Standing up for neighbors living in fear
They refer to it as their “tamale moment,” an odd term of art for what became for them a profound realization that they could no longer stand by silently, stiffly while the world went mad.
From that moment came an understanding between two people of differing perspectives, an opening of the heart and of the mind to try to listen to both sides. Because only then, they contend, is a dialogue more than just talking at each other.
Antoinette Sedillo Lopez’s moment came three years ago when she encountered a homeless woman begging outside a church in Guanajuato, Mexico. Sedillo Lopez, then a professor and associate dean at the University of New Mexico School of Law, was scheduled to fly home within hours at the end of another UNM summer law institute in the central Mexico city. A friend had given her a large bag of tamales as a parting gift.
“So many tamales,” she said. “I would have had to have a party to use them, and I still had to pack.” But that poor homeless woman. Sedillo Lopez gave her the bag of tamales.
The woman, who Sedillo Lopez learned had escaped the violence of Guatemala only to be tossed onto the streets of Mexico, was grateful, naturally. But what stunned Sedillo Lopez was how excited the woman was to share the bounty, how the spirit of giving still triumphed in times of great need.
“Things shifted for me,” she said. “For 27 years, I had been surrounded with the whiny and the privileged and I was no longer satisfied with the work.”
She quit her job, and in 2014 she became executive director of Enlace Comunitario, an Albuquerque nonprofit social justice organization that supports Latino victims of domestic violence and advocates for the rights of Latino immigrants and their children.
With the election of a president who had campaigned on a hard-line approach to ridding the country of undocumented immigrants with a deportation force, an unforgiving tightening of the laws and the building of a “beautiful” wall on the country’s southern border, terror began to flood into the communities Sedillo Lopez served.
“There was crying,” she recalled of a community meeting she attended the day after the election in November. “Someone says, ‘What are you going to do? Hide these people in your basement?’”
John Ross, a self-described “old white guy Republican” who attended the meeting, shouted back, “Yes.”
On the way home, a troubled Ross thought about his unexpected answer and what was happening to the people who did not look or sound like him.
“I heard the stories of these people’s pain, about how their children are terrified,” said Ross, a consultant and leadership coach in the nonprofit sector. “And I thought, my group, the people who look and sound like me, don’t go to bed at night terrified like that.”
That, he said, was his tamale moment, when he realized that those terrified people were his neighbors, most who worked hard, committed no heinous crimes and contributed to the community.
Just like Sedillo Lopez had, he realized he was no longer satisfied with the work.
“My wife later asks me, why are you doing this,” he said. “And I told her, I don’t know. I don’t have a choice. You can’t un-know what you know.”
Ross and Sedillo Lopez met for lunch Nov. 30 to discuss how best to support their fellow citizens and noncitizens, bringing to the cause their individual skills and their decidedly different backgrounds.
Thus was created Defend Our Neighbors, a grass-roots, nonpartisan effort to support the rights to due process of undocumented immigrant children and families in New Mexico and to protect them from oppression.
Threats to one part of the community, they contend, lead to threats to other parts of the community, tearing away at the country’s diverse social fabric. They say Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ, Native Americans, other communities of color — even the media — are experiencing a marginalization in an increasingly polarizing political climate based largely on fear but not always on facts.
So far, Defend Our Neighbors has a membership of more than 300 individuals and organizations, among them prominent lawyers, advocacy groups, churches, activists, teachers, politicians, businesspeople, medical professionals, academics and other concerned citizens.
“We’re trying not to be political,” Ross said. “This is a moral, ethical issue. We’re saying we are one big family. You may not like everybody, but they are our neighbors, and we need to listen to each other and understand each others’ fears.”
How the group accomplishes its goals remains somewhat murky. The ground keeps shifting with each new executive order, Cabinet appointment and tweet.
“We’re constantly evolving,” Ross said. “The playing field keeps changing.”
Already, though, the dialogue has begun.
“We’re just trying to support the Constitution,” Sedillo Lopez said. “We do come at this from different views, but we’re trying to find a way to find the middle, not extreme liberal, not alt-right, but reasonable people who care about New Mexico families. We have a problem with an inability to hear what the other side is saying. We need to learn not to demonize the other. It’s a safer world if we’re friends.”
It’s a world where the work is just beginning, where the ground is shifting, where standing by silently, stiffly is simply not an option.