Battle Lines

This Saturday was the annual San Jacinto Battle Reenactment, and I had plans to go. My oldest son and I have been talking about going to this for a few years. This year, I actually remembered to watch for the date, and it so happened there was a geocaching event on that side of town in the evening, so it was good justification for the drive.
We were going to make it a family affair, but my husband backed out at the last minute and offered to stay home with the youngest, and when I told my oldest it was time to go, he fell apart because he wanted to play with the neighbor boy across the street and have a sleepover. We agreed to a compromise, which was to invite his friend to come. I packed a picnic lunch while they got permission and prepared.

We got about five minutes down the road when my son suddenly had to go to the bathroom urgently. We stopped at the first fast food place we came to and he ran into the facilities. While we were waiting on him, the neighbor kid, who I'll call JB, and I were watching the parking lot. A painting van pulled up, and two hispanic men wearing paint covered coveralls got out and entered the food place.

JB looks at me earnestly and says, "Isn't it true that the mexicans are coming here to steal our money?"

"What?" I asked, not sure I heard him right.

"Some people say the mexicans are coming here to take all the jobs and steal money from the Americans. Isn't it true?"

Oh yes, suddenly I remembered the views of JB's father, and the problems resulting on our street as a result. I thought of the men I work with, who are all of hispanic descent. I thought of my heritage as the grandaughter of an Irish immigrant. On their honor and those who came before, I stepped over the battleline that was drawn, to the other side of the coin, and turned it into a teaching moment.

Our conversation rolled on as I drove them down the freeway. I explained to them the economics of immigration, trying to dispel this myth that "the mexicans are taking our jobs and stealing our money". I pointed out to them the struggle of daily life that some people who come to America had to deal with in their native country, about things like poverty, military rule, violence, political instability. I tried to develop empathy in them by telling them of men moving to, working in the US and sending their money home to a family who would rarely, if ever, see them. That moved them, and they speculated on what it would be like to struggle just to survive, and if it was fair for someone to move to another country to make a better life for themselves. We talked about the history of the US, who the indigenious people of the area where and what happened to them, where the "white people" came from who entered this land and then felt they had a claim to it, which "justified" the persecution of the Native Americans, and why the settlers were here in the first place. I wanted them to see that unless a person is a Native American living in this country, that all of us living here are descended from people who immigrated here to make a better life for ourselves and our descendants, so what makes it morally acceptable for us and our ancestors, but not the current immigrants?

In a way I surprised myself by taking such a strong stand for the immigrants from Mexico. Who would have thought that a somewhat sheltered middle class suburban white girl would have such strong feelings on the immigration issue? The radio station I sometimes listen to talks about this issue a lot, and the DJs are on the other side of the fence as I am, and from what the callers say, I think the majority of Houstonians, maybe Texans, maybe Americans do not stand on the same side I do. Every time I think about it, though, I think of the faces of the men I work with, good men who would be the first to stop if you needed help, the struggles they have gone through to become citizens here, their reasons why. I think of my grandfather, five years old, being put on a ship that took him away from Ireland and his tenant farming family and carried him to Ellis Island on the hope for a better life. He escaped famine and poverty when he left Ireland. My grandfather romanticized his time in Ireland, but when he talked about going back someday with one of his brothers, his brother said he had no interest in going back, that the only thing he remembered about Ireland was being hungry. By the time my grandather retired from his government job, he owned a beautiful little house overlooking the Chesepeake Bay and had raised three successful children, none of whom had to deal with the conditions he knew as a child.

We shifted our conversation from the immigration issue to the history of the battle we were going to watch the reenactment of. Most adults growing up in Texas are well aware of the story of the Battle of San Jacinto, where the Texan uprising beat out Mexican forces and took Santa Anna prisoner. Texas schoolchildren and to some degree our students in the state colleges have Texas history rammed up their throats for years. These boys, though, being only in second grade, haven't gotten to that part of the education system, though, so I have to bring them up to speed.
The story I tell runs along the lines of this: once upon a time, this area known as Texas belonged to Mexico. They invited settlers (of European stock) to live on the land and develop it, but then the settlers, known at the time as "Texians", decided they wanted to be independent, not ruled by Mexico's laws anymore. The Mexican government sent a large army over to fight the settlers, led by General Santa Anna, and this army defeated the small band of Texans at The Alamo and the Battle of Goliad, but then at San Jacinto, the Texans turned the tide and won their independence in a battle lasting less than eighteen minutes.

As I am telling this, it occurs to JB that we are have here the same heroes and villians and he tries to bring those two seperate groups together. "So," he says, "the Mexicans used to have this land, and the Texans came over and wanted it for themselves, and now the Texans have this land, and now the Mexicans are coming over and want it for themselves?" Texas pride would have us identify with the Texians, and we still celebrate the bravery of the men who battled for what basically were squatter's rights. I can see him puzzling over how this agrees with what his family has taught him. It gives a whole new meaning to "this land is my land, this land is your land..."

I should explain the social climate on our street before going further. JB and his family live across the street from another family with whom they have an ongoing feud. JB's father does not like the other family because they are "mexicans", and his kids aren't allowed to play with them. Ironically, the other family in question actually identify themselves as "indians" and are offended by the term "mexican". They immigrated here from a South American country (I've talked to the father about where but it escapes me now) because they wanted a better live for their children, and it really hurts their sense of pride and their emotions that they have to deal with racial prejudice on a daily basis. This is not what they expected from their life in America. The debates get heated and the cops have come out a few times, and both men have a restraining order preventing them from entering the other's yards.

In our neighborhood, the battle lines are being drawn every day, over these issues of racial prejudice and justice. My son wants to play with both boys. We have been teaching him for years to treat everybody equally and make decisons about people based on what is in their hearts, not what they look like, and he is really good at sticking to that. The problem with being this way is that sometimes you lose popularity. He has come home crying many times because JB's family saw him playing with the "mexican" boy and now they "hate him" and won't play with him. Even though it comes at a cost, we have taught him to stand up for what he believes, and if he believes the other boy to be a good person that he enjoys playing with, he shouldn't let the condemnation of JB's family stop him.

When I am consoling him during these times, I think sometimes about the Japanese internment camps our country formed during WWII. There was an internment camp in Tulelake, CA, where we used to live, and we drove to it a couple of times. There is a plaque standing on the site now that explains what the fenced in area of barracks was for, and why it still stands, and it reads: "These camps are reminders of how racism, economic and political exploitation, and expediency can undermine the constitutional guarantees of United States citizens and aliens alike. May the injustices and humiliation suffered here never reoccur."
I am not saying that this battle we fight on our street is anywhere near this devastating. Freedom to play with whomever one chooses is not equal to the freedom to survive unpersecuted, free from violence, in safety and security, and where one chooses. However, I think it is interesting that these camps are still maintained as a reminder, like it states, of what can happen, and suggests this is something from our past. It is the twenty first century, I always think when wiping my son's tears away, why are we still fighting this? Haven't we moved past this already?

So we finally made it to the battle reenactment. We hiked through the fields around the monument while the kids imagined they were soldiers. We sat in the hot sun and watched actors and history buffs act out the battle, with real ancient cannons, muskets, and battles on horseback. I thought it was interesting that you could not tell by looking at a person's skin which side they were on. There were large people, skinny people, old people, young people, women, men, people of all shapes, sizes and colors, reenacting the battle, and the uniforms they wore were the only way to seperate the sides, much as I imagine wars are today. We live in a blended universe and are all united by our humanity.

After the battle, we introduced our neighbor to geocaching and took him to the event with us. We had the sleepover. In the morning, the kids sat down to join me as I watched a movie, "The Pianist". In the movie, we watch the struggle of a Jewish piano player, Wladyslaw Szpilman, for survival in Nazi-occupied Poland. The children begin to empathize with the main character and ask questions. Why is this happening to him? What is going on here? I explain to them the basic facts of the Nazi occupation as we root for our hero to survive. The movie depicts some of the cruelties of the war, and the children watch in horror as the SS soldiers gun down Jews in the streets, as Szpilman sees his family being taken away to concentration camps, as he is forced to perform slave labor, as he stumbles, in the end of the movie, desperate with hunger, around burned down houses in the ghetto of Warsaw looking for food.

The movie brings up more questions of fairness, justice, of the reasons humans can be cruel to each other. Through their empathy of Szpilman, through an awareness of his struggle to survive, the children develop compassion for others. JB asks me, as we are talking about how difficult life in their country was, "where did the Jews go?" He wants to know if they got away. I told him that lots of them died in the concentration camps, even kids their age, but some were able to flee to freedom, especially during the early stages, and some ended up in America.

He nods his understanding. These people whose struggles he had witnessed, maybe some of them were able to come to America and have a better life. What happened to them is not something they asked for, and he can see now how hard their life was in the country they were born in, and why they might want to escape.

Right after the movie ended, I went to Sunday school. The lesson this day was on the sin of "Pride", and in our discussion, we concluded that having pride in yourself for doing good is not the sin, but the sin exists in elevating yourself above others. This reminded me of racial prejudice, of how it still exists in this world, how there are people out there who think other races or types of people do not deserve the same respect or rights equal to theirs, who want to close borders and homogenize towns.

I think that part of the cure for racism is to teach our children to put themselves in someone else's shoes, to show them the hardships others face, to develop this compassion and empathy for others, and to continue to battle against the sin of pride, of thinking ourselves better than anyone else and therefore more deserving of human rights and privileges, like the privilege of living on a country that protects our freedom.