From the ashes, p.14
From the Ashes, page 14
But finally she had had enough, and their shouting at her drove her to stand up for herself. “I’ve been quiet for so long,” she said, and told them that she was tired of cleaning up after their children, after them. Her uncle nearly slapped her, but her aunt held his arm back.
She called a helpline—one she had relied on before when she had panic attacks—and then called a friend, who then reached out to a community elder in Leeds, who took her in for a while. The family soon seemed to resent her and ended up kicking her out, her things in garbage bags. “You just have to learn not to put your trust in everything, in anyone, or just don’t get too comfortable. You just never know.” She worried she’d be sleeping in the street. “I was like, I might be the problem. Because it’s a pattern. What is wrong with me?”
She had come across PAFRAS in her research for her asylum claim, and they helped her to find a place to stay once again, after a couple of weeks staying in a friend’s university apartment. But all the moving exhausted her, and she felt lonely. “Sometimes you do need family, you need supportive family. I have no one,” she said. “And I just don’t know, because I don’t control my future now.” If her asylum case was rejected again, she could lose her housing. She could be deported.
Like Idris, she felt disconnected from her own story. Without an ID she could not go out with her friends; she couldn’t order things online without a bank card. “We are restricted to do nothing. You can’t work. If you’re an asylum seeker in this country, they make it so difficult for you,” she said. She found herself lying awake at night, her brain always working. When people were nice to her, she wondered when they would change their minds, or she would push them away. “I’m just like, don’t get too close to me because if you get too close something bad might happen to you.”
She sought ways to feel like a full human, even as she struggled to maintain relationships. Her mother, she thought, did not believe her side of the story, and romantic relationships were hard when she had no idea where she would be or what rights she might have. But she threw herself into the PAFRAS community, attending their café night every Thursday and making friends and then beginning to do volunteer work there as well, helping other people in her situation. She dreamed of studying law if she was able to remain.
She spent some of her volunteer time making social media stories for other young people in her situation, to make them feel less alone, to do what she wished someone had done for her. This too is caring work, but it is work she chose, work that brought her back to herself, that brought her comfort. Staff and volunteers and lawyers, she said, “can help you, but they have never experienced it.” With the people who have been through the system, she can be angry and sad, and also she can laugh about it, she can express all the feelings that she has had to hold back.
“I just hate the words ‘asylum seekers,’” she said. “That’s what I’m going through right now. But that’s not who I am.”
2.4 Home
The Esperanza Community Center—esperanza is Spanish for “hope”—is in West Palm Beach, Florida, the city where my grandparents lived their final years and died within a couple of months of each other. I had been there before, but it didn’t feel familiar other than the way every place made up of hotels and beaches and nice restaurants feels familiar. My father chose one vacation town and my grandparents another to live in and I went to Palm Beach to meet people who chose it for different and also for the same reasons.
Esperanza is in a lovely low building beneath matching palm trees, red flowers that I could not identify growing along the front. Inside I met Maricela Torres and Yirna Buitrago, the director and manager, respectively, and they gave me a tour of the building; the room with the diapers they distribute to the community, the room where meetings were held, and within it the little separate room for children, with toys and colorful posters on the walls and snacks and juice boxes piled high.
Buitrago was working on her English and I on my Spanish, and so our conversation happened in the space between the two languages; I understood more than I could formulate into words and so did she, so we muddled through with a lot of laughs. She is from Bogotá, Colombia, and she came to the United States in 2016 with her husband and children, fleeing death threats that came because she was a community worker and organizer, and her work challenged corrupt officials. Her father suggested she go to the US for a few months to relax and seek out other opportunities where she and her family would not be threatened.
Buitrago and her children stayed with relatives at first, and her husband, who worked in construction, moved around Florida to find work. She recalled arriving in a new apartment with only a suitcase, a plastic table, and two mattresses, thinking, Oh my god, I want to go to Colombia. It was lonely, but, she said, “for my children, all days I get up and continue.” She missed her family in Colombia, and she missed her country itself: “It’s beautiful, Colombia, it’s absolutely beautiful, and the food, the cities, oh, my God, it’s beautiful, but with the corruption it’s hard.”
Six months after she left Colombia, her father died, and she was unable to go back for the funeral to say goodbye without risking her asylum claim. Her mother was ill when we spoke, and Buitrago had only been able to see her once in seven years, when her mother and brother were able to get visas for a visit.
The process of applying for political asylum, she said, was long and complicated; like Fatima and Idris she went through lawyers and hoops and more hoops to jump through for years, having to produce proof that her life was threatened—as though when you pick up the phone in the middle of the night to hear a rough voice telling you how they’ll kill you, you have a recorder just waiting nearby to capture it. For a long time she was studying English and working cleaning houses and driving for Uber and DoorDash and thinking, “I didn’t study for this. I need other work. I need other work.” For Latinx immigrants, she said, “people don’t ask what you’re trained in, you’re cleaning, only cleaning, restaurants only.” She longed for the kind of community work she had done in Colombia, connecting people to each other, supporting their needs, feeling supported in turn herself. She had worked under Gustavo Petro, then-mayor of Bogotá and now the first left-leaning president of Colombia in the country’s history, doing conflict mediation and building harm reduction programs around drugs and alcohol and support for LGBTQ people in the city.69
It was only when she met Maricela Torres at Esperanza three years ago that she finally found her place. Together with Lenin Gomez and Andrea Gil, they started the Mujeres Fuertes (Strong Women) program. I joined them one morning, standing alongside Torres as she held a baby and offered juice to another child as the group of mothers, all with young children, talked actively about the experiences of migration, on their bodies, their lives. The mothers scooped babies from carriers and rocked them as they spoke, handing children treats and books and toys while they continued to talk, effortlessly multitasking.
The aim of the program, Gil said, was to help the women see their own strength and power. “People think that empowerment is success. An empowered woman is the one who has a good job, a good body, good aesthetics, a good job, a good house. We focus on, look, these women crossed the desert. It is an experience that makes them strong. Even if they don’t believe it and don’t know it.… We try to make them see their skills, their own abilities and their own strengths.”
The language barrier is often the biggest obstacle, Gomez confirmed. When he and Gil and their oldest child came from Bogotá to Florida five years earlier, “I lost my words.” His whole life, he had been working with words: he was a psychologist in Colombia and like Buitrago a community worker. He made theater and art. “All my life was building around words. So if I come to United States, I lose the words.”
Gomez had family in West Palm Beach; first his uncle and then his mother had moved to the United States when he was younger. When his first son was born, he began to think about giving his family access to a different culture, a different country. “When you are driving, and you are stuck in traffic, you sometimes think the lane behind is faster than you. So you think, I’m in the wrong lane. I need to move.”
It was an adventure, but it was also painful: “Grief is like a sensation, an emotion. It’s something that you feel in your body,” he said. “The grief in my body is, I need to restart with few words.”
It was even harder for Gil, who had no family in Florida other than her husband. She had been a social worker in Colombia but spoke less English than Gomez. The first couple of years in the United States, she said, she had some symptoms of depression. “I cried a lot,” she said. “In my country I have my apartment, and in this country my husband and me and my kids live in one room.”
They had not sought the American dream, she said, and it wasn’t money that drove them but rather wanting their children to experience something different, like Mohamed Mire wanting his children to know both cultures, languages, places. In Colombia, they had been professionals; in Florida Gomez worked in an IHOP washing dishes and driving for Uber, and Gil took on some cleaning work. To get recertified in their professions would require starting from scratch.
The family fractured further, Gomez said, because the immigration process for Gil was slow and difficult. They were still awaiting her papers when we spoke, five years after they had moved. It left her feeling helpless.
So they, like Buitrago, sought volunteer opportunities, to put their skills and training to use in their community, and they met one woman who decided to trust in them. “Trust is something that you receive,” Gomez said. “It’s like an egg. One egg can have a life inside, so it’s very special. But it’s fragile at the same time. Once you crush the trust, it’s difficult to recover.” That trust led them on a path that brought them to Esperanza that day, to Buitrago and to finding a way to use their skills and training and their personal experiences of movement and loss to support other people, newer arrivals with even less than they had.
Their second son was born in February 2020, right before COVID-19 made it to the United States, and when COVID hit, Gomez lost his job and turned to driving for UberEats to support the family. But that August he was hired to do community education around COVID safety. “It’s good because it’s something that had a relation with my career,” he said, but at the same time, he worried that he could bring COVID home to his family. Still, it was the best job he’d been offered since they relocated, and he could do it while still working on the program at Esperanza.
In the time that Gomez and Gil had been in Florida, they had survived the Trump presidency and Governor Ron DeSantis’s endless attempts to make the environment more hostile to immigrants; they had seen the Parkland school shooting and many other smaller acts of violence. Gil told me that much of her work in Colombia had been with people hurt and traumatized by the armed conflicts there, young people recruited into the wars, families displaced. “I worked in a project that sought to support these victims, and I traveled throughout the country, I coordinated a team of fifteen professionals including social workers and psychologists, and we made a strategy for the emotional recovery of the victims,” Gil said. “I loved this job very much and it taught me the reality of the country, because I had always worked in Bogotá, in the capital. And I went out to very poor and vulnerable places, that gave me a broader look at what was happening around me.”
Growing up in the ’80s, the conflict was part of daily life, Gomez explained. “We can die in any street for a bomb or because you are in the wrong place with the wrong people.” There were narco-traffickers and paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas and the government. His first real job was working with people who made the decision to put down their guns. He did art therapy and theater, sexual health programs and harm reduction, often with kids or young people, and said, “Part of my intention is to try to do the same here.” Gomez had studied psychology in part because he wanted to find work that could not be replaced by computers, but he had not realized how hard it would be to keep doing it.
Gil and Gomez and Buitrago all had the kind of training and experience that Florida and the US more broadly desperately needed: conflict mediation and therapy and care, restorative justice and support for people living through trauma and trying to turn away from guns and violence. The country should be thrilled to welcome them. But the United States does not value, has never valued, such skills.
“Immigration is not a problem, it’s a right,” said Gil in Spanish. “It’s a problem for the people who see us as immigrants with bad eyes.” The translation has stuck with me. Bad eyes, mal ojo in Spanish: it recalls for me the Jewish idea of the ayin hara, the evil eye. The gaze that can cause harm where it falls, intentionally or unintentionally, out of jealousy, greed, hatred.70
Paul Gilroy suggested that there is something valuable in being able to see a culture from the outside, something valuable in a cosmopolitan eye that is in a way the inverse of the evil eye, carrying critical distance rather than blessing or curse. I heard that value in the calm appraisal of the hostile environment in the United States and Britain from Mohamed Mire with his thirty-two years of exile and nineteen-year-old Fatima learning to master the asylum system. The way they see that the culture of the Global North is hostile not only to outsiders but to life itself.71
The women in Mujeres Fuertes will bring the strength of desert crossers to the country they are learning to live in. “It turns out that no one has asked these women how they feel,” Gil said. “That’s why these questions are so important. That’s why their voice is so important. Sometimes when they come here, they don’t say anything. They just look at the floor. And little by little, over time, they start talking more. They express themselves more. The work we do here is very important.”
Buitrago has been doing community work long enough that she has gotten good at drawing people out, learning what is important to them. She looked after me for the days I was there, checking in on interviews and making sure I had what I needed. In addition to Mujeres Fuertes she also worked with day laborers and disaster relief workers, had traveled the state after hurricanes bringing information to the immigrant workers who picked up the mess left behind by the storms. While the women had their family, she noted, sometimes the men lived alone and failed to care for themselves; they needed different things from the center. “People all the time come here for help, for example, they need food stamps, Medicaid, they need passport appointments, need to change address, they register children in the school,” she said. All the time, she wanted to create new programs, to address different needs, to improve her English so that she could help others learn, to make more money to send home to her family in Colombia, to get her legal situation and her papers sorted so that her daughter could go to university. “My daughter is an excellent student,” she said proudly.
When I left Esperanza my heart was in my throat. I still hear Mohamed Mire as we hung up the phone for the second time, telling me he will pray for me, and I feel Yirna Buitrago’s hug. I think of those moments of shared vulnerability, and I wish safety and an end to the evil eye for them and for everyone like them, crossing the desert or the sea.72
Break III
My father worked himself to death. I should not say that, but it is true.
Even before the collapse of the small restaurant chain he ran, he had been obsessed with the value of work, though in sometimes contradictory ways. But after what he perceived as his failure (rather than the fate of something like half of all the small businesses out there), the only answer possible was to work more.
The bicycle shop was open seven days a week, and so he was there seven days a week, wringing more value out of his own sweat, his own lengthened working days. He obsessed over finding ways to improve, to promote, to make more efficient.
He blamed himself for not having worked hard enough to prevent failure, and then he kept on working until he could not do it anymore and I had to do it for him, I had to show up every day and try to make him leave, to take even a half day off. He wasn’t doing anything anyway; he would let the phone ring and ring hoping someone else would get it. When people tell me that people need to work, we need work to have meaning, I think of him there and all the things he could have done that were not work. He liked to do things once, I want to scream, he played golf and liked good food and jokes and his convertible and sometimes playing tennis with me. He was interested once in what I did, what my sister did, what we thought. And then all of that stopped, and there was just work, and death.
When I was a child, I watched him do logic puzzles for fun; he saw making money as just one more puzzle. There never seemed to be anything he wanted from the money he made, other than maybe some time off to play golf. But once we lived in Hilton Head, with a golf course literally in our backyard, he rarely played, and if he did he had usually worked first. He did little for fun except watch more golf on TV and occasionally take my mother to a restaurant.
He was already not well when he started this schedule and not young either, and unlike at the restaurants he was actually doing the physical work, lifting rental bicycles onto a delivery truck and fixing, adjusting, in the South Carolina summer because summer was when the tourists were there and the money was made—three or four months when you had to cover your entire year and to make up for lost savings and to help two girls go to school. He was not big or strong at any point in his life, but there was no bit of physical work he was willing to delegate to the legions of young people who came through on summer jobs without doing it himself first. I wondered whether he was punishing himself or just genuinely convinced he had to have his hands on everything lest it fail again.
I learned from him to work two and three jobs at a time (once, for a brief period, four), to fill my hours with preparation and hope labor and to say no to days off, to spend an hour writing before work and more hours writing after, to always be looking for what is next because there was no net to catch me if I fell. Because when I did use that net—my parents’ house, my teenage bed—it turned into just another form of work that was even harder to escape: running their business, looking after their needs, that was another job. I had to stay and watch my father.
