Dignity of the Human Person

Trip to the Rio Grande Valley

~ Leticia Adams
Me and my son Gabe

This past Saturday my son Gabe and I drove from Austin Texas to McAllen Texas to help New Wave Feminists unload a semi full of donations for the respite center there that is run by Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.

As I native Texan, I do not say “The Border” and in fact I think that term has been coined by the media and it reduces this entire part of Texas that has its own culture and beauty. I get that the US/Mexico border is long and goes past Texas, but still. In Texas we call this part of our great state “The Valley” which is short for The Rio Grande Valley. People from there just say RGV. But never in my life have I heard it called “The Border” and I honestly would be so pissed to see it called that if I was from there.

I grew up in South Texas which is about three hours from The Valley which is weird because you would think that would be South Texas since it is the most southern part of the state. But Texas is huge.

It was not uncommon for my Tio Roy and Tia Mary to help people who had crossed the border and were on foot or hitchhiking from The Valley through their town to go further north. My Tio had a police scanner and sometimes when he heard that the police were after someone who was suspected to be here “illegally”, he would get in his truck and go see if he could find them, give them water and a ride past the county line. My Tia had storage rooms full of donations that she would give to people in need, a lot of them were Mexicans who had crossed the border looking for a better life for their family. These were things that I saw happen my entire life. People have been crossing the border in The Valley for as long as I have been alive and even before then. They have also been dying in the Rio Grande and the desert as long as I can remember.

My son’s biological grandfather was one of those people who crossed the border illegally looking for a better life and he did just that. He worked hard and he raised his family. He was also a Deacon in the Catholic Church and served his community his entire life here in America. He became a Citizen when Anthony was around four or five years old.

I am telling you all of this information because for me, the issue of immigration is an issue that has been a part of my life since before I was born. My first published words were in a letter to the Editor for the Amarillo Newspaper about the issue of immigration and the Government’s failure to fix a broken Immigration system.

My family worked in the fields of the Texas Panhandle and often my grandfather could not find work for his family of American citizens because those jobs were taken by people who crossed here illegally for work and would work for cheaper than my grandfather would. My family also thought that our citizenship made us better than people who came here illegally. Part of that is rooted in history considering that we are Tejanos and the whole -point of Tejanos was that we did not want to be Mexican. This is a real fact that most people do not know since Tejano culture has all but died except for the newly discovered love everyone has for Selena. Hispanics do not publicly discuss this issue in our community though or how so many of the officers working in border patrol or in detention centers are Hispanics and why. We just skip over that part but it is important to note when discussing the “racism at the border” because ya’ll, it is not a bunch of white border patrol agents who are working down there, it is mostly hispanics. We have fallen for the lie that if we are born a few miles north of the river that we are somehow better than those seeking to come here for safety or a better life. I have never understood this at all but it is a reality in the Hispanic/Latino community.

So going to McAllen came with a lot of historical, cultural and trauma based baggage for me. As Hispanic mother who has seen person after person say that these mothers bringing their kids into the US to flee danger are at fault for the way their children are being traumatized and in some cases dying due to conditions in detention centers, it was difficult for me to shake the feeling that I was driving my child into danger and if something happened to him it would be my fault. I was raised by a worrier who saw a lot of shitty things happen to Hispanics.

My mother grew up in a time when she was not allowed into spaces that had signs saying “no Mexicans allowed” and even though we were not Mexican, white people did not care about truth and considered us Mexicans since we were brown and spoke Spanish. (for those of you confused: Native Americans and Spaniards make brown babies that grow up speaking Spanish. That does not always mean Mexican.) So I have an inherent fear of border patrol and especially in a time when the president of this country is tweeting the kind of racist statements I have heard all my life telling women of color to go back to the country they came from. Spoiler: I belong in this country, especially the state of Texas, more than most of the racists who use that line on me. My great grandmother was full blooded Native American from Texas before it was even Texas meaning way way before it was part of the United States of America. As far as I am concerned it is Trump that can go back to where his family came from because my family came from right here.

My point is that I had a lot of anxiety taking my son down there. I had not ever been further south than Corpus Christi Texas. That was intentional. Everyone who knows me knows that I do not go anywhere south enough that I am going to have to go through a border patrol checkpoint to come back. All the nopes.

When we reached the respite center there was a lot going on in the street and there was no parking. I thought “wow, this is great, looks like a lot of people are here to help!” but what I didn’t know at the time is that some members of congress where touring the respite center and holding press conferences there. Here’s my thing. I am tired of seeing members of congress touring detention centers and respite centers and holding pressers. What congress needs to do is do their damn job and start creating solutions to this mess. What is happening now is for sure worse because of Trump’s administration but BOTH parties have failed for decades to create a solution to fix the broken immigration system. It is time for them to get to work, not having photo ops to win elections. It is up to those of us voting for them to hold them accountable. And I mean BOTH PARTIES.

A group of about twenty of us worked for about four or five hours in the Texas heat, which is the worst in the Valley, unloading a semi full of water, diapers, backpacks, socks, shoe strings and other stuff. The people in the semi were boiling but still managed to keep up their spirits. My son Gabe hauled so many loads of supplies on a dolly and put them up for the volunteers of the respite center. The assembly line of people helping to get everything up the conveyor belt was 12 deep. While we probably all disagree on solutions or on who is to blame for this mess, for those few hours, we all worked with one goal in mind and that was to unload this semi and get these supplies into the hands of people who need them. I think that congress can work together as well to help make this crisis better. I also think there is room for pro-lifers and pro-choicers to work together as well to help asylum seekers and work together to hold our leaders accountable. They have used the abortion issue to keep us from working together long enough ya’ll. In the end we all agree that women and children should not be treated like shit, let’s all work together towards that.

One thing that I heard someone say is that we do not even have healthcare or resources to help our own citizens so how can we allow these people in and help them. Considering this came out of the mouth of someone who is pro-life, my thought was that this is what most women who are considering abortion have going on in their mind. I know because I have been in that place three times in my life of finding myself pregnant and thinking “i do not even have enough to take care of myself or the kids I already have, how the hell am I going to manage another child?!”. Guess what? We make room. That is what being pro-life means. That is what being “open to life” means. Open to life isn’t just for pregnancy. We have reduced being “pro-life” to being about stopping abortion when it is so much deeper than that.

Aborting my oldest son would not have solved the issue of poverty. Let’s stop thinking that eliminating the poor is the same as eliminating poverty. Eliminating poverty means building a society where people can work, pay bills, see a doctor and get an education without working four or five jobs. A society that respects the dignity of its citizens is a society where mothers welcome their children into the world. As a brown woman who has had white people tell me that I would not be able to mother my children so I should make the responsible choice to abort them, my opinion is that abortion as the solution to poverty is usually rooted in racism at worst and white privilege at best. But it is for sure not rooted in understanding the strength of motherhood.

These donations are amazing. I was proud to see how much people can do to help others. It was great to work hard in a hot warehouse with people I don’t agree with for a common goal of helping human beings in need. But all of that is a band aid if we keep voting in leaders who are either making these crises worse and/or are not doing their job to fix it. If we do not hold ourselves and our leaders accountable, then people will keep suffering and also children will keep dying.

On the way back I had to go through the border patrol checkpoint. I was so nervous, I had no idea what they would ask for or how the whole thing would go. The border patrol officer asked me where I was going, where I was coming from and what I was doing there. My first instinct was to say that it was none of his business but I already know that is how you make things more difficult for yourself. That is what you learn from a young age as a Hispanic. Which is why I roll my eyes anytime I see anyone say “you have rights”. Yeah, I had the right to tell him I didn’t have to answer him, but that would have gotten me pulled to the side, my car ransacked and taken a few hours out of my day and that is the BEST case scenario. But what surprised me is that when I explained to him what we had been doing he said “so there are still good people in the world”. He was hispanic and looked just like my Tio Roy and was nice to me all things considered.

For so long I had made presumptions about border patrol and they have only gotten worse in the last few weeks. That interaction with this man who was nothing but nice and respectful to me made me check myself and my temptation to dehumanize anyone at all, including border patrol agents. Which to me was the greatest pro-life lesson of the day.

Overall, the Rio Grande Valley is a beautiful part of the state I love so much. I realized it is possible to work with people I disagree with, some of them Trump supporters, for the common good which means that is possible on a bigger scale like congress and I have checked my own assumptions about border patrol as a whole.

As a Catholic sidenote: I went to San Juan and lit a candle for my Tio, Tia and Anthony and got holy water for my mom. It was a great day with my son Gabe which was a blessing since I have come to find so much joy in time with my kids. I am so proud of him for how hard he worked on Saturday. On the way home we stopped at a BBQ place in my Tio’s hometown and as we left there was the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen in my life and it felt like maybe God was saying “good job”. Gabe and I went to honor Anthony’s memory and I think we did just that. We will be going back to help at the respite center!

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Business As Usual

~ Leticia Adams ~ 3 Comments

I am really just rambling today so please stick with me, I’m hoping it all comes together in the end. My blog used to be called “Ramblings of a Crazy Face” and that’s why. It is how I write.

At the beginning of March I went and spoke at the FemCatholic Conference in Chicago. (You can buy the talks here. Honestly, I think that they are all worth the money and mine was not bad even though I almost fell apart in the middle of it.) At the end of my talk a woman who was the victim of sexual abuse as a child asked me how I felt about the current scandal in the Church. I guess from the look of most of my feeds on social media we might wanna start calling it the “last scandal” because nobody seems to remember that we are mad about it still and that nothing has been done at all. My I am bitter so maybe it is just me.

Here’s my answer: I am pissed. In my opinion, this is more than just about the sex abuse scandal though. It is about the way that we as Catholics accept lies when we think they are worth whatever end we are trying to achieve. It is easy to look at the sex abuse cover up and want our Bishops to face the fire for their part or their culture in those cover ups but then we all turn the other way when it is a lie that helps some narrative that we are trying to push, whatever that might be. And we all do it.

Catholicism is a great mask for psychos. People who take jabs at other people and mask it all with “I pray the Lord gives you peace” or other such piety speak that makes you look crazy when you tell other people that it was a jab at you. People with agendas and fakery fit right in when it comes to Catholic media. People who seethe with rage in real life but post pretty Instagram pictures of their rosaries and flowers telling us all how their morning prayer time was so fruitful. In the last nine years I have seen the under belly of our Church and it is ugly. Even in Parish council meetings where people say racist things about Hispanics without batting an eye.

The last time that I was this mad about the PR machine in the Catholic Church I lost a speaking job and was removed from the list of approved speakers for my Diocese. They were “concerned” about me. Then I set all of my social media accounts on fire and burned my platform to the ground. I have 0 desire to be made into someone I am not to do the work God has called me to do. I will not do it.

I have had a hard time articulating what exactly it is about all of this that makes me so ragey. But now I think I have finally figured it out.

After Anthony’s suicide I was on Instagram just scrolling out of habit when I saw so many of my friends just living their lives while I was sitting in a funeral home waiting to start planning my son’s funeral. His body was in a morgue somewhere and I was sitting in a funeral home and my friends were posting videos and pictures of them having fun. At that moment, I wanted to take a hammer to my phone. I hated that little device that showed me how little everyone cared about my dead kid. How they could just go on with business as usual without having their world stop because their son was dead.

In hindsight, I am not mad at anyone in particular about that at all, I’ve been and still am the person who goes on with my life when tragedy strikes another family. We all have our turn in that chair at the funeral home when our world has crumbled and everyone else is going to the movies or eating at Applebee’s or having a birthday party you aren’t invited to because you are dealing with dead bodies and funerals. It is part of life. But we haven’t always been able to see life go on when ours is at a standstill in a funeral home. Now we can.

Now we are all branded and have things to promote even in the middle of someone else’s tragedy, including the Catholic Church. And to me, that seems so wrong. I do not think that Jesus died on the Cross because it was a good content for His brand. I don’t think that His Passion was a marketing move. Or that He died at 3 pm because that is when the most people are online. In the modern world we have allowed the tools to become our masters. And with that comes dehumanizing ourselves into brands and dehumanizing others as brands and mostly we dehumanize Jesus into content for our feeds. That is not how God intended us to grow His following. That is how the Kardashians grow a following.

When I see the USCCB’s social media devoid of any talk about the sex abuse crisis I feel like my pain does not matter. I was sexually abused as a child by a mechanic and those things, those happy social media posts selling some kind of Catholic stuff, still hurt me. I cannot imagine what it is like for people who were victims of clergy. Each one of those “business as usual” social media posts might as well say “we do not care about your pain”. It is a signal that The Catholic Brand means more than the Gospel. A signal that I hear loud and clear. And it makes me angry. There is something more important than all our branding. There has to be, otherwise we are all just fooling ourselves and each other.

At some point I will have to find a place for this anger. I will have to process it and figure out where to put it because I am not going to allow it to stop me from doing what God has called me to do. But for today, I am just going to allow myself to be angry. There just has to be another way to be witnesses of Christ without the PR spin and without being fake and without accepting lies for the greater good. The Truth matters. The Truth has a name and a face. The Truth is Jesus and if we do not believe that then we should all just stop spending so much time pretending we are Catholics who believe in God.

Hate, Love, Darkness & Light

~ Leticia Adams

Here is my family’s make up: I am Hispanic. My oldest son Anthony is the grandson of a Mexican man who came here illegally and made a good life for his family. My youngest three children are half white and ethnically Jewish. My husband is white. His three sons are half white and half Hispanic.

This is a diverse family. I am Hispanic but I was raised in South Texas, my stepsons’ mother is from the Rio Grande Valley which is further south than South Texas but is The Valley, not “south Texas”. I know, it’s weird. Even weirder is that the Hispanic culture is totally different in The Valley than in South Texas and even more different than the Panhandle of Texas.

Both the men I married are white and both are honorary Hispanics. They were both raised with Hispanic friends, love Mexican food and fit right in with my family. More than I do even. But my ex-husband was raised in the city of Houston and my husband was raised in the country like me. Ben is a city slicker and Stacey is a redneck.

My oldest son Anthony was born in the ghetto and has always felt most at home among black people like me. But my three youngest kids are very suburban to the point that they pass as white and have to tell people they were raised by a brown mother.

All of this is to explain how diverse my family is and that is without even going into politics or religion. None of my children are practicing Catholics. My grandkids go to Mass with their mother who became Catholic after my son Anthony died, but my children are all over the place when it comes to both politics and religion.

In my opinion, what real tolerance and diversity and peace will look like is when no part of my family is being attacked for the color of their skin or their worldview. When the world is a reflection of my family, then I will consider that we have made some progress in creating a loving society.

Right now racists attack my Hispanic heritage, Trump attacks the grandfather of my oldest son, people fighting racism attack my white kids and husband, people equate redneck with Trump supporter and anti-antisemitism attacks the heritage of my children. Everywhere I turn there is some insult based on culture, skin color, social class, worldview, generation or heritage that insults someone in my family. It is getting pretty old.

Dr. King’s dream was not that people of color would one day outnumber or overpower white people so that we could insult them and their skin color. His “I have a Dream” speech ended with these lines:

When we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and
every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all
of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and
Gentiles, Protestants, and Catholics will be able to join
hands and sing in the word·s of the old Negro spiritual,
“Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, “We are
free at last.”

His dream was one where we all saw the dignity of each other. Where black people were lifted up as equals and who were judged by their character not by the color of their skin. Where their pain from what was done to them and is still being done to them was acknowledged. Where they were given a chance to lift themselves out of the poverty and trauma that was put on them by a system that dehumanized them. He never called for any of that to come as fruit of dehumanizing white people or religious people or non-religious people.

It is very fashionable to quote Dr. King on MLK day, but how many of us are willing to read the words of his “I have a Dream” speech and live them out in our everyday lives?

As Hispanic Catholic woman I ask that you do not claim your prejudice of anyone is in defense of me. Do not put that on me. I reject it a hundred times.