From The Bathroom Floor

"I am horrified by the language that is used to recruit community members to tear through immigrant neighborhoods across the country."

I want to write about joy. I want to write about love. But just yesterday Google sent this advertisement via my Gmail inbox:

“Continue your mission while earning a competitive salary with CBP.” 

We are being hunted and killed for recruitment incentives and 70k a year, paid with our taxpayer dollars – my immigrant dollars. They will not pay for my medical care or my education, but they will pay for my disappearance and death. 

We have not left the house in several weeks. I write from my bathroom floor. Where I am welcomed to a few minutes of alone time if my kids allow it.  They are clingy and desperate for my attention. I imagine that their mother explaining the danger that she poses if she leaves the house has certainly not helped. If I decide to walk past the front yard to where the chicken coop is nestled between the trees and the property line ends, and they cannot see me or hear me, they get so scared they start to scream and cry. 

On the bathroom floor I  try to imagine the near distant future. Will the faces of our neighbors and family members be on milk cartons? In local newspapers? I think of how they kept the mass graves of indigenous children buried for decades, and wonder how many disappeared people will be buried in the belly of mother earth in an attempt to further erase us. Erase what they did to us. Many years in the future, after ICE is disbanded, who will avenge all of the innocent dead? Will masked vigilantes come for the people who once claimed those recruitment incentives the way they came for us? 

The kids are knocking on the door now. They need baths, and then it will be bedtime, and then the silence and the darkness of my home past 8pm will consume me. I will pour myself a glass of wine and stare at my computer and transfer what I have written on this legal pad into a Google Doc. 

There is dried up molding beeswax on my bathroom floor. I dig my nail into it and wonder which one of the children sat on the toilet and played with purple beeswax. I take it and toss it in the waste basket. 

I want to write about joy. I want to write about love but I am troubled by waves of desperation and unrelenting grief.  

Maybe I can tell you about the puppet shows my kids put on every day. Or the elaborate rainbow house with clouds for doors they built together on Minecraft. Or that my tomato plants are lush and blossoming with tiny yellow flowers. Or maybe about the hummingbird that hovered for a minute beside me and watched me water my roses. I can tell you about my friends and the book they wrote, the art they are making, the essays they are writing and the work they are doing. I can offer you this poem I have read to my children at bedtime so many times they beg me for a different one. 

PEACE
   SARA TEASDALE

Peace flows into me 
As the tide to the pool by the shore
It is mine forevermore, 
It ebbs not back like the sea

I am the pool of blue
That worships the vivid sky; 
My hopes were heaven-high,
They are all fulfilled in you. 

I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies, –
You are my deepening skies, 
Give me your stars to hold.

They are knocking at the door again. I flip the notepad closed, I have been crouched over it with my knees on the cold tile floor and my elbows propping me up. I get up, flush the toilet to pretend I have used it, wash my hands and take a look at myself in the mirror. There are dark circles under my eyes. My elbows are red with the indentation of the bathroom mat.

I get them ready for showers—they like showers better than baths now. I play cumbias and they sit in my bedroom and dance to them and play. One of them finds a piece of copier paper and a pen and is drawing on an empty laundry basket flipped upside down. I help them shower one by one. Massage lavender lotion onto their skin and brush their hair. They brush their teeth, I tuck them in and read them the poem. I kiss them goodnight. 

My daughter asks me if I get scared at night. If I am scared to be alone when their dad works late. I tell them that I do not get scared. That we are safe in our home.  

“No one can find us here?” 

I tell her no. I do not tell her that I am scared. That I do not like being alone, that sometimes I think about sleeping on their bedroom floor just to be soothed by the sound of their deep sleep breathing. 

In her interview with Melissa from The Border Chronicle, Alix , says “I’ve been telling people lately, I know that we are really scared and it's a really hard time for our community but showing up for each other matters. And I think that is the reason why I am surviving because I have so much love. It’s so sad that we are having this conversation but if you ever wanted to find a moment to take care of your neighbor it's this time. There hasn’t been a better time for it.” 

She says this through tears, through the knot in her throat. 

All I know is love these days. And that I am so full of it I cannot write without it.  When the interview ends Alix tells everyone she loves us. Melissa tells her she loves her back. I feel so loved it hurts.

 A few days later I am checking my email from the bathroom floor when I see another sponsored ad from CBP. I am not as startled as the first time I got an ad, but am still horrified by the language that is used to recruit community members to tear through immigrant neighborhoods across the country. The CBP has apparently raised their recruitment incentives. And I am shocked by the dollar amount they are using to bait people to hunt down my friends and family. I think of Alix’s long list of costs of being undocumented that she published  in her book. The long list of costs that was listed last year on a post that La Cuenta shared. Real dollars of immeasurable loss.

“Take pride in what you do.” As in you will be a more respectable person for taking on this profession. 

“Take pride in what you do.” As in do not be ashamed of what must be done.

Propina

Tremendous gratitude to Christián for sharing this essay with us this week. If you are not subscribed to her Substack, check it out.

Alix and Antero will be discussing The Cost of Being Undocumented with writer Julissa Arce in Los Angeles in two weeks (with an online option available). RSVP here.

And if you’re still on the fence about picking up The Cost of Being Undocumented, maybe read a free chapter, excerpted on LitHub last week. Or check out our interview on Culture Study (hello new subscribers!):

The Cost of Being Undocumented

We’ll see you next week!