continent, on the other end of the line, I remember feeling detached from news that couldn’t possibly be true.

As the reality set in, I was desperate to get away from rainy, rural South Derry and back home to Phoenix, to our cozy little house with its pink door and its sun-splashed walls. I wanted to check if the anniversary card I’d mailed from Dublin had made it in time. It hadn’t. I found it nestled among junk-mail and bills in the mailbox. He had died the day before our 22nd wedding anniversary, and every year since I’m reminded that “magic and loss” co-exist, forever juxtaposed on the calendar.

I have a lasting memory of a conversation with my then-teenage girl telling me it was beyond her grasp that one day it would be ten years, then twenty, then forty, since her dad last held her hand in the frozen food section of the grocery store to keep her warm. It was beyond my grasp too. Yet here we are. Eleven years later.

Keep on keepin’ on. That’s what he used to say.

Ken was her dad for less than 6,000 days. He was her first word, and it was towards him she took her first brave tiny steps. He taught her how to pay attention to things that otherwise would have gone unnoticed—a rare coin in a handful of loose change, critters in a tide pool, a hummingbird nest concealed within the upper branches of the Hong Kong orchid tree outside her bedroom window, a constellation of stars in the sky above a desert city, despair in the eyes of a stranger holding a “Homeless” sign at the entrance to a San Diego freeway.

No photo description available.

There’s so much she wouldn’t know unless I told her – that when she was a baby, he brushed her hair with a soft toothbrush, that he did household chores with her attached to him in one of those baby-carriers, that he was there to pick her up after school entirely too early every day, but only because he never wanted her to come outside and not immediately spot him waiting in the shade of ‘their’ mesquite tree.

Together, they shared thousands of little routines and rituals that created an unshakeable constancy for the first 15 years of my daughter’s life. Carefully preserved, milestone moments fill scrapbooks and old VHS tapes that neither she nor I have been able to watch. I suppose we haven’t needed to.

A few years ago, she wrote a remembrance of her father that I will forever cherish:

My dad passed in the weeks following Samhain and Día de Muertos—celebrations of when the veil between the living and dead is at its thinnest. As we journey into December, wherein the veil supposedly restores its usual impermeable quality, I’ll continue to look for the slivers of his light that peek through the cracks. Like a hand poking through a dense theater curtain to sneak a cheeky wave to the audience, I find that signs and symbols reminding me of my father seem to slip surreptitiously—mischievously—into view during these months. Sometimes it’s a classic rock song. Sometimes it’s a dream where we chit chat about nothing. Sometimes it’s javelinas mysteriously materializing on Father’s Day to eat my mother’s plants and nestle comfortably in the muck of the flowerbed. Little coincidences that don’t quite feel coincidental, and are always just enough to make me cry with boundless gratitude.

This morning finds me transported back to that last time we spoke as a family. During a transatlantic phone call—my daughter and I on top of the magnificent Titanic in Belfast and Ken in our Phoenix living room—we talked and laughed together, unaware that it would be the last time. An ordinary conversation. He told her to enjoy sightseeing and that he loved her. He died in our home just hours later.

On this anniversary of that surreal morning, I am again reminded of the notion that we die three times – the first when our breath leaves our body; a second time when our body is returned to the ground; and, the third and final death is that moment, sometime in the future, when our names are spoken for the last time. I make a point of saying his name aloud today, to thank him for the myriad ways his life made mine better during all those years we spent together; for his good-hearted good humor and wisdom that is instantly recognizable in our daughter; for his sense of wonder; and, for his rock ‘n’ roll heart. And, to thank you, Ken, for all the love you left for me to give away.

Every time I’ve returned to Belfast since, I walk to Titanic take a moment to look up at the diving female figure, cast in bronze, in front of the building. Inspired by the traditional figureheads mounted on the bows of sailing ships, her name is Titanica, a symbol of hope and good fortune on the journey ahead.

When I see her, I am reminded of these lovely words from the poem, Epitaph, for which I will always be grateful.

Epitaph by Merrit Malloy

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or Sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on your eyes
And not on your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

I’ll see you at home
In the earth.

with all boldness

11 Monday Nov 2024

Posted by in Anahorish, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Art, Awesome Women, Great Advice, Human Rights, Justice, Language matters, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Oprah Winfrey, Peace, Phoenix, Politics, Prop 300, Punishment, Seamus Heaney, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Theater

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On her afternoon talk show some years ago, Oprah Winfrey shared a list of eight powerful women she thought we should all know— as if we might encounter any of them at the grocery store or on the bus.  I remember one of them got my attention—Anna Deavere Smith, perhaps better known to some of you as Nancy McNally from the The West Wing, or as Gloria in Nurse Jackie. She told Oprah that woman should be bolder; that we should argue as much as our male counterparts, and that we shouldn’t try so hard to avoid conflict. We should speak up and out, she said. Boldly.

We should, and we do. At least two of us—the only two women ever nominated to be president by a major party—ran for President of the United States by doing so. They lost. Of course they lost. As post-election analyses continue to dissect the results with historians and pundits presenting their conclusions about why America overwhelmingly chose to elect Trump again, the fact remains that the United States is still bedeviled by misogyny.  If you don’t want to go that far, you’ll maybe look up and see that there’s only one crack in the ultimate glass ceiling.

Gender has always played a role in presidential politics, and the 2024 campaign was no exception. During the last one hundred odd days of it, we heard many of the same old story lines from the same old playbook that, according to Kristina Wilfore, co-founder #shepersisted  “undermine voter behavior toward women,”

Gendered disinformation is the spread of deceptive or inaccurate information and images against women political leaders, journalists, and female public figures. Following story lines that draw on misogyny, and gendered stereotypes, the goal of these attacks is to frame female politicians and government officials as inherently untrustworthy, unintelligent, unlikable, or uncontrollable – too emotional to hold office or participate in democratic politics. 

Vice President Harris chose to downplay her gender, her eyes fixed on a new era where it would be irrelevant in America. She rarely spoke about it or the historic nature of her candidacy as potentially the first Black woman to be elected president. Instead, she talked about the cost of groceries and prescription drugs and issues that should have galvanized the Democratic party—affordable housing,  protecting reproductive rights, bringing an end to gun violence, and strengthening the middle class. But it didn’t work, and too many Democrats chose to stay home on November 5th. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies chose to talk a whole lot about the Vice President’s  gender, to exploit it, with some of his allies branding her a “DEI candidate,”  “a childless cat lady,” “crazy,” “dumb as a rock.” One of them even likened her to a prostitute at a Madison Square Rally in the final stretch of the campaign.

She rose above it all. Was that a mistake? Maybe. Maybe she should have confronted him directly about his misogynistic remarks. Maybe during her one debate with him, she should have challenged him passionately on his overt sexism and his plans to put women back in their place, where he will protect us “whether we like it or not.” Maybe the more apathetic voters in those all-important swing states would have been more motivated to vote if they had seen Harris campaign harder on breaking the glass ceiling. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered.

Sure. Women turned out for Harris. She won a higher share of white women with college degrees, but her opponent won an even wider margin with women who did not go to college. And, in 2024 there were more of them who voted. Add his gains with men in every age group, there was just no way for Harris to make up that ground, no path to victory.  In a nutshell, Trump won the working and middle classes, and Kamala Harris won over college-educated people who are financially better-off. Why? Maybe the prospect of electing a woman to the Oval Office is too much for the United States. 

Maybe not. Maybe misogyny wasn’t the deciding factor in Trump’s victory, but for many women it certainly feels like the “same old tired playbook” helped him win.  It will take some time to retire that particular playbook. The fight will take time, as Kamala Harris reminded us in her concession speech, but “That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”

It will take outrageous acts—lots of them.

An Outrageous Act

The week before Barack Obama won his second term, I met Gloria Steinem in Phoenix.  Following her remarks at a YWCA luncheon, she described a deal she has been making for years at the end of organizing events. To sustain momentum, she promised organizers that if, in the next 24 hours, they would do just one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, that she would do the same. She told us it could be anything. Anything we wanted it to be. She also said that only we would know what it should be—pick it up yourself, run for office, suggest that everyone in the office say out loud how much they make thereby allowing everyone to know who is being discriminated against.

In return, Steinem guaranteed two outcomes. First, she guaranteed that after just one day, the world would be a better place, and secondly that we would have a good time. Never again would we wake up wondering if we would do an outrageous thing; rather, we would wake up and consider which outrageous thing we might do today, tomorrow, and the next day.

I’m not sure I did anything that even felt remotely bold or outrageous until I was in my forties. The principal of a small high school in Phoenix at the time, I was struggling to turn it around while dealing with the devastating impact of a new Arizona law, Proposition 300. It required me to inform 38 of my bright immigrant students that they would no longer be able to take state-funded college courses, because they were in the country without documentation. They had been brought to the US as infants by parents in pursuit of a better life for them, but without Social Security Numbers or visas, the American Dream would remain achingly elusive.

The irony wasn’t lost on me as an immigrant from Northern Ireland, being asked to segregate children at school—school which should be the sacred space in any country – placing those who could prove citizenship in college classes and denying those who could not prove residency and could certainly not afford to pay their own way. Over 90% of my students lived below the American poverty level. The law was unfair. It felt un-American and anti-immigrant. To be specific, it felt anti-Mexican immigrant. My white Northern European skin seemed much more acceptable. Who isn’t Irish on St. Patrick’s Day? Because nobody told me what to do or what not to do about my students, I decided to reach out to the local media and anyone who would listen. By my own standards, this was outrageous. Bold, I even asked for money. The kindness of strangers helped raised over $100,000 to pay for tuition. The world was a little better, the way Gloria Steinem would one day tell me it would be, and the story made it to the New York Times, “A Principal Sees Injustice and Picks a Fight with It.”

Of all people, Anna Deavere Smith read the New York Times on a morning in March 2008 during a trip to Phoenix. Later that day, during Spring parent-teacher conferences, Nancy from the West Wing arrived at my office. Initially star-struck, I wasn’t sure what to say to one of Oprah’s phenomenal women. But as she explained what she was doing in Phoenix, we fell into an easy conversation that covered a lot of ground—from Northern Ireland to Arizona. She was in town to interview, along with me, an array of politicians, community activists, lawyers, and incarcerated women, for her one-woman play, “The Arizona Project,” commissioned to honor the 2006 naming of Arizona State University’s law school for retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—the first U.S. law school to be named for a woman. We talked about our respective childhoods, and Anna recalled that when she was a girl, her grandfather had told her that

 . . . if you say a word enough, it becomes you.

Walking in Other People’s Words

Inspired, Anna Deavere Smith traveled around the United States, interviewing people touched by some of our most harrowing social and racial tensions, recording her conversations with them, and shaping them into collections of monologues which she presents, verbatim, on stage. Using the real words of real people, Anna Deavere Smith breathes in – and out – America. It was surreal, sitting in my office talking to an acclaimed actress. She had “people”  who set up the camera in my office and left us to chat about justice and education and my beloved Seamus Heaney.

A fan of Heaney, she admired the picture of him hanging on my office wall. I made a copy of it for her,  and now that he’s gone, I like knowing his picture hangs in our respective living rooms.

Worlds apart but connected all the same. 

When our conversation ended, and the camera and tape recorder packed away, Anna Deavere Smith told her assistant to be sure to get a picture of the shoes. My shoes. They weren’t my favorites. They were uncomfortable. Beige, high-heeled and professional, chosen that morning I suppose in an effort to look a bit bolder at work, to be perceived as strong— a part of my armor.

It wasn’t until the night after President Obama was elected to his first term, when my students and I went to see Anna perform her one-woman show at the Herberger Theater that I understood the shoes.

Changing shoes between each of her monologues, Anna Deavere Smith walked for miles in our words, in our world. Boldly, she crisscrossed Arizona and America and showed us ourselves—how interconnected we are—prison system employees, incarcerated women, female lawyers, immigration activists and others including Justice O’Connor who was in the audience,  Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Mayor of Phoenix, and the principal I was at the time. We were looking in the mirror, and much of what we saw was bleak. At the same time, with a brand new President elected the night before, there was hope in the air.

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It’s time to get back at it, to look in the mirror, to take a walk in the shoes of other people—people with whom we vehemently disagree, people who appear to want something very different from the same place all Americans call home.  This is not the time to retreat or to recriminate. It’s a time for boldness, and I can think of no better voice to remind us than that of Seamus Heaney:

… make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to it and you are fit for it; you deserve it and if you make your own best contribution, the world before you will become a bit more deserving of you.

Goodbye to my Juan, Goodbye Rosalita …

07 Thursday Nov 2024

Posted by in Dispatch from the Diaspora

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Following his decisive win two days ago, the President Elect has intensified his campaign pledge to conduct a mass deportation of the estimated 11 million immigrants who are living in the U.S. without authorization. He promised to do something similar the last time he was in the White House, but he was unable to deliver. But with a judicial landscape more favorable to his agenda, this time could be very different.

Deportation has made the news before. In 1948, a plane chartered by United States Immigration Services crashed in Los Gatos, California, killing all 32 people aboard including 28 Mexican farmworkers. who were being deported to Mexico after working in the Bracero program, created to address an agricultural labor shortage in the U.S. during World War II.

A temporary guest worker program, it brought over 4.5 million Mexican workers to the United States between 1942 and 1964, and although there were protocols in place to protect the workers, the Braceros were nonetheless subjected to harsh conditions, enduring an abusive registration process that included strip searches and exposure to deadly chemicals used to fumigate them for lice.  Harvesting the nation’s asparagus, lemons, lettuce, and tomatoes, the Braceros were paid a meager 30 cents an hour and charged for food and lodging. When they attempted to socialize, they often faced discrimination, being refused service in restaurants or segregated from white customers – “no dogs or Mexicans.” The threat of deportation was always there; they were dispensable, and it was easy for employers to replace them with new braceros who were willing to work for low wages.

Media stories about the Los Gatos plane crash omitted the names of the 28 Mexican braceros, referring to them only as deportees. Their remains were buried in a mass grave in Fresno while the bodies of the pilot, flight attendants, and immigration agent—all white—were sent home to be laid to rest by their loved ones.

Deeply affected by the national media’s indifference to these workers and their families, singer Woody Guthrie wrote a poem, Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee), an unflinching indictment of how Americans can so easily disregard a tragedy of this magnitude when the deceased don’t look like them. By giving the workers symbolic names, Guthrie’s poem provided some measure of dignity for them:

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees” . . .

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves . . .

Memorialized in lyrics that are still being sung seven decades later by the likes of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, the 28 Mexican workers would remain anonymous until Tim Z Hernandez, the son of migrant farmworkers and a professor at the University of Texas, El Paso, embarked on a six-year search to identify the “deportees,” find their families, and chronicle their lives in his book All They Will Call You. Since 2010, he has gathered hundreds of documents, photographs, and remembrances of the Los Gatos accident and continues to locate surviving family members. At the same time, his work recognizes the immense contributions of immigrants to the United States, since long before and long after the Bracero Program and illustrates the devastating impact of deportation, how it strips immigrants of their dignity and their humanity, separating families, and leaving behind a long trail of trauma.

The passage of Proposition 134 : Secure the Border Act in Arizona this week has renewed fears of deportation among the state’s immigrant community, where 188,000 US citizen children are living in mixed-immigration families. I know some of these families from my time working as a principal in a Phoenix high school. Following Tuesday’s election results, I opened Facebook Messenger to find a message from a former student. Although I haven’t seen her since 2008, I knew immediately why she was reaching out, and it broke my heart.

A DACA recipient, she attended my early college high school when Proposition 300 passed in Arizona, making students who were not US citizens or permanent residents and those lacking legal status ineligible for in-state tuition and federal and state financial aid. The referendum was approved with 72 percent of votes in November 2006, leaving little doubt about where most Arizonans stood on immigration. That was the tip of the iceberg, with anti-immigrant sentiment reaching its peak in in 2010 with SB1070, the “show me your papers” law that required law enforcement to ask for proof of legal status if they suspected someone was undocumented. Racial profiling by any other name, it also gave police the authority to arrest, without a warrant, those they deemed “deportable.” Later that same year, a law subsequently ruled unconstitutional, banned a Mexican-American ethnic studies program in the Tucson school district. 

Arizona was becoming “ground zero” in the war on immigration. My students, undocumented with no way of becoming documented that didn’t require them to leave the only home they had ever known, were the collateral damage. They were scared every day that they or someone in their families would be arrested on the way home from school and deported. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigrant policy brought in by Barack Obama, would subsequently offer protections from deportation and legal work permits, but temporarily. Today, DACA is under threat in court, with an ongoing legal challenge led by Texas that has already resulted in a freeze on the granting of DACA initial requests. Trump, who tried to dismantle it during his previous term in the White House, has promised to end the DACA program.

I found out from my student that she has been living her life in two-year increments as required by DACA and from court decision to court decision. Now with another Trump presidency on the horizon, she is exploring her options, one of which was to reach out to her old high school principal to inquire about where I live in Mexico and if it’s a nice area. She’s anticipating the worst. It’s understandable. It’s so unfair.

It is with her and other immigrants on mind, that Aliento‘s Founder and CEO, Reyna Montoya, released the following statement on Tuesday night:

President-elect Donald Trump promised one day to invoke the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 to conduct the largest deportation of long-term undocumented Arizonans and their families. Sadly, in Arizona, we don’t have to imagine how mass deportations will occur. During the SB 1070 years and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, we saw police officers conducting immigration checkpoints outside of schools and churches. Nurses and doctors were forced to question patients’ immigration status. Our hearts and minds are with the 250,000 undocumented Arizonans that built lives, homes, and communities in Arizona for decades.

These Arizonans along with millions of undocumented immigrants across the country have US citizens depending on them, households that cannot function without them, and families that are traumatized by the fear of them being swept away—a prospect that may become a reality. Even if President Elect Trump does not follow through on his mass deportation agenda, his rhetoric has stoked fear and anxiety in immigrant communities across the country, especially in places like Arizona. Immigrants who are victims of crime may be less likely to report it to law enforcement, for fear of being deported. They may be less likely to ask social services for the help they need. Children of undocumented students may stop going to school because of the threat of being separated from their families.

Like the vulnerable Braceros before them, they are more than just a number. They have hopes and dreams and people who love them. They matter.

And all we will call them is “deportees.”