José

Diane George

“Words can be meager things. Sometimes they fall short.”

—Dale Horvath, a character in the zombie apocalypse television series, The Walking Dead

Dale’s words occupy space in my brain most days now. He offers them to us in the first season of a television show in which survivors of a zombie apocalypse try to find their way in an utterly changed world. I hear them again now as I try to put words on a page to say something meaningful about our present moment—a moment in which ICE gestapo agents are kidnapping and disappearing black and brown bodies throughout the United States. Zombies are figurations of death-in-life: human lives lived beyond language’s ability to construct moral coherence in the face of mortality. They represent an ethically vacant insatiability to consume human flesh, just as an enormously expanded and lavishly funded ICE now traffics in cheap labor to enrich private prison corporations, leaving behind a trail of broken lives.

There go those words, falling short again. Paltry things.

—Dale Horvath

I worked as an immigration lawyer for over a decade and have spoken with hundreds of immigrants in that capacity. As an anthropologist, I’ve studied and taught migration, interviewed dozens of migrants, and traveled with 30 DACA recipients as they re-entered the US after their first trip home in more than 20 years. I’ve learned that migration is not about laws or policy but is lived experience. As anthropologists we try to see, listen to, and hear things from within a disciplined understanding of, and an empathetic identification with, the perspective of those whose lives and cultures we are trying to know. We try to discern other lives as inhabited worlds that are just as valued and valuable as our own and those of our audiences of students and readers.

All my life, I have done this work from a place of privilege. That’s a hard place from which to find the right words. But I have to write this. I have to write it because every single day my heart breaks a little more. Because when our wanna-be dictator took office, it was already in a million pieces from watching Israel kill Gaza for two years while the world did nothing and my tax dollars supported it. Because every day I see another Instagram post showing masked thugs tearing apart parents and children, destroying another life, terrorizing another human being. I have to write this because I would go insane if I didn’t. Because the least I can do is bear witness. Maybe I can’t find words that don’t fall short, but I can tell a story and let it speak for itself. Here goes.

A recent Thursday morning, 10am, Brooklyn. It’s the end of the weekly move-the-car-for-street-cleaning ritual and I am just about to head home, around the corner. Then, chaos. I hear pounding steps and yelling behind me. Turning, I see two people chasing a man across the intersection. I see the man crash to the ground as the others tackle him. He moans. I’m frozen but somehow remember that I need to record this. The man, a middle-aged Latino man who is a bit overweight, is hyperventilating. Someone holds him down while a woman tells him to take a breath. As if he could.

I and a couple of other bystanders ask them what’s going on. They don’t answer. Eventually they get the man to his feet and start walking him back across the street in the direction they came from. I follow, slightly encumbered by my two dogs and trying to film. I get up pretty close and ask them who they are. They don’t answer. I ask again, and add, why are you arresting this man? They don’t answer. I tell the man, in bad Spanish, don’t say anything and don’t sign anything. They keep walking.

A crowd gathers, and I fall behind a bit. Another person is also filming and a few are shouting curses at the kidnappers. Most bystanders watch in silence. The crowd is a mix of white upper-middle-class Park Slopers and Latinos who work at the car wash or the local corner store. We keep asking the kidnappers who they are. “Police,” they finally say. “What police?” I ask. “NYPD? Police means NYPD.” They don’t answer.

I’m not thinking through most of this, but I excuse myself as I push through the crowd and get up in the face of one of the kidnappers who has a badge. (Only later, when I froze the picture on the video, did I see it said Department of Homeland Security.) I ask the kidnapped man to give me his name and the name of someone I can call. For a moment he looks right at me. I see fear and desperation. “José,” he says. Then he is gone, inside the unmarked car with two masked men driving him away.

I found out later that José has been the manager of the car wash for the last fifteen years. I don’t know his immigration situation, but the local deli owner says he’s a good man, works hard, never causes trouble. I sent the video to everyone I could think of, including my city council person, who thanked me via a staff member. Several weeks later, there’s still no word on José. I wonder where he is.

This scene plays out every day, in every place across the country, although largely in blue and sanctuary cities, which Trump targets like the childish tyrant he is. You won’t give me your crayons? Fine, I’ll just shit on your drawing. Some of us die a little inside every time we see a kid pulled away from their mom while she gets pushed into a car or watch the video of a woman screaming hysterically while being shoved into a tiny compartment in the back of a truck while her husband sobs. Or every time there is a new iteration of this brutality.

It’s not anything I didn’t know already, but I didn’t grasp (didn’t want to grasp?) the depth and breadth of it. I mean of the cruelty that exists in this country. Of the sadistic pleasure in cruelty.

It didn’t come from nowhere. Words may be meager, but words can also be weapons. There’s been a renewed effort over the past three decades to dehumanize migrants. The word Illegal, for example, used as a noun designating a person’s identity: a word that turns a human being into a crime. It’s quite a feat to make a person a crime. It takes reducing the whole of a complex life—all the joys and sorrows, all the lovers and family and friends, all the whispered intimacies and shouted delight, all the dreams and thoughts and memories—an entire universe—to one rejected, excluded, criminalized thing.

Ningun ser humano es ilegal.

Words dehumanize. (Insert any number of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender-based, religious slurs here.) But I like to think (hope) that it is not impossible to re-humanize with words. Who are these people being handcuffed and thrown into the back of cars by masked assailants, being tackled to the ground while they fight for breath, being confined in places that would haunt anyone’s worst nightmares while private companies profit from their bodies? They are my neighbors, my friends, the guy who manages the car wash on the next block. They are the Dreamers who let me join them on their first trip back home to Mexico. They are former clients whose hands I held while they relived the trauma that led them here. They are the people who deliver my packages, the ones who work hard to grow my food, or to bring my meal in the restaurant that I’m privileged to be able to afford. They are the people who draw my blood in the hospital and who bag my groceries—and they are so much more than that. Maybe words can bring the dead back to life, not as zombies but as fully realized human beings, impossible to dismiss and dehumanize. So I bear witness, and I tell their stories in meager words that, maybe this time, are something powerful.