Notes Toward a Theology of Cross/ing

Push Factors

It is beyond the scope of this essay to cite all the factors that “push” Mexican migration to the U.S., but we can consider at least one controversial economic policy that has had an enormous effect on immigration in the last generation, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or in Spanish, Ratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, which was ratified in January, 1994. The complexities and relative gains and losses that have resulted from this treaty have been debated for over twenty years. In sum, many U.S., Canadian, and Mexican citizens have benefitted from the passage of NAFTA, because it promotes free trade, creates jobs, and keeps food prices low. But many other North Americans have suffered profound losses. Manufacturing jobs, particularly in the U.S. and Mexico, have been lost. Competitive food prices have made sustaining a livelihood in farming impossible for many poorer Mexican farmers. ⁸

The impact of NAFTA on poorer Mexican farmers has been particularly harsh. Prior to NAFTA, Mexican corn production was subsidized so that farmers could make a living, even if it was meager. Prices were kept low so that poor people could buy food. With NAFTA’s advent in 1994, corn subsidies for Mexican corn were removed to encourage trade, while at the same time subsidies on U.S. corn remained in place. This created an imbalance in trade, and it became cheaper for Mexico to buy U.S. corn than it was for them to buy corn from their own people. Because of this imbalance, an estimated two million corn farmers have had to leave their ancestral lands to find different kinds of work. Many of them migrated north to work other people’s lands. ⁹

As an added burden on farmers who have attempted to stay on their land, modern agri-business has so thoroughly hybridized corn and the corn market that all farmers, here and in Mexico, can no longer save seed from one year to the next to replant. The corn is so specialized against pests, rot, and mold that, like the flu vaccine, it is good for only one year and unusable for the next. Farmers must buy new corn seed each year to plant, thus significantly increasing the cost of production. “Farmers who can no longer compete in the market with subsidized produce have little choice but to abandon their lands, the land of their ancestors….” ¹⁰ Many Mexican farmers cross into the U.S. to labor in our fields or in our hotels, restaurants, gardens, factories, and construction sites in order to survive.

Other “push” factors include high rates of crime, often because of drug cartels, increasing rates of unemployment, high poverty rates, and natural disasters. ¹¹ Marco, a farmer from Honduras staying in a migrant shelter in Altar, Sonora, reports the factors that forced his emigration. He and his family were producing barely enough to live on when Hurricane Mitch took all they had. “There comes a point when the poverty is so severe, when the desperation is so great, when there is nothing left to lose, that the only option available is to emigrate. After a while you start getting very hungry…Many people are afraid to explain the reasons they are trying to cross over to the north because they are afraid they will be seen as failures.” ¹²

Pull Factors

For Mexican and other Latin American immigrants the “pull” factors are opportunities for jobs, living wages, and safer living environments for their families. Some citizens of the United States perceive that immigrants come to the U.S. for an “easy” life and “handouts.” But the reality is that for the first time in many years, perhaps generations, their hard work is giving them an opportunity to survive.

Citizens of the United States have developed a type of xenophobia that tolerates outsiders as menial workers at the same time it scorns their equality as human beings. For centuries, immigrants have built U.S. infrastructure, picked our crops, reared our children, cleaned our homes, and labored at other necessary jobs that U.S. citizens would not do for such low wages. For generations, we have used immigrants for our own purposes without giving them the full rights of citizens. “The fact is that undocumented workers have not forced themselves on an unwilling society. They have filled crucial occupational niches that are not provided for by our outdated immigration system…It is a grievous injustice to take someone’s labor but not to welcome his or her full personhood.” ¹³

Beginning with African slaves’ forced migration and continuing with people who immigrated to the U.S. and were processed through Ellis Island, Americans have had a tendency to weave together concepts of race and citizenship status with hard labor. Those who have done the most menial labor have most often been people of color—African, Chinese, Mexican—who benefitted the prosperity of whites. ¹⁴ Indeed, measures have been taken throughout U.S. history to deny citizenship rights to these necessary workers, even as whites have used migrant labor to their advantage.

Jesús and Maria: Unlikely Criminals

We are sitting on the Mexico side of the border in a migrant shelter in Agua Prieta, Sonora. It is winter, and the desert night is cold. My students and I are eating dinner with hesitant migrants who have been deported from the U.S. to Mexico or who are attempting to cross the border soon. They are hesitant because interviews with Americans have never resulted in anything but pain for them. Through interpreters we try and reassure them that we only want to listen and not interrogate, but telling the story of their migration experience seems foreign to them. Why would anybody care about their stories when they seem to describe only failure?

My dinner partner is Jesús. Two students and I join him for a supper of beans, rice, and chicken mole. As he eats he gradually begins to sense that we sincerely care about what has happened to him. We are not there to judge him. Our judgment is reserved for our own government’s policies, for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for Homeland Security gone awry, and for our own complicity as U.S. citizens in Jesús’s situation.

Jesús was a mover in Salt Lake City, Utah. Not like “mover and shaker” but like Mayflower and Allied. He worked as a mover for eighteen years until ICE raided his employer, and the United States deported him to Guatemala after incarcerating him for three years in a detention facility in Bisbee, Arizona. As he speaks to us in good English, the irony is not lost on me that for many years he helped others move to better jobs, better homes, and better lives, while he could not do the same for himself. He is now considered a criminal in the United States, because he crossed the border to escape poverty in Guatemala. After having contributed years of labor at a low-paying job that no U.S. citizen wanted, he is unable to participate in any of the benefits of his labor.

His eyes well with tears when he recounts being incarcerated with murderers and rapists in prison while he waited for deportation. He repeats the word “criminal” many times as he speaks about himself, as if trying to get it through his head how our country could label him such when his only crime was to cross the desert to make a living wage for himself and his family.

He tells us how he was deported back to Guatemala and had ridden a train known as La Bestia—The Beast—up from Chiapas to Mexico City and then made it to the border on foot. By “ridden,” he means he lay on the top of freight cars for days. The Beast injures or kills many migrants who fall from the top and are crushed by the train (see Fig. 2). ¹⁷ Jesús made it without falling off, but he tells us of the women on the train who are taken off and raped by other travelers or by Mexican officials waiting at the station. He tells us that he survived only because strangers gave him something to eat in the towns where the train stopped.

Now he is trying to cross the border again. As bad as his experience has been, it is still a better life than he can find at home, so he will try again. In telling us his story, his journey becomes ours. It is a journey that wounds us, too. We are wounded by the realities of our complicity in the global economics and politics that fund migration and suffering.

As we contemplate our woundedness, we contemplate a theology of cross/ing that challenges traditional theologies of atonement. In traditional theories of atonement, Jesus is the silent suffering servant, volunteering himself in complete obedience to the will of God, in some form of payment for our sins. ¹⁸ Rita Nakashima Brock, Dolores Williams and other feminist and womanist theologians have challenged this theology of sacrificial atonement and have taught us that to valorize Jesus’s silent, suffering servanthood as the payment God seeks for our fallenness perpetuates the suffering of the marginalized. ¹⁹ If Jesus suffered silently, as his “duty” to God, then so should border crossers, abused women, violated children, African slaves, and undocumented workers suffer in silence. The message is clear: do not act up, do not ask for more, do not seek justice, accept your plight, for it shall be made right in the next life.

I remember meeting Maria, a thirty-two year-old, undocumented worker in a plastics factory in a small Wisconsin city. Maria came home from work daily with burns on her arms from welding, yet she could not complain about her working conditions because she did not have papers. This is the conundrum of the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy as it functions in the American workplace. In addition to wounded feet, I remember Maria’s burned hands and arms, as she suffers silently for fear of deportation. Maria’s journey becomes ours as we challenge the silence that surrounds her working conditions and make it clear that we will not accept mistreatment of the least among us (Matt 25:40).

A theology of cross/ing transforms Jesus’s (and Jesús’s and Maria’s) silent suffering from atonement to shared experience. A theology of cross/ing is not about Jesus as a sacrifice for sin but about God’s coming into the world as a human being to suffer in solidarity with those who are wounded, rejected, incarcerated, and executed. A theology of cross/ing reminds us that the crucifixion is best understood as the execution of a seditionist, a law-breaker. ²⁰ The political forces of Jesus’s day conspired to execute him for crimes against the state. Thus the cross is born of the state and the political forces of the state. Cross/ing is born from politics and the global economy that result in the criminalization of migration. Border crossers become law-breakers whose travel-worn feet resemble those of the crucified Jesus. As Jesus was reviled and rejected by the state, so are these migrants. In a theology of cross/ing, Jesus is among the “least of these” who suffers alongside the poor and rejected. But rather than offer them a cup of cold water (Matt 10:41) or solace (Matt 25:31–40), we enact laws that cast them back into the desert.

Operation Streamline

We are sitting in a federal courtroom to witness a judge processing deportations, a process called Operation Streamline. Five at a time, detainees shuffle in chains toward the judge’s bench, and stand in front of microphones with translation headphones in their ears. Each man or woman in their turn pleads culpable—guilty—for the crime of crossing the border without papers. To the court, their guilt is self-evident. It does not matter that they were leaving a terrible situation to find a less terrible one in el norte.

But before they go, they are incarcerated, joining millions of non-white men and women in our penal system. ²¹ The judge sentences each of the eighty people she will “process” during this two-hour period to between thirty days and eighteen months in a detention facility before deportation. Historian and activist Aviva Chomsky notes that having lived in the U.S. and contributed to the work force does not make a difference in the deportees’ status: “Immigrants are human beings who have arbitrarily been classified as having a different legal status from the rest of the United States inhabitants.” ²² Chomsky describes Operation Streamline as “daily hearings [that] fall somewhere between kangaroo court and a slave auction. The migrants are shackled hand, foot and waist, and sit in rows.” ²³

The shackled and brown- skinned Latino immigrants being deported from this country are experiencing the inverse journey of the black bodies that were brought into this country in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though chattel slavery and the deportation of undocumented immigrants clearly are different in their particulars, these institutions have the same basic racist foundations: both thrive on dehumanizing attitudes and denial of citizenship based on race. For Chomsky, Latino immigrants are “human beings who have arbitrarily been classified as having a different legal status from the rest of the United States inhabitants.” ²⁴

Chomsky explains that most U.S. citizens insist that their stance toward undocumented immigrants is based solely on legal grounds, not race: after all, these people broke U.S. law. “But becoming undocumented is a highly racialized crime,” Chomsky writes.

Another way to look at the racialized nature of undocumentedness is to compare the criminalization of immigrants (especially Latino immigrants) in the post-civil rights era with the criminalization of blacks.” ²⁵ Citing the work of Michelle Alexander on the criminalization of black bodies, Chomsky writes, “Just as African Americans have been stigmatized in the post civil rights era through criminalization, so have immigrants. Before, legal discrimination could be based explicitly on race. When race-based discrimination was outlawed, a new system emerged: turn people of color into criminals. Then you can discriminate against them because of their criminality rather than because of their race. ²⁶

As the bailiff takes them away, the shackled deportees pass by us. “Lo siento,” my student Tonya whispers to each one of them, “I’m sorry.” Outside the federal courthouse my students weep for the pain and indignity they have witnessed. The journeys of the eighty men and five women incarcerated on that day become ours as we weep for them and then rage in anger against unjust immigration policies.

A theology of cross/ing reveals the complexity of “roots and routes.” A theology of cross/ing recalls Kwok Pui Lan’s reading of the great Ghanian theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye’s “crossroads Christianity,” which shows us that there is no single root and no single route that makes sense of the complexity of the cross and the complexity of the crossing. ²⁷ The truth of the cross/ing is complex because it lies between Mexico and America, between indigeneity and nomadism, between “legal” and “illegal” status, between and because of life and death. The truth of the crossing reminds us of the complex truth of the executed man who is the crucified Son, who is fully God and fully human, who experienced death in life and life after death. We must train theological eyes to see the complex interrelatedness of these strands. We must develop compassionate hearts to feel the ambiguities between life and death in order to do justice in these crossings. Failing to accept the totality of the tangled and interlaced roots, we instead try to tame the shock of the cross, and we fail to understand and meet the needs of the crosser.