Rocelia
Nowadays, every South American laborer and menial worker who has entered this country illegally is being called a criminal, a thief, or a rapist. The powers that be have torn families apart. They have snatched babies from their mothers’ breasts. They have placed children in giant cages, separating them from their families as if they are animals in a zoo. They turned a deaf ear to their heart-wrenching cries of despair. People who sit in their comfortable homes, surrounded by their families and a hot meal on their tables three times or more a day, declare that these ‘criminals’ should have entered legally. You are not them. You have not experienced the desperation they had to endure. No one leaves their homeland if they feel safe and secure. Many of us have entered this country with passports and green cards because of unrest in our native lands. What if we could not have afforded to? What if we were in danger or hungry, or any reason that made it intolerable for us to live safely in our country of birth? What then? What would we do? How would we protect our families? How? Would we not do the same thing as they do, perhaps? Many years ago, perhaps thirty or twenty-five years ago, we used to have a cleaning lady by the name of Rocelia. She was a happy woman with a perpetual smile on her face. She did her work cheerfully and gratefully. As she worked, she sang her Spanish tunes. Once I was not well. I had a bad cold and temperature. She called up her husband and instructed him to buy ingredients for a soup as ‘la señora’ was sick. During his lunch hour, he went and bought the ingredients and delivered them to her. She made me the most delicious soup and refused payment for what they had spent. They felt insulted that I even suggested it. They behaved as if it was an honor to do this. Over the years of working for us, she gradually recounted the story of her life. She was a pretty girl of fourteen when she caught the eye of her father’s forty-year-old drinking buddy. Her mother had passed away when she was very young. Her father was a drunken lecher. When his friend expressed interest in her, the father happily and heartlessly gifted his innocent fourteen-year-old daughter to his drunken, no-good friend! I suppose he wanted to pawn his responsibility to someone else! Very soon, this poor innocent girl bore the man a daughter and then a son. The boy was deaf. Because of this, the man kicked her and her two children out. They had nowhere to go. At that point in time, she was eighteen years old, with nowhere to live and no means of support. She discovered an empty little mud hovel, which consisted of four walls, an opening to enter and exit from, and no roof. She and her children had to endure the hot sun during the day and the cold and the rain. Still, she was grateful. She had four walls for privacy. She looked for work and was grateful for that as well. She paid part of the meager money she earned to someone to care for her babies. Years passed. Her children grew. From her penury salary, she managed to save enough to come here. She trusted the person who had taken care of her children to continue to look after them. I cannot even imagine the perils she endured to get here, but arrive she did. I cannot imagine what pain she felt as she left her babies behind to seek a better life for the three of them. She found jobs cleaning houses. She was found to be trustworthy and hardworking. She succeeded in getting more and more jobs. She worked seven days a week, then six days. She now had enough money to bring her son over. She spotted my son’s old bed and desk in the storage room. May she please have it for her son? She may. That day she sang happily from morning till the moment she left, because she now had a bed and a desk for her boy. Peter and I smiled to ourselves, listening to her. In the meantime, she had met a good, decent man who loved her. He married her. She continued to work. This time she was able to bring her daughter. She planned and planned. She dreamed of her daughter becoming an attorney, just like Peter. But first she had to learn to read and write English. Once a week, the daughter would come to me for a two-hour conversation and reading session. The girl began to work for one of my friends cleaning houses. I do not think she attained her mother’s dreams of becoming an attorney. One day, Rocelia came to me with a sad look on her face. Her husband had told her that she had worked very hard all her life. He had just received a substantial raise. Her job from now on was to take care of her home and her family. She was feeling sad to leave us, but happy to be a housewife. We were happy for her to have someone who truly cared and loved her enough to allow her an easier life. But happiness did not come easily for Rocelia. It seemed that good fortune was forever eluding her. A few years later, as her son was bicycling to college, a car honked for him to get out of its way. The lad was deaf. He did not hear him. The driver impatiently hit his bike and killed him. All the love and toil of that poor mother came to nothing. So I ask you, what crime had this unfortunate creature committed? What crimes have all the Rocelias in this country been guilty of, except to try to seek a better life for themselves and their families in the only way they knew how? Since when has poverty turned into a crime? Have all you Trumps and Obamas and Clintons, all you judgmental people who criticize them, ever stood in their shoes for even a day before condemning them? Have you risen at the crack of dawn to trudge to the bus stop in the cold of winter and the scorching heat of summer to clean the houses and toilets of others? What are their crimes? You know what their crime is? Their crime is that they have no alternative but to get up early in the morning to get to your house just before you wake up; to clean your toilet bowls and tolerate your impatience and rudeness because they do not work fast enough, speak English well enough, or come late because their bus did not arrive on time. They get up in the dark and wait for a bus in the cold of winter and the heat of the hot summer sun. That is why I am enraged and sad at what is happening in this country today. We have lost our compassion and understanding. We have become cruel, heartless, self-centered, and soulless. Oh, to have a compassionate heart once more. Oh, to remember our humanity. To remember that if not for the Grace of God, there could go any of us.