People With No Names - The Undocumented #59

This is another oil on canvas 8"x 16". These are the deportees waiting in the cold for more assistance. Notice the one on the right putting on new socks.   As I am listening to the news of all the travel delays in the U.S. right now due to winter storms,  I find myself thinking, "If you are traveling on foot those flight delays don't apply to you!"
In my family we like to use 'neologisms' (made up new words). In my readings about immigration I read a great one...the 'Sanctuary' workers of the 1980s said that they were trying to 'conscientize' North Americans to encourage them to work for immigration reform. I guess its a new version of 'conscience raising' from the '60s. Either way, I like it and I think it is happening to me.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #49

This Guatemalan refugee is the proud owner of a modest cafe in Tucson.  She, along with 1-1.5 million Central American people were driven from their homes by violence and civil war. (A war that we have since learned was aided and abetted by the United States.)  Hundreds of thousands of these people made their way north into Mexico and on into the United States.  The New York Times called their flight one of "the most determined and concentrated migrations of any national group to the United States in recent history".   The official U.S. government response was to greet the migrants as criminals, imprison them and return them to the death squads, guerrillas, and military sweeps. Fortunately, ordinary citizens listened to their stories, saw their scars and thus began an official "Sanctuary" movement and a new underground railroad. The Arizona Daily Star, a daily newspaper that was sympathetic with the underground railroad, commented, "America at its greatest has always been an America as a refuge from persecution, as a protector of the helpless, and a voice for justice." Amen. I am getting a lot of information and quoting liberally from a book titled 'Sanctuary- A Story of American Conscience and Law in Collision' written by N.Y. Times reporter Ann Crittenden.

People With No Names - The Undocumented #3.

This man was moving stones into a real estate agent's Lexus in Tucson. It was 108 degrees outside.