It is 4 am. You are in your own bed, in your own house. You wake up in a sweat. You have just had a nightmare. In Spanish this is called a pesadilla.
Even though you are now awake, you are not totally sure where you are. You look around and see familiar things from your bedroom. You get up and walk to the next room. The kids are there, sleeping -- All is ok.
You heart is pounding. You sit on your bed and think about the dream.
It starts with a loud heavy knock on your front door. Someone breaks through, there are men in black uniforms, with rifles in their hands. They are screaming. "Get up Mexican - we are sending you back home." Your kids wake up - they are crying. The dog is barking. One of the officers threatens to kill the dog if it doesn't shut up. The kids scream even more.
The men in black take your family away in a white van. In a few days you find yourselves deep in the interior of Mexico, hundreds of miles from anyone you know. You have $40.00 in your pocket. You can't believe this happened to you in America. Your kids are American citizens. You have been here for 20 years, came at the age of 4 when your father lost his job and there wasn't enough money for food.
A few seconds later you find yourself standing on a dark street corner in a small mountain village of San Luis Potosi. You are alone, where are your kids?
Suddenly the dream ends.
4 comments:
Thank you for posting this image in the context of this horrible "dream." I was just reading about the raids in Mississippi and thinking about pogroms and krystalnacht and how long it took before it was stopped. This is very sad and unacceptable.
there has been commentary that the current immigration polemic should not be compared to the Holocaust. I have been chastised a few times for pairing the two together. Of course, they are not the same, but the sense of terror, inequity, and lack of reasoning are very similar.
There are some good reasons to not make too much wholesale comparisons. They are substantially different. There are some echoes.
True, thirty + million people being killed is nothing like having ICE raids every few days. But I think it is very important not to get into a tangle over who suffered more...
Like you say, the echoes are there -
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