Proud of heritage

Dear editor:

If you can, imagine a family traveling hundreds or thousands of miles through the desert or wading through the ocean with only a canteen of warm water and a small amount of food. Imagine before leaving your home that you calculate the risk and you decide that getting apprehended at the border is worth it just to keep your babies safe from daily violence and bloodshed. Imagine then, that after getting stopped at the border, your children are taken from your sunburned arms and work-hardened hands. Not just separated from you to be placed in a loving and gentle environment while your misdemeanor offense winds through the court system, but taken from you to be put in a cage. A cage. Not a wall made of chain link fence, but a cage.

Toys, rosaries, keepsakes, and Bibles carried the hundreds or thousands of miles to give comfort to the journey — all pried from your screaming child’s terrified hands. Exaggeration? Hardly. This very thing is playing out right in front of us. It’s cruel, it’s evil and it’s certainly not Biblical.

As a proud Mexican-American parent and grandparent, I am glad that my father was not separated at the border from my aunt who reared him. I’m glad that he became a citizen. My father was a very proud, hard-working man who loved America. I believe that he was among the best that Mexico had to offer. He was not, as our leadership says, a rapist, murderer or thief. He was not an intruder.

My family did not infest the small town in Texas in which we picked cotton to survive. We were poor, yes. But we were safe. We may have had to work until our fingers bled, but we were safe. We may have had to resole our shoes with cardboard to keep the gravel from cutting our feet, but we were safe. We may have had to listen to our mother tell us that we could have the last bit of food at the dinner table because she wasn’t very hungry, but we were safe.

We were not in Mexico, but we were safe. Proud of my Mexican heritage, Al Gloria Hot Springs