People are dying out here



The son of man will be handed over to be crucified. – Matthew 26:2

Artist Alvaro Enciso builds beautiful crosses from empty tin cans he finds on the migrant trail in the desert on the Mexico and Arizona border.

Alvaro says he had no idea people were dying out here in the Sonora desert, but the deaths of 3,000 people have been documented and 2,000 more people are still missing. He works with a group of older adults called Samaritans who provide water stations for migrants who are crossing the border searching for a better life.


He remembers seeing a map with red dots where people have died in the desert. Sections of that southern Arizona map had so many red dots that it was simply a mass of red. Every week, Alvaro walks out into the desert to mark the places with one of his crosses where people have died.  

Each Tuesday, his goal is to mark at least one more grave. So far, he’s marked 800 graves with crosses. He knows his task will never end because more people keep dying out here.

Each cross marks the place where the American dream ended for someone, Alvaro, a former professor of anthropology, says. For many of these migrants, their only hope for fleeing poverty and violence in their own country is to try to cross the border into the United states. The lack of a humane immigration policy in the United States can make this trip for migrants a deadly one.

Alvaro knows his art, his crosses, are out in the desert in the middle of nowhere and he knows his art will be viewed by few people, if anyone. But every day, he says, someone else is suffering in this desert, and he believes his crosses can help restore the humanity of the people who have died here.


“The cross used to be the electric chair for the Roman Empire,” Alvaro tells me. His crosses symbolize modern day crucifixions. By building a border wall and pushing people further out into the desert to try to cross the border, Alvaro says we are asking the desert to kill people so that we can keep our own hands clean.

Alvaro also believes that the crosses are symbol of where the vertical and horizontal lines meet, the place where we can find compassion.

“People are dying out here in the desert,” Alvaro says, “But I want to help remember them, to help keep their stories alive.

J Ron Byler is executive director of MCC U.S.



Comments

  1. Tucker ConradNovember 13, 2020 at 4:14 AM

    A GREAT SPELL CASTER (DR. EMU) THAT HELP ME BRING BACK MY EX GIRLFRIEND.
    Am so happy to testify about a great spell caster that helped me when all hope was lost for me to unite with my ex-girlfriend that I love so much. I had a girlfriend that love me so much but something terrible happen to our relationship one afternoon when her friend that was always trying to get to me was trying to force me to make love to her just because she was been jealous of her friend that i was dating and on the scene my girlfriend just walk in and she thought we had something special doing together, i tried to explain things to her that her friend always do this whenever she is not with me and i always refuse her but i never told her because i did not want the both of them to be enemies to each other but she never believed me. She broke up with me and I tried times without numbers to make her believe me but she never believed me until one day i heard about the DR. EMU and I emailed him and he replied to me so kindly and helped me get back my lovely relationship that was already gone for two months.
    Email him at: Emutemple@gmail.com  
    Call or Whats-app him: +2347012841542

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

They welcomed us

Image
One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. (John 9:25) She was addicted to drugs for 20 years. She was in prison and her family broke apart. Her child was in an orphanage and her husband died. Because of her substance abuse, she eventually lost her one arm below her elbow. She saw no way out. She had hit the very bottom. When she came to know God, Natalia says everything changed. She found she had a deep desire to help people like herself and she discovered that her life experiences helped her understand others. “I remember what God did in my life and I have hope that God can touch other peoples’ lives and give them new life, too,” Natalia tells me. In Nikopol, Ukraine, she and Olga and Valodya, both of whom have similar stories to tell of their own, began New Life Charitable Fund a half dozen years ago to help people in prison, or who have drug or alcohol addictions, are HIV positive, homeless or for some other reason need a helping hand. Ukraine has ...
Read more

God multiplies our efforts

Image
Sister Zita at the La Posada shelter with baby Emmanuel and members of our border learning tour. Photo courtesy of Janae Rempel The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail. – I Kings 17:14 Ana Hinojosa remembers growing up on the Texas-Mexico border near Brownsville in the late 80s. Her family’s house was a mile from the border wall and she remembers the extended family gatherings in her back yard. Ana, an MCC immigration staff person, says border patrol agents would rest in the shade of the trees near the front of her house and, in the same day, it would be possible for a family from Mexico to knock on her front door to ask for food or directions. Her family turned no one away. Life on the border can look quite different today. When we enter the Catholic Charities respite center in McAllen, Texas, it is startling to see the contrast from the serenity of the neighborhood outside to the chaos inside. Cesar Matta tells us that, today, the cente...
Read more

A river of love

Image
For it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. – Matthew 25:40 “We are happy you are here to see this with your own eyes,” the leader of the Islamic Charities organization in Deir Attieh, Syria tells us, a group of MCC people visiting partner organizations in Syria. “We can’t express enough our heartfelt thanks to you.” Islamic Charities works with 3,000 at risk families affected by the war in the region and relies heavily on the work of volunteers. MCC provides food boxes to Islamic Charities as part of our humanitarian assistance in Syria. When I visit five families who received these food boxes, I recall the heartfelt thanks but feel mostly heart broken.    We visit two families living in a partially constructed apartment complex that stalled when the war began. The first family lives in a small two-room apartment, the mother and her five children and the woman’s father. Her husband is serving in the army. The second family inclu...
Read more