Neither Criminal nor Alien

I still find it distasteful that I am prohibited from serving communion through the border fence at Friendship Park.  Would our nation’s security be compromised if I were allowed to offer people gathered in Tijuana a piece of bread and a swig of juice?   I am reminded of the inherently universal demands of the Christian faith and the inherently restrictive demands of the modern nation-state.  Perhaps some Christians do not experience this tension as a part of their struggle with the life of faith, but living on the border, as I do, I find it inescapable.

Among the people who distinguished himself by the seriousness with which he treated the sacrament during the months in 2009 when I was serving communion through the border fence was a man I’ll call Manuel Ybarra.  Manuel had been deported in the fall of 2008, and was separated from his wife, Laura, and their three children who were living in San Diego. Most Sundays Laura, a U.S. citizen, would travel to Tijuana to spend time with Manuel, and on those Sundays the two of them would come to communion together.  Sometimes, though – when Laura’s time was too scarce to go back and forth across the border – she would come to Friendship Park to greet Manuel through the fence.  Sometimes Manuel would show up all alone. 

Manuel Ybarra at Friendship Park 2008.
Photo Credit: Maria Teresa Fernandez

Whatever the case, I could count on Manuel being present for communion, and I could see him waving from a distance on the day that I was denied access for the first time. It dawned on me that the park had worked its magic on us. Manuel and I had become friends.

Manuel Ybarra was born and raised in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon. In 1989, at the age of 19, he moved to San Diego to look for work, of which he found plenty. A strong man with carpentry skills taught to him by his father, Manuel was the ideal member of a construction crew, someone who could be trusted with work requiring a certain craftsmanship, but also someone who would do the heavy lifting if that was what the day required.

Two years into his stay in San Diego, Manuel made a horrible mistake, one that would change his life forever. Out drinking at a bar one night, Manuel and two friends exchanged words with another group of men. Soon a fight broke out and the owner of the bar called the police. Along with the others, Manuel was arrested, but because Manuel had a pocketknife on him the police charged him with assault with a deadly weapon. As he recounted this story to me two decades later, Manuel hung his head in shame and cried. “I was young and stupid,” he told me through tears. “I am now a very different man.”

Manuel made another crucial mistake when he took the advice of the public defender assigned to him by the court, pleading guilty to the charge of felony assault in exchange for a reduced sentence of two years in jail. Decades later – despite having given up drinking; despite having stayed entirely on the right side of the law; despite having married a U.S. citizen and started what would otherwise have been considered an All-American family – Manuel Ybarra would be branded a “criminal alien,” a label that would forever prevent him from regularizing his status as a permanent resident of the United States. (The category, “criminal alien,”does not in fact exist in U.S. law, but has been created as a catch-all category by U.S. immigration officials.)

By the time I met him –deported and separated from his family – Manuel was feeling utterly trapped. One Sunday he told me he had found a job in Tijuana and was working as a repairman for the city’s public utility. The rate of pay, he told me, was one hundred and fifteen dollars a week for a 55-hour work week. “I can make that much in a good afternoon in San Diego,” he said.

The finances were untenable. Laura suffered from a chronic case of epilepsy and had long been unable to work, and the family had always depended almost entirely on Manuel’s income. Since his deportation Laura had filed for welfare benefits for herself and their three teenagers (also U.S. citizens by birth). It was the first time, Manuel assured me, the family had ever relied on public assistance.

As the months wore on, Manuel’s resolve increased. If once he was a rash young man, he was now a husband and father with responsibilities. He would go about the business of crossing the border methodically he told me, working with Laura and his extended family to save the money he would need to hire a reliable coyote. And when the time was right he would cross the border illegally, as he had done twenty years before.

A few weeks after being turned away from Friendship Park, I got a call from Manuel, who informed me he was back with Laura in San Diego. He had walked for two days through the mountains east of San Diego, he told me, and he never wanted to do it again.

“Fue muy, muy duro el viaje,” he told me. The trip was very, very hard.

It occurred to me Manuel might just as well have been talking about his life.