Annunciation House Newsletter - Winter 2004

Opening the Door at Christmas

By Ruben Garcia

Hospitality can be a most unpredictable experience – especially when that experience is lived in three large houses of hospitality where on any given day, one might encounter as many as 100 guests – men, women, children and infants – calling these houses home, some for a few nights at a time and others for even up to months.

The guests who stay in the houses of Annunciation House are a people in migration. They arrive individually or in families, but together, they constitute a people. They come from as close as next-door in Juarez and as far away as Brazil in South America. What binds them together as a people is the commonality of the forces that push them into the stream of migration. Hospitality in the houses of Annunciation House is about welcoming people who, for the most part, did not willingly seek out the role of immigrant. As deeply grateful as the vast majority of the guests in the houses are for the hospitality that is provided them, they are nonetheless reluctant guests.

During the past 25 years, the reality for immigrants has become increasingly difficult in the United States. Much has been written and will continue to be written about what immigrants are facing as they attempt to navigate the border between the US and Mexico. An 18-year old young woman from Guatemala presently staying at Annunciation House walked for two nights and one day through the Arizona desert. It was not long before the people she traveled with ran out of water and only survived because they came upon water holes in the desert. By the time they came out of the desert, the blisters on their feet would no longer allow them to stand, much less continue to walk. Just this past summer, some 250 people were not as fortunate as this young woman and died in the heat of Arizona’s desert. These desert deaths are only a part of the number of people dying or being injured as they attempt to navigate the US-Mexican border.

But the deaths along the border tell only part of the story. Across the country, immigrants are encountering an ever-growing antagonism, exclusion and oppression. Referendums like California’s Proposition 187 and Arizona’s Proposition 200 -obligating state agencies to deny any and all non-federally mandated services and benefits to undocumented immigrants - are some of the more visible expressions of the growing resentment that immigrants now face. State after state has moved to deny driving licenses to the undocumented and basic non-emergency medical care is being denied to undocumented immigrants unless they can pay for these services upfront.

At the same time, it is widely accepted that many of the low paying jobs that the US economy creates will only be filled by immigrants - millions of whom are now illegally in the country - who take on these jobs while managing to live, and at times barely subsist, in the country’s underground. Year after year, Congress systematically refuses to raise the federal minimum wage, thus ensuring employment for the millions of undocumented workers.

The message being sent to immigrants is at the same time both hypocritical and schizophrenic. “You are indeed wanted and needed by the US economy. Hire the coyote or risk your life and limbs crossing the desert, hopping a train or stuffing yourself into unventilated semi-trailer trucks. Make your way to Kansas City, New York, Denver or Portland – the jobs are waiting. But it also needs to be understood – stay out of site. Don’t be seen or heard. Don’t use any of the community’s resources. Do the work, pay your taxes but don’t expect anything in return.

Some time back a mother with her eight-month-old baby came knocking on the door of one of the houses at about 2 AM in the morning. The baby was seriously ill with a temperature of 105 degrees. “My baby is very ill. Can you please take me to the hospital?” On the way to the hospital, the mother was asked, “Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” Staring at the floor of the car, with that beaten down fearful look of so many of the undocumented, she replied, “Pues tu sabes que no tengo papeles.” – “You know that I don’t have any documents.” Her fear that the ambulance driver might turn her over to Border Patrol forced her to go knocking on doors looking for a ride to the hospital, all the time delaying medical treatment for her baby and putting his health in jeopardy. This is what it means to do the work for low wages but remain quiet and out of sight.

In this kind of an environment, what does it mean to celebrate Christmas? How easy it is to romanticize the story of a homeless family giving birth to their baby in a stable, surrounded by farm animals and eating who knows what for food. It is so tempting to take the Christ event and rationalize it into an interpretation that affirms or validates how we live our lives. We decorate trees, sing Christmas carols, attend beautiful Christmas Eve masses or services and then go out and support efforts and legislation to exclude, deport, and deny employment and basic human services to immigrants and the undocumented. For so many of us, there is no sense of contradiction.

Jesus was born in a stable precisely because it was not possible to see the contradictions with which we live our lives. Jesus and his family were not welcomed because people would not be inconvenienced. Two thousand years ago, the owners of the inns and homes where Joseph sought lodging were unable – and perhaps it could even be argued they were incapable – to recognize that it was the Christ who knocked on the doors of their homes. If truth be told, the vast majority of us would probably also turn Mary and Joseph away at the door. Because of the way we too live our lives, we are unable, and perhaps incapable, to recognize the Christ in our midst. It is so difficult and challenging for us to allow ourselves to be inconvenienced. And yet, is this not what Christmas is about? The Christ event is ultimately about a God who continues to enter the world, to remain in our very midst in the here and now. And as happened 2000 years ago, that entrance, that presence in our midst will be and is being revealed through the vulnerable ones of the world – the poor and oppressed, the rejected and unwanted, the stranger in an alien land, the undocumented.

Christmas is about hospitality-- that unpredictable experience that will undoubtedly set one up to be seriously inconvenienced. Christmas has to be about hospitality, that profound moment when the vulnerable, the stranger is fully recognized as the Christ who reflects the image of the God of creation. Hospitality is a constitutive dimension of the Christ event and in the absence of concrete expressions of hospitality extended to the immigrant; faith communities are nothing more than what St. Paul defines as “noisy gongs, clanging cymbals”.

The ever-increasing repression of immigrants, the undocumented, all over the United States is a total contradiction of Christmas, of the faith of Christians. And in response to this repression, the peoples in migration call upon churches and faith communities all across the country to establish, to open up houses of hospitality, places of welcome for immigrants, and the undocumented. In the face of this repression and oppression, let churches and faith communities open their inns, welcome the stranger in an alien land. Allow these houses of hospitality to be concrete recognitions of the Christ in our midst in the here and now. Let the truth for us be as Isaiah foretold, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone.”