One leaves for Texas, another witnesses a knifing and the third has a near fatal motorcycle accident One night a year ago, Félix, our gardener of twelve years, left without notice with his two brothers to work at high-paying construction jobs in Texas. Stew didn't take it well and cussed Félix for his disloyalty for …
Continue reading The hard and tangled lives of our ranch hands
It's been almost a year since our gardener Félix went to work in Texas, along with his brothers Juan and Sergio, all of them undocumented. This was Félix's fourth trip across the border. He was a teenager the first two times, and was detained and sent back the third time by Mexican cops, who stole …
Continue reading Our gardener's Texas odyssey and the self-defeating politics of U.S. immigration
To help readers understand America's chaotic exit from Afghanistan, I've drawn up the following imaginary, yet too real, scenarios: You're hosting a dinner party at your home, for six or eight of your closest friends. After the dessert course, you hear Attila and a gang of Huns banging insistently at the door. Your reaction would be:a. …
Continue reading There was never an easy way out of Afghanistan
I suspect some of the attendees at the lecture last week by Francisco Cantú, author of "The Line Becomes a River," a memoir of his four years as a U.S. Border Patrol Agent, may have left the packed auditorium, at the Centro de Bellas Artes, somewhat disappointed.They may have expected a more evangelical presentation about …
My trip to Cuba with my husband Stew in 2013 in large part was a pilgrimage to try to reconstruct my childhood, abruptly interrupted in 1962 when, at age fourteen, I had been shipped off to Miami with thousands of other children, presumably to save us from the communist apocalypse about to engulf the island.What …
Continue reading Trump revives memories of my "shithole" country
After eleven years here, Mexico shouldbe home to us. But it's not that simple. In a recent post, fellow blogger Steve Cotton wondered if his house on Mexico's Pacific Coast was a "home" or merely a "house."For expats that's not a fatuous question. Stew and I vote in Chicago, our last foothold in the U.S.; have …
It's been a painful, shameful, embarrassing spectacle, even from the distance afforded by living in Mexico, to watch what passes for a debate on immigration among the Republican presidential candidates, led by Donald Trump.The more extreme and ridiculous his positions have become—starting with his opening campaign blast promising that he would build a two-thousand-mile wall …
Continue reading A not-too-modest proposal for reforming the American immigration system
Magdalena García is a fellow Cuban refugee and a Presbyterian minister who performed an act of kindness I'll never forget when my mom died twelve years ago. She organized and conducted a beautiful memorial service at her church in Chicago, with music, flowers and a moving eulogy, after the Roman Catholic parish to which I …
Short of being locked up in a Turkish prison on charges of smuggling heroine, nothing makes you feel smaller or more powerless than crossing an international border even if one of the sides is your own country.Last week on the way to San Antonio Stew and I congratulated ourselves on making such good time, about …
El Rancho Santa Clara 