There is a beautiful, tall row of corn growing in the back yard of the house next door to mine where once there was a dense hedge of pyracantha, commonly known as the Firethorn bush. Although the cedar waxwings undoubtedly miss the red berries in winter on both sides of their north-south migration, my neighbors will be eating from their little piece of land this year, something I admire.
Changes in vegetation are only one
of the differences in my neighborhood since I first moved here. Once there were workers and managers at Lindsay
Olive, an ag chemist, the owner of the Chevron station, and a farm labor
contractor whose crews served the nearby Sunkist packinghouse. Now I don’t know where anyone works or where
they’re from, a reflection of my reclusive nature and their commute
schedules. Our language differences add
a small complication to the non-local nature of our lives.
I imagine that’s not too different
from many neighborhoods in our small towns now.
I don’t know the citizenship status of my neighbors, and I certainly
wouldn’t ask, out of politeness. They’re
my neighbors, and I keep looking for ways to act accordingly despite my
ignorance of their lives. But since the
March 13th meeting of the
Lindsay City Council, when the Council was approached by activated citizens
seeking official support for DACA students (which the Council gave,) I have
been wondering what I would do if ICE showed up at my neighbors’ doors.
In Germany during WWII, when their government’s
agents known as Brown Shirts came to take away Jewish neighbors, the non-Jewish
neighbors had two responses. One was to
hide behind the curtains and watch, assuming the government knew what it was
doing or remaining silent, simply too afraid to make a peep. The other, much riskier, was to take their Jewish
neighbors into their homes and hide them.
With 20/20 hindsight, we have become judgmental about the curtain-watchers,
but are blind to the fact that here in good old America there are no stories
about families taking in their Japanese neighbors when they were being rounded
up by our government officials and taken away to internment camps.
Mark Smith, pastor of both the
Exeter and Lindsay Methodist Churches, was at the March 13th Lindsay
City Council meeting, where we met organizers from CHIRLA, the Coalition for
Humane Immigration Rights (Los Angeles.)
CHIRLA has a new office in Porterville, and the organizers were eager to
find ways of serving the community.
Wanting to know what we can do to
help, we met with them and decided to sponsor one of their workshops on immigrants’ rights. This workshop will be held at Lindsay United
Methodist Church’s Maxwell Hall on Sunday, June 10th at 5:30 p.m. It will be conducted primarily in Spanish
to serve those residents, documented and undocumented, who could benefit from
knowing what to do if and when ICE comes to their door. We hope to begin the process of learning what
the rest of us might do as well. Please
join us if you can, and watch this column for further developments.
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Trudy
Wischemann is co-editor of the forthcoming volume A Little Piece of Land:
Writings on Agriculture and the Common Good in California. You can send her your thoughts on ICE
incursions c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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