When ICE Comes

Published June 6, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     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 13^th  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 13^th 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 10^th 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.

           

We Need to Talk

Published May 9, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The phrase “We need to talk” can sound menacing when it comes from a boss or a mate, implying the need for some change the hearer may not want. And it might sound menacing to you when I say it regarding immigration issues.  These issues are so longstanding here in the Valley that we think our lives depend on them.  They’re part of the status quo, and that’s what I think we need to talk about.

           

     Monday morning’s Fresno Bee carried yet another front-page story about the trials of people facing deportation who were brought here as children through no fault of their own.  I’m going to call them “importees” from now on, for the sense of involuntariness is what moves us to care, and it should.

           

     This man, Vanna In, considered Cambodian but born in Viet Nam in the mid-1970’s when our war on that country was just ending, leaving rice paddies, roads, villages and towns in ruins, has become a minister to gang members, having been one himself.  He’s not just a productive member of society, he’s a healer of one of this society’s wounds.  But his early childhood education, so to speak, leaves him extremely vulnerable in this tragic political moment, when Congress is too hamstrung to act.  He faces deportation to Cambodia, where he has never lived.

           

     The article, written by Carmen George, who has been bringing us compelling pieces of beauty from our region for several years now, tells how we might help this singular man.  Rev. Vanna In has petitioned Gov. Jerry Brown for a pardon, which could lead to citizenship if granted.  A petition in support of that request is available at www.change.org, and has gathered over 7,000 signatures already.

           

     We need to do more, however, than help people one at a time.  President Trump’s machete-like action cutting off the DACA program, which provided a measure of stability to some of these importees, was a rash challenge to Congress, a wielding of the power of the pen to provoke legislative action toward resolving our unresolved immigration issues.  But Congress cannot resolve them while we, the people, are so unresolved ourselves.

           

     There are people in this country, powerful people, who benefit economically from the availability of undocumented (“illegal”) immigrants.  Their political influence will make it difficult to find a national legislative solution.  Meanwhile, the economic costs are borne by the immigrants themselves and by the communities in which they live.  Rev. Vanna In’s story, luckily, shows us the benefits we also receive at the community level.

           

     Perhaps this story and others will help us start the conversations we need to be having at the local level about immigration:  about who qualifies as “American” and how we gain that status, the pathways to citizenship.  About what we do, as neighbors and friends, when ICE comes to the door of the house down the street, supposedly to “fix” the problem of illegal immigration, but ripping apart families, churches, neighborhoods, and communities instead.

           

     We need to talk, and we need to talk now, before ICE comes.  Let’s find a way to do it.

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Trudy Wischemann is the granddaughter of immigrants before there were laws to prevent them from entering.  You can send her your immigrant origins c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

Sources of Power

Published April 4, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “There are two kinds of power,” a man once told me, a black minister from South Africa I met in Davis.  He’d come to speak about peace at a conference we were holding through the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and so I listened carefully to what he said.

           

     “The kind of power we normally think of is ‘power – over’:  the power of one person or group over another.”  That helped me understand why I automatically recoiled at the word.  Power Over is the greatest source of pain I can think of, for what it causes us to do to ourselves in defense of the threat of being overpowered by someone or something as much as the actual fact of it.

           

     “The other kind is ‘power – with,’” he continued, laying before me pictures of movements of peoples across continents and across centuries.  It is the power of unions, of co-operatives, of student groups and racial minorities.  In fact, it is the power of militaries as well: people committed to working together at risk of self for the benefit of something bigger than themselves.  Having just mentally walked through the Last Supper, that not-so-good cross of Good Friday, and the mysterious disappearance from the tomb of Easter, it’s not hard to see Jesus’ ministry as another form of Power With.

           

     Another man once told me of a third kind of power:  Power Under.  As a small farmer and a member of this community, he practiced this kind of power as a means of survival.  Many of us do.  It’s that “under the radar” form of self-protection and maintenance, staying out of harm’s way from those with plenty of Power Over.  So many of our undocumented neighbors have been practicing this form for so long, it makes it difficult to imagine another way.  It also makes it dangerous.

           

     As our young people have taken to the streets and the legislatures to protest our inability to protect them from gun violence in their schools, I have both cheered and wondered.  As the recent shooting of Stephon Clark by police in his grandma’s Sacramento backyard illustrates horribly, once again, our young black men aren’t safe anywhere.  Neither are the DACA students and their parents, whole families flying under the radar for years.

           

     Do we have the power to fix any of this?  I think we do, together.

           

     In a New York Times editorial last week, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated repealing the Second Amendment.  His arguments were sound and based in the constitution.  Perhaps in the face of losing all gun sales, the NRA’s backers would be divided and weakened into allowing our legislators to pass regulations against the worst weapons, the ones we do not need in our closets much less on the streets.  Perhaps if fewer guns were in our closets and on our streets, our police officers’ fingers would be less itchy.

           

     Our undocumented neighbors, however, need another solution.  They need us to come forward into our public forums and speak for them, we who do not need papers, who do not face having our lives ripped apart by speaking.  We need to advocate for legislation to be passed in Congress to make legal pathways to citizenship for people who are operating as citizens but flying under the radar.  We need to be walking with them in spirit while they stay low.  It’s what our citizenship allows – and calls us – to do.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who often feels powerless but for words.  You can send her your ideas for reform c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Unhidden Figures

Published Mar. 21, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     A miracle occurred at last Tuesday’s Lindsay City Council meeting:  people came.   The largest percentage of them came because there were issues on the agenda which they wanted to address:  two resolutions asking for official support from our town, one on DACA, the other on moving Eagle Mountain Casino from the Tule River Reservation to some land the tribe owns near the Porterville airport.

           

     A third group, however, came to address an issue from the Council’s previous agenda Feb. 27^th:  the transfer of grant monies from the project of upgrading the town’s baseball facility, the Olive Bowl, to the new project of demolishing the city’s public golf course and building new soccer fields there.  Eight teenaged girls stood behind their little league coach as he demonstrated their need for community support.

           

     The overall effect, in my mind, was to disprove a theory long held by many in this town:  that no one cares.  Often here in Lindsay, as in small towns everywhere, people are reluctant to express their opinions, especially if their opinions appear to be at odds with the powers that be.  They can be reluctant to seem different, which is more difficult in small towns than in urban centers.  But when things matter, when things really matter, people will – and do – step up to the plate.

           

     Councilwoman Laura Cortes brought the DACA resolution to the Council’s agenda.  It says, in part, that “the City Council of the City of Lindsay stands in strong support” of the thousands of people affected by the pending loss of the DACA program.  It also urges “the swift passage of (S. 1615) and (H.R. 3440) Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act - of 2017. . .a bill that will allow thousands of young students that have lived in the United States for years, and call it home, to realize their education dream and give them a path to legalizing their immigration status.”

           

     As our newest council member, Cortes’ action was bold.  It was rewarded by passage 4:0, with Councilman Watson abstaining.  But the real value was seeing the youth of this town step forward to the microphone and tell the Council what it wanted:  relief for themselves and their neighbors from the terrible prospects imposed by the current U.S. ICE deportation efforts.  I was in awe of them and their leaders.  Our teenagers were every bit as eloquent in speaking up for the realities of their lives as those students from Parkland have been about theirs.  Their issue is no less threatening.

           

     Friday I stopped by the library and found a book at the front desk that was offered to me for free, part of a program to generate interest in reading.  It was Tim Z. Hernandez’ book All They Will Call You, published last year, about his project getting names on the graves of the unnamed deportees killed in a plane crash in 1948.  The crash – and the namelessness of the deportees – was memorialized in a song by Woody Guthrie titled “Plane Wreck Over Los Gatos Canyon” but known by many simply as “Deportee.”  The last two lines of the chorus say “You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane.  All they will call you will be Deportee.”

           

     As I took the book home, I realized that one of the beauties of this current movement to staunch deportations is that we are working, as a people, to protect against this namelessness, this loss of identity.  With students like ours, we are likely to succeed at least at that.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who always has a song in her head.  You can send her your concerns about Lindsay or other small towns c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.