People With No Names: The Undocumented # 114

This is acrylic on canvas 12" x 30".  A little over a week ago it was Holy Thursday when priests all over the world washed people's feet in a re-enactment of The Last Supper.  In fact,  our new pope washed feet at a juvenile detention center in Rome and EVEN the feet of several women!  I started thinking about all of the immigrants walking up to the United States and that verse from Isaiah, (that is repeated in Romans), "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news...".  Here in the Sonoran Desert,  people actually have to walk over rugged mountain terrain to enter the U.S. What 'good news' can they possibly be bringing to us?  Well it turns out there is a 'Barrio Effect' that immigrants bring with them.  It is an actual, medically documented fact that people who live in poor Latino neighborhoods are healthier than our own homegrown poor people.  Infant mortality rate is lower, neighborhoods really matter, they have access to traditional foods (which are prepared from scratch), extended family members live nearby or with each other.  There is ethnic and racial pride.  As was expressed in the Broadway musical "Porgy and Bess", "I've got plenty of nothing, and nothings plenty for me".  Ethnic enclaves share struggles, and that social life actually causes biological changes in the body and lowers stress.  In our terrifically independent lives, our newest societal members, maybe, have something to teach us.  We may be 'connected' by our abundance of social media, but we sure aren't preparing meals, touching, talking and living together.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #67

Okay, you may think that you have seen this painting before...you have seen a smaller, different version. This oil on stretched canvas is 24" x 12". It is of a boy who is part of a multi-family co-op that organically grows raspberries and strawberries. It is a wonderful story (all the more so because of it's rarity) of immigrants from Mexico and Central America finding/creating safe, dignified work to support their families. They had help from kind community members securing a lease on the land, learning effective organic methodology, and selecting desirable crops to grow.

This immigrant story is highly unusual. As Father Daniel Groody (Notre Dame professor and scholar on world-wide migration) writes, the immigrant story most often follows the "four 'action verbs' of the Last Supper narrative---taking, blessing, breaking, giving. People 'take up'the decision to leave their homeland, 'bless God' for the gift of their lives and families (even in the midst of tremendous suffering), 'break themselves open' so that they can feed those that they love, and 'give themselves away' for the nourishment of others, even at the cost of their own lives." ---A PROMISED LAND, A PERILOUS JOURNEY p. 304-305.