Central Americans made their own sanctuary city
Stories reveal how migrants and allies forged a community
David Benítez and his daughter Allison rehearse their quinceañera waltz to the soundtrack of the (now aging) heartthrob Chayanne singing “Tiempo de Vals.” The formal gown, white chiffon with a pink fringe, was borrowed for the occasion and is big on Allison — she wears it over the Mickey Mouse T-shirt she wore to school today. “Kiss me to the tempo of the waltz,” croons Chayanne in Spanish, and even though it’s just a rehearsal, father and daughter glow with the tenderness between them.
David and Allison, both natives of El Salvador, are not actually rehearsing her “quince” (she’s 13 now). They’re acting the moment for “Little Central America, 1984,” a theatrical production I co-wrote with the Costa Rican performance artist Elia Arce that premieres next week at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. By the end of the performance, we realize that David and Allison’s story echoes and yet is devastatingly different from that of another Salvadoran would-be immigrant family: 25 year-old Oscar Alberto Martínez and his 2-year-old daughter Valeria, who set out for the United States from San Martín, El Salvador, in the early summer of 2019.
Oscar and Valeria will not share a dance for her First Communion, quince, high school or college graduation because they drowned in the Rio Grande on June 25 of that year — their bodies discovered on the riverbank of the American side, the toddler tucked tightly inside the father’s Tshirt, a measure he took to keep the current from separating them and that kept them together in death. Photographs of their bodies made their way around the world for a few days, briefly focusing attention on the context for the “surges” of recent years from Central America.
Over nearly four decades, I’ve explored this paradox — the trauma that Central Americans carry and how we can still thrive — in my writing and performance. Houston tells us this story with its own Central American community, how it was formed and how the city at large has responded to it. Exploring the arc of this story can guide us towards responding to the latest influx of migrants and refugees as they begin to settle into their new lives here.
The Benítez family has settled in Southwest Houston — part of the greater Central American barrio whose hub is Gulfton. The origin point of the many “Little Central Americas” that exist today across the country — Los Angeles’s Westlake/ Pico-Union area, San Francisco’s Mission District, Washington, D.C.’s Mount Pleasant — is the tragic exodus spawned by the Central American civil wars of the 1980s. This history — in which the United States played a fundamental role, propping up horrendous military regimes that made leftist insurrections inevitable — has faded for many younger Americans. But for Central Americans the wars are a primordial trauma for the generation that lived them, and even for the children of the children of the conflicts: psychologists refer to the passing on of such painful memory as “transgenerational trauma.”
But visit Houston’s Gulfton today and you won’t find many overt signs of the pain. Drive down Bellaire or Chimney Rock and there is an effusion of color, aroma and sound — strip malls
with markets selling produce from back home, restaurants churning out Salvadoran pupusas or Honduran baleadas, storefront churches emitting the raucous music of a Pentecostal revival. Little Central Americas are at least as much about hope as they are about painful memory — and about a community’s emergence from invisibility. Gulfton tells a different story than the typical media coverage that runs hand-in-glove with overheated political rhetoric about Central American gang members as super-predators.
Houston’s version of Little Central America appears to be on the verge of catapulting to the next level of placemaking.
“We continue to claim space, we are a burgeoning community,” says Allison Sáenz, who is of Honduran-Costa Rican heritage and a doctoral student in the Department of History at the University of Houston. Her dissertation traces the establishment and development of the Gulfton enclave.
Demographic data bears out the emergence. According to the most recent census figures, there are over 250,000 Central Americans living in the Houston Metropolitan Area, the largest numbers being from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, respectively. Together, they make up nearly 16 percent of Houston’s foreign-born population (by comparison, people of Mexican origin represent 34.5 percent). There are also significant numbers of Black and Indigenous Central Americans, such as Garifuna-speaking Belizeans and Indigenous Guatemalans speaking a variety of Mayan languages.
The first wave of immigrants and refugees arrived rapidly. The Central American population of Harris County expanded from 5,400 in 1980 to nearly 50,000 by the end of that decade. (By some estimates, ultimately one-fifth of El Salvador’s population left the country during its 13-year-long civil war.) The only way to survive trauma and upheaval of that scale is to seek solace — and safety — in numbers. Thus, Little Central America: communities forged in shared vulnerability and agency along with solidarity from allies.
Because of the highly charged debate over U.S. involvement in 1980s Central America — coming just a few years after the end of the Vietnam War — refugees and those seeking political asylum were shunned by a U.S. policy that saw them as opportunists at best and “Communists” at worst. American faithbased communities opened the doors of their churches to those seeking shelter — the beginning of the Sanctuary Movement. Houston’s First Unitarian Church in the Museum District was one of those prophetic spaces, led by its pastor, the late Rev. Robert Schaibly, who began his sermon on Sunday, Dec. 11, 1983, with these words:
“There is someone in trouble in Houston — an undocumented alien facing deportation — and
they have broken the law and if they are apprehended they may be killed. Would you take them in? It may be some time since you have had cause to think about moral distinctions as different from what’s legal.”
Not long afterwards, First UU became the first congregation to declare Sanctuary in Houston, joining a nationwide movement whose moral symbolism was just as important as its offer of material support. Little Central Americas began to take shape through acts of solidarity like these and also from the community’s own agency. These enclaves carved themselves out of the air — everything Latinx back then (when there was no “Latinx” yet) was Mexican-centric. Social service agencies like the Central American Resource Center (CRECEN) initially focused on consciousness-raising towards ending U.S. interventionism. However, the overwhelming needs of the community — education for newly arrived children; psychological support services for refugees; housing; language learning, for starters — soon shifted the focus towards what people began to realize was to be their permanent home.
A generation later, the children of the children of war are hard at work on the next chapter of the Central AmericanAmerican journey. The Benítez family has spent decades disassembling and reassembling its life between El Salvador and Houston. David’s father benefited from President Ronald Reagan’s immigration amnesty that granted legal status to any immigrant who had entered the country before Jan. 1, 1982 (what a path the Republican Party has cut on immigration since then!) and was able to sponsor him; years later, David was able to bring over his wife, Clelia, and two of their daughters who were born in El Salvador. Their two youngest daughters were born here. The point is that they’re all here together now — hurtling into an American future with David’s refinery job and Clelia managing a family insurance business. With tremendous energy and hope, the parents are prying open a door for the children. Melany, their eldest, is studying business at Knox College in Illinois. Allison says she wants to study architecture. Miley, 10, dreams of being a lawyer. Seven-year-old Andrea has her heart set on being “a doctor to animals and people.”
Just as the Benítez family is emerging from El Salvador’s painful memory and reaching for the American mainstream, the community writ large is increasingly intersecting with the greater cultural life of Houston. The Central American Collective, an arts agency run completely by women, has produced events with partners such as the Holocaust Museum and the Fine Arts Museum.
“We deserve to be in all these spaces, highlighting our people,” María Vilma Durán, the executive director of the collective, told me Thursday.
The world has learned a lot about pain and loss in the last few years. Central Americans have a long piercing history of it. And they know how to survive, and even thrive, because of and in spite of it. Which does not mean forgetting the pain. At the end of “Little Central America, 1984,” David Benítez and his youngest daughter, Andrea, walk out of the church sanctuary, leading the audience in a procession towards a lush outdoor patio, where water trickles from a small fountain. Here, we remember those who died when crossing, including Oscar Alberto and his daughter Valeria, by placing candles around the gentle flow.
The question for greater Houston today is in the spirit of the one Rev. Schaibly posed to his congregation back in the 1980s: will you recognize the Central Americans among you — those who arrived a generation ago, those who arrived yesterday — fully as your neighbors?