Immigration | United States
In the Era of Trump & Co, Flying the Tattered Flag of American Values is a Full Time Job
Rio Grande Valley heroes and humanitarians have supported Trump & Co’s victims since spring 2018 — even COVID-19 won’t stop them
In the Borderlands
The Rio Grande Valley has been inhabited for as long as history remembers. Home to at least eight nations, it has flown seven flags, including its own, as an independent nation that lasted less than a year, in 1840. The indigenous hunter-gatherers of the Coahuiltecan group roamed the area before the Spanish, then French, then Spanish — again — laid claim. And it was part of the vast northern territory of Mexico when the doctrine of Manifest Destiny augured the 19th century westward expansion of the United States.
As the new nation exercised its “God-given right” to push its way into the old, hostilities grew.
First came the Texas Revolution (1835–36), when US settlers to the region, many of them slave-holders, rebelled against Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna’s attempts to outlaw slavery. The settlers won, giving birth to the Republic of Texas, a sovereign nation that bordered Mexico to the west and southwest; and the US and the Gulf of Mexico to the north and east.
That led, inevitably, to the annexation of the Republic of Texas to create the 28th US State. The pretext was a 10-year border dispute. Mexico drew its northeastern-most border at the Nueces River. Texans claimed the border was further south, along the Rio Grande. Between the two rivers lay a vast patch of desert filled with wild ponies and pecan trees.
But much more alluring to the US were Mexico’s territorial holdings to the west, particularly California.
When a US brigade crossed the Nueces at Corpus Christi, a Mexican brigade crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoros, giving then-President James K. Polk, an ardent expansionist, exactly what he wanted: an excuse for war. He decried the Mexican advancement into Texas territory as an “invasion,” sparking the Mexican-American War.
The contest that ensued lasted two long, bloody years, ending in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Mexico paid dearly. It agreed to the Rio Grande boundary of Texas, now a state, and ceded to the US ownership of California as well as most of the modern-day Southwest — New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado — for a cool $15 million.
White European settlers flooded into the region then in the second mass migration since the Spanish incursion. They flocked to the safest places: the military forts, like the one set up by Major Jacob Brown at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico.
Charles Stillman, a Matamoros businessman, saw nothing but opportunity when the spoils of war brought Texas right to his doorstep. He bought thousands of acres just north of the Rio Grande, and proceeded to transform the former military outpost, Fort Brown, into a vibrant and strategically important international trading port. He founded the settlement in 1848. He named it Brownsville.
Historic Brownsville
We learned all this while waiting to hear from Tía Cindy of the Angry Tias and Abuelas of the Rio Grande Valley. We’d come to the region to volunteer our time with these grassroots humanitarians, while bearing witness to Trump & Co’s trumped up immigration crisis and crimes against humanity along the Texas/Mexico border.
Our road trip was to take us from Brownsville to El Paso with some “me” time in Big Bend along the way. And today, January 4, 2020, was our first day.
But Tía Cindy had told us only to meet her “at the bridge” and to “bring $2 in quarters.” She hadn’t said which bridge, or what time.
While awaiting further instructions, we schooled up on the history and culture of the RGV at the Historic Brownsville and Stillman House Museums. We wandered the streets of Brownsville’s Historic Downtown, mostly empty on this holiday Saturday, peering beyond boarded up windows and peeling paint to find architectural souvenirs of the town’s more prosperous past. We lingered at the post-Gothic Immaculate Conception Cathedral built by French missionary, Father Pierre Yves Keralum, which welcomed and calmed us with its quiet beauty bathed inside and out in south Texas light. And when we got hungry, we googled “best Mexican food near me,” which led us to Las Cazuelitas, a nondescript canteen on E. Adams Street, just shy of closing time.
As we tucked into our first — and (spoiler alert!) best — meal of tacos wrapped in homemade cornflour tortillas my phone pinged. It was Cindy.
“Change of plans,” she texted. “Meet me at the bus station instead.”
She’d forgotten to mention the time again. But before I could wipe my fingers clean of taco drippings to text her back, my phone pinged once more:
“4:00.”
All Hands!
The Bus Station took me aback: more modern than the Brownsville airport and cleaner than any bus station I’d ever seen, its ceilings soar overhead, supported by brick columns that reach for the sky. Light and airy, painted a cheery yellow, it’s bigger and taller than the actual Cathedral we’d just popped into two blocks away.
We looked around, not completely certain which of the women pictured on the Angry Tías’ website was Cindy. We spotted a gringa with dirty-blonde hair pulled back in a messy pony tail sitting on the far side of a tired folding table. She looked official and friendly, just waiting to offer helpful information.
As we approached, the lettering on a small, hand-written sign taped to the left-front corner of the table came into view. “Team Brownsville,” it said — the name of another humanitarian group I’d contacted but had not heard back from.
“Are you Tía Cindy?” I asked.
“No, but she’s here, taking care of a Mexican family that was just released on bond. She’ll be back.”
As we waited, we chatted with our new acquaintance. Also a volunteer, Lindsay hailed from one of the reddest areas of North Carolina. The wife of a dairy farmer, she works as a school librarian to help make ends meet, money always being tight on a farm, especially with the uncertainty brought on by the US-China trade dispute, and now coronavirus.
With her husband’s blessing, Lindsay had taken a few days away from the kids and cows to bear witness to the 2000-mile humanitarian crisis that started a few hundred yards away, across the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros.
“My mission is to carry back to my friends and neighbors the reality of how the actions of our government — and especially our president — impact the lives of immigrants.” In other words, that their leaders are not welcoming the stranger, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or giving the thirsty to drink.
“They’re not bad people,” she told us. “They’re just unaware, or maybe in denial, that you can’t ‘make America great again’ while condoning treating others in a way that’s in opposition to Christian principles.”
She’d come to Brownsville to volunteer with Team Brownsville and to bring home photos and first-hand accounts of the inhumanity being perpetrated in the name of all Americans and paid for with their tax dollars. Her mission resonated.
We learned all that within several minutes as Lindsay cut paper cows and goats and sheep out of white cardboard paper [we would find out why the next day]. Suddenly, she looked up and pointed with her scissors to a brunette woman carrying an overcharged bag from Subway. Following in her footsteps were a man, woman, and four children, ranging in age from maybe 1 to 13.
“That’s Cindy.”
We introduced ourselves and got pulled into a warm, welcoming hug. “Thank you so much for coming to Brownsville,” Cindy said. “I’ve just bought this family dinner.” She introduced us to them and they hugged us too. They looked exhausted, but relieved.
“Give me a few minutes to get them bus tickets. Then I’ll take you across.”
Just then, a clean-shaven man with closely cropped hair, wearing khaki shorts and an untucked button-down blue-and-white plaid shirt, came bursting through the automatic double doors at the back of the station.
“I need hands!” he shouted to no one in particular, then spun around on his heels and disappeared back through the double doors again.
“Go help Sergio,” Cindy said. “I’ll catch up to you at the bridge.” She was off.
Abandoning the info-table and her craft project, Lindsay leapt up, explaining that Sergio was one of the Team Brownsville leaders. We followed her out into the bus station parking lot, trotting to catch up. Sergio led us wordlessly across E. Jefferson Street to a storage shed behind a storefront that formerly housed a taxi dispatch operation.
He keyed open the padlock that secured the metal grill over a wooden door, then started hoisting out a caravan of two-dozen or so canvas folded-up wagons — think Radio Flyers, but from REI.
No sooner had we dragged the first round of the empty wagons back to the bus station parking lot, when several SUVs pulled up, disgorging a dozen or so people. They looked oddly familiar.
Introductions were made all around as back hatches flung open to reveal hundreds of juice boxes and stacks of aluminum trays, containing freshly quartered oranges, along with still-packaged ground cloths, sleeping bags and pads, fleeces, boxed lanterns, tee-shirts and socks, winter jackets with tags still on, and various and sundry other items, including a large black garbage bag filled with used clothes. All these items were loaded into the now unfolded canvas wagons.
Just when we were ready to go, Cindy appeared, carrying a machete still in its packaging. She hid it under the bag of clothes. “They’ll want us to pay duties on these used things, which should distract them from the contraband beneath,” she winked.
“What’s it for?” I asked.
“Firewood,” she said, matter of factly. I didn’t yet understand, but left it at that.
The Gateway International Bridge
As we set off, each of us pulling a heavily burdened wagon, we learned that Team Brownsville had out-of-town groups of volunteers lined up for the next two months. Also, that communication with the Team took place almost exclusively via the Team Brownsville Facebook Group Page. I hadn’t been on the hateful platform since it helped Cambridge Analytica hack the 2016 US presidential election. But now I understood why my emails had gone unanswered.
The battalion of Team Brownsville volunteers helping Sergio that night were from Brooklyn, NY. That’s where Jim and I met, where we were living before moving to China in 1994, and what we still call “home,” although we now live in London. Unlike the schizophrenia Lindsay faced back in North Carolina, this group was a single-minded crowd of woke do-gooders from the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue. Among them were a lawyer, several teachers, a rabbi, a nurse, an IT guy, and two teenagers skipping school for a few days of “real-world education.” They swept us into their mission.
Our wagon train passed through the bus station, out the front door and to the right; it continued down E. Adams to the municipal car park, hooking left onto E. 14th Street; then headed straight and across the main drag of E. Elizabeth Street to the foot of the Gateway International Bridge. Jim and I scrambled to find the $2 in quarters Cindy had instructed us to bring. Now we understood why: to feed the turnstiles that marked the pedestrian entry to the no-man’s land between nations — a $1-per-person toll, in quarters only, dropped one at a time into the narrow coin slot to unlock the three-armed hip-high barrier.
On this evening, a Border Patrol officer held open the solid metal security gate to the left of the turnstiles, making it easier to enter the border boundary pulling wagons. We handed over our quarters with a dozen or so “buenas noches!” answered with as many “gracias!” accompanied by the musical clinking of coins as they fell into his pocket.
Once through, the sound and scenery on the bridge shifted. The swoosh of a car en route to Mexico, accelerating on its ascent up the bridge, contrasted with the hum of standing engines on the side destined for the US. Drug-sniffing dogs handled by high-visibility vest-wearing Customs and Border Patrol officers weaved in and out of the barely moving vehicles. This one or that was waved over to be searched.
Beyond the cars, a long line of people stretched back to the middle of the bridge, perhaps further. They appeared patient, though the line did not move. I reckoned that would be us before the night was over.
As they stood, we rolled, up and over the Rio Grande, single file so as not to block the faster moving foot traffic that passed us on our left. Sometimes we pulled up, waiting for we-knew-not-what obstacle to clear. When we did, it was easier to chat with our neighbors just before and behind us.
At the apex of the bridge, I stopped to catch my breath and peered through the chainlink fencing that had been stretched from end to end. There flowed the infamous river, slow and sickly brown, it resembled more a wide, still creek than the grand waterway of my imagination.
To my right, on the US side, standing tall and rigid and rusted, was the border wall. Not the Wall. This one predated the “big, beautiful” lie Trump is right now defiling sacred lands to build despite the growing pandemic; the lie he sought to fund by forcing the longest US government shutdown in US history (35 days) in 2018–19, then robbed from the Pentagon budget — to the tune of $9.8 billion — when he didn’t get his way.
On the Mexican side, several people had descended the river’s steep bank to bathe and do laundry in water contaminated by human sewage and pesticide runoff.
Rolling downhill into Mexico, I nearly lost control of my laden wagon. It nipped at my ankles, prompting the man behind me, one of the Brooklynites, to reach down to slow it. I thanked him and turning to face him asked for the first time, “What’s your name?”
Before he could answer I knew. There was a flash of mutual recognition. Roy and I had played in a rock band together in our early 20s. We dated for a little while, too, probably breaking up the band. I was embarrassed, remembering the shitty way in which I’d broken things off. I wanted to apologize right then and there. But the years between us and the unbelievable circumstance of our reunion robbed me of words.
We made it through the checkpoint, machete and all, passed over the empty Mexican side of the bridge, wove our wagons through the standstill US-bound traffic, then confronted the sight for which we were unprepared: the tent city hugged right up against the traffic border, spread across the asphalt plaza meant for parking official Federal vehicles, passed through the chain-link and barbed wire fence, and snaked up the embankment and along the tree-lined levee above.
Also right there, standing in a peaceful scrum that ran perpendicular to the hundreds of humming cars, were the first of thousands of people we would feed that night.
More Work than Anyone Ever Bargained For
They waited patiently as we set up tables and delivered the clothes and camping gear to La Tienda #1, one of four “free stores,” housed in a camping tent large enough for four adults to stand in, that are stocked and managed in collaboration with Team Brownsville and the Angry Tías. We emptied the carts of that night’s dinner onto the tables and prepared to serve, school-cafeteria style.
“Ola! Que tal?” We chorused as we spooned rice and beans and meat stew cooked by a local Matamoros canteen onto wobbly paper plates. Someone handed out tortillas, another topped off each plate with the dessert oranges we’d schlepped over, others offered up juice boxes of grape, apple, or punch.
For two hours, folks kept coming. As the sun dropped behind the archway of the Gateway International bridge, connecting Matamoros with Brownsville, I fished out the last spoonful of beans from the second industrial-sized cooking pot I’d handled that night.
“Sergio, no hay mas frijoles,” I announced. No more beans.
“Not surprised,” he yelled over. “We served probably 2000 tonight.” But people were still coming, so he instructed me to drizzle bean juice over the rice, “to give it flavor.”
It was dark by the time we finished. We’d had no time to get a good look at the encampment. That would come in the following days.
We cleaned and packed up with the light from the headlamps of cars still lined up to get into the US. Then we followed Sergio and his cadre of Brooklyn volunteers back over the bridge. It cost $0.30 to cross back over, coins we did not have. (Cindy forgot to mention that, too.) So Roy lent us the change.
“Who’s up for breakfast?” Sergio asked as we tromped, exhausted, back to the US and our comfy hotel beds beyond, passing the still-long-line of non-US citizens backed up on the right. It was understood he did not mean who join him for breakfast. He was asking who would be there first thing the next morning to repeat the same routine, only this time with King’s Cakes, for the next day was Epiphany Sunday.
“We meet at 8:00.”
Since June 2018, this has been the life of Team Brownsville, the Angry Tías, and other Brownsville/Matamoros-based good samaritans we would soon meet. In all these months, the only discernible aid the tent-city dwellers had received was from these humanitarian volunteers, who’d been wheeling over breakfast and dinner as well as clothing, camping, and personal hygiene supplies every single day. Just one more result of the Trump administration restricting the justifications for seeking asylum and requiring migrants seeking safe haven in the US — 1/3rd of whom are children — to remain in Mexico while their claims hop slowly through a ravaged American jurisprudence system and into Trump’s kangaroo tent courts, where justice is a circus.
Where both the feckless US and Mexican governments had failed, and in the curious absence of the United Nations, these heroes had stepped up to see to the common good. And as the encampment continued to grow…and grow…their work just kept getting harder. From the first few dozen to today’s 2500 people living in squalor and danger in Matamoros, they had not taken a single day off in over 18 months. No wonder no one had responded to my emails.
In the era of Trump & Co, flying the tattered flag for American values really is a full time job, even COVID-19 hasn’t stopped these RGV heroes, though it has given the administration an excuse to fast-track genocide. A topic for another post.
Thank you for reading Episode 4 in my travelogue of a road trip gone awry: THE FIRST SOLUTION: Tales of Humanity and Heroism from Trump’s Manufactured Border Crisis, rolling out on Medium as fast as I can write it because the issues are Just. That. Urgent. Click here to access the Project Forward followed by links to other articles in the series.
“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”
— Toni Morrison, 1995
