Reflections on a Death Foretold
by Juan Carlos Ruiz

Back in August of 2006, Elvira Arellano took sanctuary in her Church. Her decision was discerned and informed in prayer and motivated by her faith and was done as a last recourse to keep her family together. Motivated by this witness, the New Sanctuary Movement was launched the 9th of May 2007 in NY, LA, and Seattle. Since then at least 25 more cities have joined the movement and are planning a launch in the immediate future.  The public launching has a twofold purpose: to couch a new language, thus reframing and redefining the issue (more specifically, the dehumanizing terms that are used against our brothers and sisters such as illegal and aliens) and to witness (and resist) the designed system that preys on the most vulnerable among us (as evidenced by legal and judicial industries that have developed around the suffering of our bothers and sisters who continue to be separated by indefinite detention, incarceration and criminalization, tearing our families apart).

We did know that the proposed legislation did not respond to the needs of our two families taking Sanctuary (and the thousands they represent) and, quite the opposite, our families were going to be persecuted with greater intensity should the “Grand Bargain” pass. The bill was clearly determined and driven by economic interests that would have benefited those in power and was evidence of a truncated imagination and abuse of language (dehumanizing and making us look like aliens or illegals). Among the many failed and shortsighted provisions under the killed legislation was the Guest Worker program, which would have documented data and records from our recent history and pointed to the fact that our workers, documented or undocumented, would have been more vulnerable to abuses by the employers, not guaranteeing their rights and driving a whole class of workers deeper underground. Plus the weak legalization provisions would not help families already trapped in the deportation system. (About four million children are directly affected by these and other inhuman measures).

It is time to sober up and take stock of where we are. We, as immigrants and those who are taking our cause as theirs, need to enlarge our consciousness, to root ourselves in our own history. Why are we here? What do we do so that our hearts do not harden in the face of constant waves of hatred and racism? What are the larger questions to which we need to be attentive? We often fail as individuals to see the causes of our displacement as we, as members of groups and movements, dwell on the effects and forget the roots of our plights.

This morning, as I was dressing, I read the label of my guayabera: Made in Mexico. Then I took some tea from India and some onions from the fields of California. A stream of images hit me as a wave: faces wrinkled, sweaty, all colors, toiling away under the sun, locked up on sweatshops, maquilladoras alongside the border, all on the blood of people of the south and people of color. Before I opened the door, a stream of unnamed people had given me a hand to walk into the real world. The words of the great prophet of our times streamed into my ears: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly”(Martin Luther King Jr.).

Another voice, exacting, demanding, conjuring a hearing emerges: It is time to act. Not react. It is time to propose a change in the status quo. We cannot wait for new elections. Our families continue to be torn apart. Our government insists on invading other countries and stealing and misusing our resources in the name of democracy. The time to act and organize--and to act and to organize more--is now.

Thus the question is incisive and needs our answer: What can we bring to the table to usher in the light of a new day?