Recently I’ve been listening to the audiobook, American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummings. My brother and sister-in-law recommended it so strongly that I was compelled to order it right away. I knew it would be a difficult hearing but nothing in my experience could have prepared me for the coming journey.
American Dirt is 12 hours of unrelenting nail-biting. It opens with Lydia and her eight-year-old son Luca hidden in a bathroom while 16 members of their family, including Lydia’s husband, mother, and sister and her children, are gunned down by the cartel during her niece’s fifteenth birthday party. Over the last few weeks I have followed their harrowing journey to el norte to escape promised death by the local hefe; a revenge killing for the article that Lydia’s journalist husband had published about the cartel that controlled Acapulco.
Hours after listening to the heavily accented narration of the audiobook all my thoughts have a Spanish accent. Even as I write this the words flow through a tunnel of Spanish that makes the English words sound thick and bulky. After the accent that drapes the words like an elegant coat in my brain falls away, my own dull inner voice emerging, I know that more than just my inner thoughts have been altered. I cannot unhear what I have heard. I cannot unsee the extreme and calculated violence. I cannot un-feel my empathetic sadness for their losses, their rape, their constant need to remind themselves that traveling on the top of a cargo train is not normal. I cannot untie the knot in my stomach.
This week I cooked refried beans and ate them with tortillas and avocado to be in solidarity with Lydia and Luca and the children that are their companions; the children who have assisted and saved them and whom they have defended and nurtured. Once Lydia recalls a happier time in her life, before she could have imagined the slaughter of her family, cooking dinner and remembering she was out of garlic. She lamented that dinner would be bland. Now each time I chop and smell garlic cooking in the pan I think of this imagined moment in this imaginary life and I am grateful that my dinner will carry the depth of a moment far beyond the flavor imparted. When the migrants are hungry and are fed by way of the kindness of strangers I imagine I would feed them. But when they are hidden and protected from capture I wonder if I would hide them. I would like to think I would. Lydia reveals through her own actions that no matter who you are or what you think you would do; you don’t actually know what you would do under profound and life-threatening circumstances. I pray to God to help me to be the kind of person who would risk my life to save the life of another. When the women in the story gather together to pray the rosary I imagine the beads between my fingers and I mouth the words of my own prayer on their behalf. I feel the relief of falling into the arms of God, momentarily still, momentarily calm, momentarily safe. I wish they would pray more often so I would feel better.
My brother said that while he was listening to the story he was “so worried about those folks” that he had to stop listening. I too have been relieved when my car comes to the end of its journey and I can take a rest from listening to the heart-stopping story so that I can breathe again. He said he often had to remind himself that they weren’t actual people. But the fact that the story is fictional does not give me any relief because the story is based on a collective truth for countless thousands of people, each with their own stories of fleeing persecution, captivity, rape, slavery, torture, and slaughter. It is a story so deeply woven into the fabric of the Latino experience that I am keenly aware that there is no part of this fiction that is not true.
Stories have this kind of power; to transmit authentic human experience by way of a fabricated tableau of imagined situations; the line between true events and truth is sometimes so very thin that it evaporates entirely leaving behind the realization that the effort to determine truth from fiction was always a false choice. There is no part of Lydia and Luca’s story I would want to live, and yet by hearing their story, the collective story of their people, of their nation, I am living it too. With every passing mile, they and every reader who follows them to and across the dessert experiences something on the other side of empathy: transformation.
Early in Lydia and Luca’s escape their lives depend on the assistance of a missionary couple. The couple have devoted their lives to bringing groups of youth from the United States into Mexico to expose them to a kind of religious freedom previously unknown to them. In Mexico the piety of religious life is as much a part of everyday rituals as is wearing clothes. The people speak openly of God and God’s blessings. The people pray and cross themselves for this and that. The people remember and bless the dearly departed each time their names are spoken. The people pray before eating. The acts of daily life are marked by blessing, ritual and ceremony. This kind of open religious expression as a social norm is largely unknown in America. It is a foreign concept to most Americans born into a secular society in which religious affiliation, and even more so religious expression, is becoming more foreign all the time.
While secularization had already made deep in-roads decades ago, the exception was Christmas. I recall the Christmas Eves of my youth: attending elegant parties in the grand homes of my southern hometown followed by the pilgrimage to the church for the midnight service where hundreds crowded in to hear the Nativity story. For many this annual obligation afforded them the only experience of the Gospel they would receive. I recall my father preaching earnestly and faithfully to the full church though I cannot recall a single word. But the story of Jesus’ birth remains clear and unchanged: the story of Mary’s visitation and she and Joseph’s pilgrimage to safety, from the start and all the while guided, protected, and aided by angels and dreams, the quiet birth taking place in a barn, mother and child surrounded by farm animals, the huge star shining brightly in the sky hailing a new King and the coming of a kingdom, a kingdom in which the lion and the lamb lie down together and swords are beaten into plows, the summoning of those who were awake and alert and watching for the sign – the shepherds in their fields watching over their flocks, the wisdom teachers of the East carrying the spiritual gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. There are many stories in the great canon of sacred text we call the bible, but during this holy week, the beginning of Christmastide, it seems to me that if this is the only story one should ever hear from Christiandom, and for many it is, then it is a sufficient proclamation. It is a story sufficient to lead us to the other side of empathy, into transformation; a changed heart and an open mind. This story of God coming into the world has the power to compel us to pray: Here I am Lord, an agent of change, an agent of good will, an ambassador of the good news.
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