We Are, An Introduction and A First Selected Work: This Is Why They Come - A Terrible Loss

This is why they come...

Every year, my class publishes what we call our ENL Magazine, a collection of writings by my students, all recent immigrants to the United States  At first, the goal of our little publication was to teach people in our community something about today's immigrant experience, but with all the fervor out there about immigrants these days, I feel that it's important for people to learn some things they do not know.  

I've been working with immigrant students for 16 years now, and in that time I've learned a lot of things I never knew before, things which inspire me to be their advocate as best I can.  Before I begin to share their words with you, I'd like to share some of the things I've learned over the years...

- Like elsewhere in the U.S., the population of immigrant students, especially from Central America, has grown and continues to grow every year.

- The young people I work with are just that...young people...kids.  If they had had their way, they'd still be home in their countries, with their families and their friends.  The great majority of them did not choose to come here, but most know why they did.

- I have had students from many countries, representing five continents and more than twenty countries.  I have both documented and undocumented students, and every single one of them is a human being who deserves as good a life as anyone.

- My students have experienced things that you and I will never experience.  The only gun I've ever seen has been in the holster of a police officer.  I've never seen or heard a gun used, and I've never seen one used on a relative.  Many of my students have.  I've never been threatened with my life by scary people hanging around outside of my school, or have had my family extorted for money for 'protection,' nor have I experienced threats to my mother or father or younger siblings.  I never walked for days on end in the hot desert sun without food or water, or been made to ride in vehicles with literally dozens and dozens of strangers in a cramped little space, or holed up in a strange house, hiding in darkness, terrified, waiting for a signal that it's time to move on.  I've never seen dismembered body parts or been threatened with a machete or made to swim across alligator-infested waters in the darkness of night.  I've never experienced these things, much less as a child.

- How desperate does a parent have to be to set their children off on a journey such as this?  Pretty damned desperate!  I once was told by a student that his little brother of 12 years had just left El Salvador on his way here.  For six weeks, his mother had no way of knowing where he was or if he was safe all that time.  All she had was God.  

I think you get the idea, but that's just me talking.  Now I'd like you too hear from some of my students.  I've published excerpts from this magazine in the past, and now that we have a new edition, I'd like to share some more.  

This world, this country has a great shortage of empathy, and especially on the part of many who claim to follow Jesus, probably one of the most loving and caring people who ever walked this Earth.  It makes me sad.  Even so, I still feel in my heart that there are people I know who will turn their backs to these stories.  Ignorance truly is bliss!

I can tell you firsthand that it's really hard to get these kids to share their stories.  I tried my best to convince them that they have an opportunity to help somehow, and believe me, there is plenty more to tell far and above what I will share here, but even I may never hear it.  In the meantime, here's the first piece I'd like to share, a piece entitled A Terrible Loss.  It is a story that was borne out of one sentence this anonymous student had written in another piece and I thought it worthy of attention, so we created a separate essay.  This story is true.  I've listened to him speak it and I have seen photographs.  Please read on and stay tuned for more from We Are... (warning, some may find the following content disturbing)

A Terrible Loss

Something sad happened just one week after I came to this country.  My best friend, Cristian, who lived with his mother in the same town as me in Guatemala, was killed by gangsters.  She was murdered, too, by the same killers I escaped from just a couple of months earlier. It hurts that I could not to go to the wake and say goodbye to him.

You see, when the gangsters approached him to ask him for money for protection, he decided to not comply.  He tried to fight back.  He lost.  He tried to use his fists to fight off the gangsters, but they had guns.  My poor friend was shot in the chest, and then they shot his mother, too.  Both of them died.   

The news was a blow to me because we were like brothers.  We were friends ever since we met five years before in school.  It was also especially hard because it decimated practically everybody in his family, and left his sister without parents and without a brother.  My friend’s father had died when Cristian was very young.  To this day I don’t know whatever happened to his sister.    

Anonymous

Lost

outsidethebeltway

In another piece written by one of my students, a young teenage girl from Guatemala writes about her harrowing journey from Central America to the United States. Freshly arrived, she wrote this as an essay in Spanish and translated it via Google translate.  As I read through the piece in my editing stage, I thought it read more like a poem.  To me, it captures the inner struggle that these children must face and the constant fear they endure during their voyage.  Check out Lost...

I am a Guatemalan with dreams of overcoming my problems

My trip started on December 4, 2017

With a prayer to God to take care of me on the way

There I left my childhood, my family

To come to this new place

With a lump in my throat, I said goodbye

Time progressed and with each moment

I was moving farther way from them

Two days by bus, we reached the border with Mexico

We crossed at night, in fear, ,among so many strangers

We arrived, locked away for two days until finally they came for us

A truck, ready to start crossing the desert

They dropped us at 3 A.M., 

with nothing but backpacks, water and a garbage bag

To protect us from the cold and the rain

In the morning, we were separated into three groups

Told to look for the famous line with guides who "knew where we were"

By the fourth day, we were all supposed to meet again

Unfortunately it was not meant to be

What happened to the rest of the group, I do not know

The guide went back for the rest, leaving us

On our own, to get to that line

I know he feared something would happen to us too

But he left us anyway, to walk through the desert on our own

Two days, no water, and the fatigue was surely fatal

The only thing we had was to ask God

To give us the strength to follow on

I don't know whatever happened to my travel companions

But I wish them the best since their decisions weren't easy either

As always, thanks for reading.  Stay tuned for more...

Judge Us for Who We Are, Not What We Are

As promised, this will be the first of several stories written for my class' ENL Magazine that I spoke about earlier.  It was written by a long time student of mine and it speaks to the feelings of a young girl who has experienced both the good and the bad about coming here.  Take a look...

The United States is a country that offers many opportunities and is a much safer place than El Salvador, but the separation of races to me is ruining the beauty of this country. I am a high school student and it is sad to see how other young people my age see me so differently than they see each other. In the five years that I have lived in this country, I have learned to speak English, to integrate myself in the culture and the way of life here, and yet I have not made one American friend.

None of this has been easy. It took a lot of hard work to learn the language, to be able to communicate, and yet I feel so rejected. I feel so isolated from my American peers, and even some teachers, too. Sometimes I feel that I’m not treated with respect and kindness by them, and they never even try to speak to me. Now I'm not saying that this is everyone, it’s not. There are many very nice and kind people here, too, but the ones who treat me differently because I'm from another country, because I speak another language, or that I have a different skin color, makes me angry. These things don’t make me less than them. Being Hispanic doesn’t mean that I am not intelligent, or that I can’t do what anyone else can do.

This separating ideology that some people have prevents them from seeing that really we are all the same. If they just take notice, they will realize that there is no difference between an American and a Hispanic. We are all human beings! I don’t understand this separation. If we are equal, why are we treated badly because of our differences?

I understand that in my country there are bad people and that many of them come to this country and do bad things. They embarrass me and fill me with indignation and sadness to see that they are like that, but just because they are like that doesn’t mean I should be judged differently or badly. We shouldn’t have to pay the price for their bad behavior. Get to know me before treating me badly. There are as many young Hispanics like me who just want to study, be honest, not do bad things and not take people’s jobs away. I think that God rewards people who struggle so hard to achieve.

For every person who reads this, I invite you to give yourself an opportunity to get to know me, to get to know some of us. We’re not all bad. Know us and judge us according to what you observe in us, not simply because we are Hispanic. We’re not all gang members or murderers. You should thank God that you are blessed. You do not have the need to immigrate to another country for your safety, for food, or to just save your lives. Imagine if you had to move to another country for these reasons, and people there treat you with indifference, as we are treated here. Imagine you had to learn a whole new language in order to be able to survive in that country. Imagine what that would be like. I can tell you it would be frustrating.

Like I said, we are all human, with feelings, emotions, and each with our own problems. We are the same. So I invite you to leave that race-separating ideology, to not judge us without knowing us. Say hello. Make a friend. See that we are all good people with dreams to succeed in this jungle full of wild animals.

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING

My Purpose: An Introduction to "Why We Came and How We Got Here"

From my Facebook, about two weeks ago:

Hot off the press...after weeks and weeks of writing, re-writing and editing, this labor of love is finally complete! In this, our 15th edition, my students share some pretty compelling stories of why they came here and how they got here.

Like the generations of immigrants who came before them, these youngsters made their oftentimes dangerous treks here to escape extreme poverty and a very war-like environment.

They’re all great kids and they were afraid to share their stories because, well, we all know the attitudes towards immigrants these days, and so the only way I could get them to share their stories was to promise to publish them anonymously.

I’m very proud of ‘Why We’re Here and How We Got Here: True Stories of Young Immigrants,’ and I am thinking about publishing this as a PDF. Please click ‘like’if you’d want a copy. Thanks!

In the past couple of years it's become evident to me that I have a purpose in life.  It's something that I'm not yet totally comfortable with, but I find myself being driven by it.  From my own actions and reactions to the things going on around me lately, it's become pointedly clear that the things I'm doing are as natural to me as anything else in my life, ever, and so when the recently heated debate about immigration came bubbling to an ugly surface, I decided I had to act on it.  I put myself wholeheartedly behind what I do, what I live, and what I believe, and this is my truth.

It is with that in mind that I pointed my class' annual magazine in the direction of laying stories bare.  As one who teaches some social studies in my classroom, I know that primary sources of information, sources coming from those who have had actual experiences connected to a topic, are the best kinds of sources to go by, and so what better way to convey the stories of today's immigrants than to hear from them.  

Me and my students began this undertaking about six weeks prior to publication, and I'm proud of them for sharing what they experienced.  I've learned a lot about immigration from them that I never knew before, and I think that sharing the stories beyond the area of my school district is a worthwhile endeavor.  So I begin with my own introduction to the publication, a piece that lays out the process behind it.  Read on and stay tuned for some of their stories...

Dear Readers,

Welcome to “Why We Came and How We Got Here,” the latest version of our ENL Magazine. We began publishing this annual collection in 2004 in the hope that readers might gain a new perspective on our students, an often-misunderstood group of youngsters. To this point, I believe that goal has only been partially achieved. With the political climate of the country the way it is these days, misinformation and misunderstanding about the immigrant experience has reached an all-time high, and so our purpose for this year’s edition takes on a greater significance than ever before.

A Class Project Leads to a Mission

Early in the school year, the students in my ENL class completed an autobiographical project. This wasn’t the first time I’d ever assigned such a task, but it was the first time I ever really had to sell them on something. You see, with today’s immigrants drawing such open criticism and anger, I wanted to gain a better understanding of their stories. I wanted to know the real reasons why they came here and what they went through in making their way here. Even though I’ve been working with these kids for so long, even I wasn’t aware of the real answers to these questions.

Virtually all of the students were reluctant to tell their stories, and it was a hard sell to get them to do so. I had to assure them that the things they were going to share would stay within our group. In addition to a written piece, the students were also required to make a presentation to the class, sharing not only their personal stories of why and how they came to be here, but other such things as what they’d put on their bucket lists, some of their favorite things, and even their hopes for the future. It was during these presentations that my eyes opened wider than they had in fifteen years.

For more than two weeks, each of my students came to the front of the class to share their auto-biographies, and I learned things that I may have suspected over the years, but never really heard told so openly. Laughter and tears, and plenty of anguish permeated the room with each presentation, and those watching even just one of them either commiserated with the speaker or became consumed with empathy.

Empathy. It’s a word I often use in my classroom and one that I wholeheartedly believe everyone needs a little more of. If we make an effort to empathize more, we might just gain a whole new awareness that we didn’t have before, and hopefully these new perspectives might make this world a more tolerable place.

Once our presentations had finished, we continued with the theme by tackling the NY Times bestselling book, “Enrique’s Journey” by Sonia Nazario. It tells the story of a boy from Honduras who makes the harrowing and dangerous trek to the United States in search of his mother who had abandoned him when he was only five years old. Once again, memories were jarred by the many stories found in the book. 

A New Mission

When the time came to begin working on this publication, it seemed that general attitudes towards immigrants had become even worse than before. New stories and videos showing harassment towards immigrants, more specifically Hispanics, seemed to pop up every day on social media. News outlets cover raids and roundups of undocumented immigrants, families being forcibly separated, children being held in secretive, jail-like camps. The list of stories goes on and on and the more we hear, the worse the situation becomes.

In the poem, “Push and Pull,” I speak of the plight of the many generations of foreigners whose desperate situations led them to immigrate to this country. Each group of immigrants had its own reasons for coming, and most often it was to flee danger or poverty. The stories of today’s immigrant are no different, only the rules have since changed.

So I thought that perhaps we, our little group of immigrants who chose to settle here in Southold, might do our own little part in helping people gain a better understanding of who they are and why they came. Their stories are sometimes raw and always very personal, and show just how desperate these immigrants must be to undergo such a dangerous journey that they are not guaranteed to finish. I believe that the immigrant population in Southold is a microcosm of the greater immigrant population and their individual stories reflect the experiences of the whole.

Again, selling this idea was a difficult task. Some of the stories contained within are highly personal, and I am sure that still there were difficult details that were omitted because of their emotional impact. I convinced my students that this undertaking will be worth it if we get even one person to see immigration in a different light. The idea of their stories being published elicited an even greater protest than the project had, and so in the end we decided that all of the stories published would be anonymous. I encourage you to read on with an open heart and an open mind.

Thank you,

John Myers