Conversations with Marta
On the struggle to bridge intersections and listen
Let’s call her Marta. She’s one of the many people who work in the office building doing the things no one else wants to do: cleaning toilets, taking out trash, running from the basement to the eleventh floor on the whim of an executive, cleaning up the vomit from the pregnant lady on ten. After nine hours of that, she goes to a second job where she works as a nanny to two young children. She has two children of her own and two grandchildren — as well as family she sends money to in El Salvador.
I learned this about her because she helps me learn Spanish and I help her with English. I still speak Spanish like a third grader, but it’s a start toward understanding other people.
Over the past few months, I’ve questioned relationships with people I thought I knew. I’ve grown distant from some I’ve respected and counted among friends. I can handle having different politics, but dehumanization and discrimination isn’t just politics. I’ve seen a side of people I would have sworn couldn’t exist. But even as I type that sentence, I realize that as a white woman, things have been comparatively good for me. For others, this wide-spanning assault of Trumpian bigotry is nothing new in Texas and in America. I’m the one who’s new to this, who’s finally begun to see how things are and have been.
One day recently, Marta and I put aside talk of our children and our jokes about men having it so easy. When Marta asks me how I am, all I can say is “Mi corazón está triste.”
She lets out a small gasp. It’s the first time I’ve replied to her sunny greetings with a fully honest answer.
“Por qué?”
“El mundo esta loco.” I’d just read a piece about children being unable to receive medical treatment because of the recent executive order before it was struck down by the courts.
“Ah, sí. Donal Trump es — — ” She pauses. She’s unsure of exactly where I stand. Her anxiety is understandable.
“El diablo,” I say.
She laughs, positions her fingers on her head like horns and says, “Sí con los cuernos.”
She says she’s nervous about the news about the mass deportations — not for herself; she has papeles, she says, but she’s scared for her children and her friends who don’t. Her friends are sin papeles, pero con corazones buenos. Trabajan duro para que sus familias puedan dar comida y ropa a sus hijos. She tells me about the children back home in El Salvador: how they play in the dirt and how they don’t have food, clothes, toys, or hope for a moderately prosperous life. The highest hope for these children is that one day they might be able to live in the US. That hope has been replaced by fear.
I think about my own daughter with her entire playroom filled with toys. Marta and I are in the same room but we occupy separate universes. And even as she tells me about her own fears, the only thing passing through my mind is my own worry.
I worry my LGBTQ friends will someday soon find themselves legally unmarried and unable to adopt. I worry that women won’t have access to affordable reproductive healthcare and will be completely stripped of the right to make decisions about their own bodies. I worry that millions of people will lose healthcare with no alternative and die. I worry that there might not even be an earth left to leave to my daughter.
I explain all this to Marta and I realize I’ve left her another mess to clean up. She leans against her cart and pauses before she answers. “No te preocupes. Dios ve. Estarás bien. Las personas sin papeles deberían preocuparse. Las personas que se les niega la entrada deben preocuparse.” I shouldn’t worry because I’ll be fine. She asks me if I understand and I say yes. It isn’t just reassurance. She’s reminding me of the actual people who should be worried for themselves and, in this gentle way, lets me know that I’m not one of them. Yes, I’m a woman, but I have a lot less to worry about than many others.
“Pero puedes estar enojada. Utilice su ventaja para luchar por los derechos de otros.”
But she also tells me that marching is not enough. In El Salvador, she saw what oppressive regimes can do. She has seen all the reasons people flee from their homes seeking refuge in the US. She has seen resistance and war. She’s seen Trump and the GOP before, only worse, and I imagine what I must look and sound like to her.
But I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to activism. I’ve donated money and marched in the streets. This seems to make people feel good and gives them Instagram fodder. But it’s important, I’m starting to learn, to get out and engage with with people daily and, if nothing else, listen to what people have to say and learn about the struggles they go through. It’s a big reason I’m trying to learn conversational Spanish.
I can look around at the US in 2017 and know that what’s going on is wrong on a fundamental level. But we — I — don’t often understand how it affects the groups targeted or what it means outside of our own respective bubbles of privilege. I — we — need to listen better.
I tell Marta goodbye, feeling guilty that I made today about me and my anxiety. She says she’ll see me tomorrow with the same smile she greeted me with. Tomorrow I will do better.
Savannah Ober is based in Houston.
