The Undocumented Speak Out

The Undocumented Speak Out

Everybody has a story to tell. It doesn't matter who you are or who your audience is. This is true even for recent arrivals in this country.You can still speak, still shout out, "Hello, America! I'm here!" This is true, even if you are one of those people who are invisible, identified only by the label that in the minds of many renders you a non-person, an alien somebody. But you have personhood. You can still say, "I am somebody. I have a right to be here, I belong here. And I am not going away!" In spite of the full panoply of federal power, the undocumented immigrants are saying exactly that: "I belong here!"

A whole body of literature is growing up. We should consider it a type of literature because it is immediate, in your face, told as fascinating personal stories. Much of it is on video, online on the usual platforms, in voice recordings, in documentaries, in music, dance, and visual and graphic art, all the new ways of recording life, with many written autobiographies and academic books and newspaper and magazine articles thrown in. It's a very American thing to do. When we look at the experiences of the immigrant workers who are labeled illegal aliens, once we get past the negative stereotypes, the almost totally false narrative of the "criminal alien," the whole Tren de Aragua thing, what we find is just how much the immigrants are doing what immigrants have been doing in America since the Pilgrims landed: telling their stories. And reminding us of the better angels of our nature. Consider John Winthrop, the Puritan Englishman who was the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630's. He wrote a treatise titled "A Modell of Christian Charity" in which he says that God has founded the colony so that, "the riche and mighty should not eate upp the poore...that every man might have need of other, and from hence they might be all knitt more nearly together in the bond of brotherly affection..." Winthrop was one of the first to pronounce the American ideal of equality and the notion that America was to be a land of "brotherly affection." In spite of the recent anti-immigrant crackdowns and the profound contradictions between our stated principles and what actually occurs, Americans still believe in this ideal. Hector Tobar, the son of Guatemalan immigrants and a prominent voice for the undocumented, in his book titled Our Migrant Souls, says, "white families often do things that explicitly attack or undermine the nation's immigration laws; they might place NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL bumper stickers on their cars, or provide the cash Latino employees need to smuggle a relative into the United States..."Polls show that the majority of Americans are opposed to the government's anti-immigrant tactics. The data proves that Tobar and many other young immigrant writers, whether society deems them to be legal or illegal, are right.

We all have our stories to tell. Recent Latino immigrants are shouting out their stories, all the way across the deserts and mountains, led by the vision of the promised land, coming out of oppression and the slavery of grinding poverty like the ancient Israelites, the militarized heavily guarded border notwithstanding. They get almost all the attention, mostly negative because the media doesn't know them. Not yet, anyway.  But let's not forget the other Latinos. We call ourselves Chicanos, and we were here long before the doctrine of U.S. Manifest Destiny and the expansion of the U.S. from sea to shining sea.Thousands of families like mine can trace our origins to the Spanish Mexicans who populated Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Ardizona and California.This was long before the United States took half of Mexico's national territory with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican War of 1846-1848. We are descendants of the Spanish colonists and the Native Americans who lived with them, and as we spread across the land we tell our very positive and proud stories. Our stories are woven in with those of our immigrant compatriots to form one beautiful fabric.

Each ethnic and racial group has its version of our national history. Each group, not just Latino groups, swims inside its own narrative river, borne along in the powerful current of its own culture, traditions, successes, failures, challenges and sufferings in the land of the free. The stories are different from mainstream history, but at the same time they are similar because universally they are stories of arrival, rejection, hardship, failure, eventual acceptance, however reluctantly,  and ultimately success. These narratives are a corrective to the paradox of America. The paradox is that America, proud of her freedom and tolerance, nonetheless seeks to erase the stories of her many diverse communities. We seem to be perpetually anxious about losing our perceived national character, derived from the original English settlers, people like John Winthrop, and we see any deviation from that as a threat. But perhaps Winthrop had a vision, one in which Americans could assume an American identity while simultaneously retaining significant differences. The surprisingly strong voices of the undocumented immigrants are calling us to believe in that possibility and to live up to the ideal of "brotherly affection." 

Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches Mexico-U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.