Growing up, I was always fascinated by people. Some of my favorite family activities as a young child consisted of visiting nearby Amish villages and staring in awe as Amish Families paraded to church in their horses and buggies, or listening to a street performer playing the saxophone outside of the Reading Terminal Market. At home, I would spend countless hours on my childproof I-pad watching National Geographic travel videos that featured young reporters traveling to faraway places like Bolivia, India, and Vietnam.
My interest in people originally stemmed in large part from our differences. “What is this saxophone player on the corner going to eat for dinner tonight?” I would often silently ask myself. “Surely he won’t be eating my Mom’s casserole like me. He’s never even tasted my moms casserole!” These lifestyle differences were trivial, but I became hooked on them. I wanted to know what it was like to live a life that was different than mine. This curiosity was heightened during the 2016 election, when immigration stole the stage.
As Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton voiced their stance on the issue, the words “Illegal Alien” immediately stuck out to me. Talk about a difference. I didn’t view myself as neither illegal, nor an alien, and I needed to find out what this was all about. I dove head first into a rabbit hole of YouTube videos and podcasts centered around the Mexican Border, and fell in love with the immigrant mission. I became President of a school club titled “Salesians Without Borders”, or SWB which consisted of five of my friends meeting in a basement classroom with our Spanish teacher, researching recent immigration headlines. Not exactly the best way to look cool in High School, but oh well, its what I liked. I longed for a glimpse of what life was like at the border, in the same way that I longed for a peek into the life of any individual I see casually walking down the street. This opportunity was given to me when my school offered to briefly drag my club out of the building’s unairconditioned basement, and send us to El Paso, Texas, for a week.
I was psyched. That was, until the night before the trip. As I lay in bed that night, I came to a startling realization. The generalizations and fear invoking labels about South American migrants that I had fought so hard to combat during my time with SWB, had embedded themselves into my thoughts, and were the cause of both my fascination and fears. My mind raced with questions: “Will they be accepting of somebody who knows zero Spanish?” “Is this dangerous?” “Am I wasting my time?” For the first time in my life, I began to fear the illegal alien label, and it happened to be just hours before boarding the plane to El Paso.
The city of El Paso left me in awe upon arrival. I was surprised to see such vibrant nightlife, a building layout on par with your average mid-sized American city, and a beautiful border connecting the city to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. However, My work in El Paso was not based downtown, but in the extremely poor areas surrounding it where undocumented migrants quite literally hid underground. Our groups van drove down a dry, neglected, road and up to an overgrown Days Inn Parking lot. The “Open” Sign on this Days in was nowhere to be found, and Half of its roof completely caved in. I was about to put myself in the shoes of an El Paso migrant as best as I could. I was still terrified.
Our job was to prepare and serve a meal to the migrants who were staying in the cockroach infested, waterless, and powerless rooms of the run-down Days Inn. Before we began to serve the 40-50 some migrants in the hotel, a man stood up, silenced the crowd, and said while holding his daughter, “Thank you for loving us. You are family.”. As I gave food to the families, I witnessed fathers and mother’s giving their portions up to their children, single adults offering to help serve after they finished their own meals, and people making an effort to thank me despite my complete inability to speak Spanish. My nerves gradually subsided, and I became filled with a sense of happiness that was similar to the feeling of a newfound discovery.
While sitting with the migrants after the meal, I began to think about the words the man had spoken. All of my fears about how different I was from these migrants were replaced with a sense of joy about how similar I was to them. Although it is certainly true that everybody I encountered in that hotel had never eaten my Mom’s casserole, I do in fact share a similar broad human experience with them: A desire for love, for family, and for acceptance. A couple of American teenagers disregarding the stigma of “illegal alien” led to a partial fulfilment of these shared desires for both the migrants and myself. I continue to reject the term illegal alien because it represents a complete failure to recognize humanities shared similarities, regardless of how different we may seem at face value. Taking the time to recognize the similarities between us instead of dwelling on the differences allows all of us to develop a more complete worldview..
