People Matter

Biblical Witness: Ecclesiastes 1:4 – 7

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow.

Contemporary Witness: Article excerpt from apomm.net – The words of; Álvaro Enciso

Well, when I first moved here, I saw this map of all the casualties of the immigration policy. And it’s full of red dots of locations where bodies were found. They tried to reach someplace here in the U.S. and died in the desert from lack of water, too much heat and too much sun. But also in the winter from hypothermia, you know, you freeze to death.

So a lot of people die from heart attacks, busted ulcers, all kinds of things. And a lot of people get hit by cars and some people get killed by who knows who.

I’m a migrant. I came here from South America in, in the sixties. I came here with all the papers in order, by plane. And, I came looking for the American dream, like everybody else. An opportunity to be somebody. To improve your quality of life. To find a future that looks a little bit brighter than what you had back home. So for years, I always wanted to connect in some way with my roots, with who I am.

Because despite all the time that I’ve been here, I’m still a Hispanic man and a Latino man. And people always remind me of that. You know, they don’t want to let me forget that I’m a pseudo gringo. And somehow you get this idea that you are an outsider and that you don’t belong here. Even though I’ve spent most of my life here.

So I wanted to find a way to connect with my migration, sort of be one of them. So I started hiking to the sites where a body had been found or human remains of some sort. I went to stand there and see if there was anything there, a vestige of what happened there, the suffering and the disappointment and the failure and everything.

Immigration is a two-part thing you know. The person who leaves to come here and the people who stay behind, and I was trying to connect all of that. But, you know, I’m not really an activist. And I wanted to treat this thing with some sort of a separation because I didn’t want it to get too sentimental. So I was trying to find a way to document those deaths, you know, over 3000 of them.

One of the ideas about contemporary art, or at least my way of thinking about it, is making the invisible visible. So I needed to give these people presence. I needed to mark the locations somehow.

So I started going to these sites. I will go there sometimes by myself and I will just go flat on the ground and hoping to find some epiphany or some sort of revelation, some cosmic message. This was going to be the project that had a lot of meaning and purpose. I was even thinking that this was going to be my legacy. You know, that it’s a beat up old guy putting crosses out in the desert.

Digital photograph. Alvaro Enciso
From the multimedia project “donde mueren los suenos”(where dreams die).
Cross for an unidentified male, whose skeletal remains were recovered in 2005, in Southern Arizona.

The cross connects, a lot of things. It’s a symbol of death. It’s a symbol of finality. You know, the Catholics didn’t invent the cross. They appropriated the cross from the Roman empire. The Romans used to make the crosses, big ones, to kill people. They used to hang them there. You know, common criminals, enemies of the empire, false prophets. And they hang them there for three or four days without any water under the sun until they died. Which is exactly what it was happening here.

So the cross was beginning to make sense, but I was a little reluctant because I didn’t want to be seen as some kind of Christian fanatic putting crosses out there. So I decided that this cross was going to be not a religious cross, that it didn’t have any Christianity in it. It was a universal symbol. It was nothing more than a geometric equation. You know, a vertical line on a horizontal line. The vertical line means that you’re still alive, that you’re walking. And the horizontal line means that you’re dead. That you are flat on the ground, that this is it. And where those two lines meet, that’s the point where the tragedy took place. Where the story of David and Goliath in this case, Goliath always wins, you know, because the poor person from Mexico or from Guatemala cannot compete with all the technology and all of the hate and all of the things so that he, he or she always loses at that encounter.

Reflection:        “People Matter”

Alvaro Enciso ~ photo taken by Stefan Falke

A few years ago when Marcia and I went to Tucson, we met Álvaro Enciso and spent an afternoon talking to him about his work of paying respects to those who have died crossing the desert from Central and South America to seek a safer life. Can you imagine risking death to seek safety from the danger you’re leaving behind? Sit with that a minute. A lot of these people are seeking asylum for various reasons. If they live through crossing the desert, what awaits them here all too often is imprisonment in an ICE Detention Center with a ridiculously high bail set for them and lots of prejudice that they have come to the States to abuse our hospitality.

Our Ecclesiastes reading today reminds us that the world, creation, and life goes on and on. It has been going on before our generation and will go on after. Depending on how we respond to our current climate crisis, human life may not go on for as many generations as we think, but after creation gets rid of us it will heal itself and something else will happen. It’s funny how God isn’t mentioned in this reading. While I believe that God set the system in motion and set up the parameters of what works and what doesn’t – in essence that God created the physics that governs our world – what we do with it, what we learn and how we respond, is up to us. The one called The Teacher, who wrote Ecclesiastes, tells us that life is cyclical. We’re a part of it for awhile. How then shall we live?

Álvaro Enciso made a life-changing impact on me with how he has chosen to live. The deaths in the desert that he documents by marking their place of dying with his crosses are people that other people loved. Each one is someone another person or group of people wonders what happened to. His is a quiet mission. He does this without fanfare.  Some have tried to stop him. Others have desecrated the crosses he’s placed. I won’t go into detail about what people have done, but it’s ugly, vile, and brutish. His persistence that each one deserves proper recognition is as much a part of his legacy for me as is the work itself. I can’t think of anything that anyone could do that is more important. In my words, from my tradition, I believe there is nothing more sacred and holy than what he is doing.

Let me tell you about these crosses. In the interview we read he said, that the crosses are a universal symbol, nothing more than a geometric equation. Quoting the interview, he says, “You know, a vertical line on a horizontal line. The vertical line means that you’re still alive, that you’re walking. And the horizontal line means that you’re dead. That you are flat on the ground, that this is it. And where those two lines meet, that’s the point where the tragedy took place.” Do you remember the red dots he mentioned that are on the maps marking where migrants died? Here is that red dot, right at the intersection where the tragedy took place. All of what he adds to these crosses he found in the desert. Remnants of the migrants making their way across. A pop can here and there. A water bottle. There are few things that they carry in order to survive; when they don’t, it all gets left there. He uses what he finds to add to the cross, to remember them and honour their lives.

What I want to say next may seem painfully obvious. But I think it’s something that gets forgotten or maybe misplaced. It’s the whole point of this though and what was life-changing for me. While this is something that I knew and have known all my life to one degree or another, what I learned that afternoon talking to Álvaro Enciso was that people matter. More than anything else, people should be what matter most. More than money. More than rules. More than religion. And people who are most often dismissed by others as not mattering – matter more and deserve more of our attention, respect, and actions.

This is the reason our faith compels us to action. It’s why we resist laws that are unjust. Whenever a practice or conversation diminishes another person’s value, we have to push against it. People matter too much to ignore violence against them – whether it’s political violence, social violence, emotional, physical, or spiritual violence. That’s why we do what we do, pray the way we pray, and reconsider our faith practices when we find out they are ways to prop up power rather than build up communities.

While we’re here, spinning on this globe with the seasons moving from one to the next, the wind blowing around and the streams flowing, we make our mark. What will be our legacy? Let’s make it happen, together.