meals for orphans living on the streets
every week, and from the history of
the militarization of the wall into a
sunny afternoon eating popsicles with
children on a playground. We experienced contractions and expansions—
moments of despair for the world and
pure clarity of God’s love.
We were hosted by an amazing
organization called Frontera de Cristo,
which is part of a network of Christian
Spanish, danced salsa with new friends
from a Mexican university, laughed a
lot, accepted unearned hospitality, ate
churros and shook with grief.
Mexican author Gloria Anzaldúa
writes that “a borderland is a vague
and undetermined place created by
the emotional residue of an unnatural
boundary.” There are borders everywhere—within our communities, our
families, ourselves. But God’s love calls
groups that do border-related work.They
regularly host pilgrims, taking groups
through various sites and experiences
along the borderlands on both the U.S.
and Mexican sides.
We did not expect to provide
anything beyond prayer and solidarity for
those we encountered. We traveled to
the borderlands to be transformed, to see
in living flesh and color those things that
previously were abstract ideas and disembodied statistics. We spent evenings in
migrant shelters with folks who had been
deported only a few days before we met
them—some scooped up after 17 years
living in the United States, others fleeing
gang violence in Central America. We
ate a meal prepared by women who
started a permaculture garden and resilience community for their families. We
wrote messages in the sand next to the
wall – “Pax” and “You are precious to
God.” We stumbled through broken
us into oneness—into the deep and
abiding reality that we were created
to be in relationship with one another.
Andalzúa calls La Frontera “una herida
abierta,” an open wound.
Our return to Charlottesville was
not marked by a frenzied tirade against
U.S. politics or a charge into the streets,
but rather the quiet, soulful energy of
lo