“All one could see was an amazing and intricate system of gentle waters that flowed down south towards my beloved South Florida,” Felipe wrote after a day walking through a newly restored section of the Everglades.
“The sky was blue but one could see a storm approaching in the horizon and smell the wetness in the clouds. For a couple of hours, all I heard was the sound of small birds, the cars coming in my direction, and the wind.”6
Daily they passed roadkill species they’d rarely, if ever, seen alive: possums, armadillos. Few drivers stopped when they hit an unlucky animal. Felipe guessed most never even noticed. But walking, one could see the sad details of each animal. One afternoon they passed a deer that had been hit and lay at the side of the road. That night, as they arrived at a potluck party thrown in their honor by a local nonprofit, Felipe asked what was for dinner. “Venison,” one of their hosts responded, killed that afternoon.
He did not eat it.
A month into the walk, they reached Paynes Prairie, a state preserve about ten miles south of the University of Florida in Gainesville, where bison and wild horses roamed and whooping cranes alighted at the side of marshes, just out of the reach of alligators. They covered more than twenty-two miles that day, and the quiet was both uplifting and isolating. As beautiful as the meadows and marshes were in the early-morning light, it was easy to wonder what the group was achieving, all this walking in the middle of nowhere. They checked the blog and followed the comments, but even with social media, it was hard to know if anyone in Washington was paying attention.
But there were also moments like the time on the outskirts of Orlando, when they stopped at a coffee shop to use the restrooms and noticed the staff behind the counter whispering and smiling. Carlos approached the employees to chat. It turned out they had seen Felipe and his friends on TV. Moments later, the coffee shop servers poured the group free coffee and presented them with $40 in donations they had spontaneously collected.
Another time, someone called the police because their RV was parked illegally, but the owner of the parking lot had seen their story in the paper and declined to file a complaint.
Near midnight on January 27, the night before Gaby’s twenty-fifth birthday, she was getting ready for bed when she heard a serenade outside the window of the Gainesville home where they were staying. It was her father, who’d made the six-hour drive (or, for Gaby, twenty-seven-day hike) up from Miami to celebrate with her. He was singing the traditional Spanish birthday song “Las Mañanitas.” The next day, the gang took a break and reunited with Gaby’s family, savoring a rare restaurant meal.
As the skin peeled off the soles of their feet, their muscles burned and stretched, and their spirits flagged, Felipe and his friends received texts of encouragement from the farmworkers fasting in Homestead that put the red welts and swollen toes into perspective. After all, the farmworkers’ blisters had long since turned to calluses. If those men and women were willing to fast, Felipe and the others could keep walking.
Throughout January, the students received media coverage by newspapers across Florida and local TV and radio outlets, as well as a few national mentions by the New York Times, the Washington Times, and the Huffington Post. Unlike Felipe and his friends, the fasting farmworkers earned little media attention following the kickoff. Three fasters were eventually hospitalized, and they decided to call off the effort. They would find other ways to support the walkers. Now it was up the Trail of Dreams.
In North Florida, the group discovered farm towns such as Mayo, where nearly a third of the 1,000 residents lived below the poverty line, and heard about how life had gotten tougher after the 2006 marches and the stepped-up raids.
When their driver, Felipe Vargas, asked why the local farm labor movement seemed to be stuck in a “dormant stage,” the residents were quick to answer: “Fear.”
Felipe and the others were no strangers to discrimination, but as relatively light-skinned, college-educated Latinos who lived in Miami, their experience with racial prejudice was more abstract.
A stop in the coastal town of St. Augustine, the first city in the nation founded by European settlers, brought things closer to home. They took a detour along the town’s historic “Freedom Trail.” At St. Augustine’s small civil rights museum, Felipe learned how Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders chose the city as the place to help reinvigorate the flagging civil rights movement. Fearing Congress would endlessly filibuster the 1964 Civil Rights Act, civil rights leaders had urged young black activists to stage nonviolent protests, including a “swim-in” at the Monson Motor Lodge. In response, the hotel owner had dumped pool-cleaning acid (a variant of hydrochloric acid) into the water as the teens swam, photos of which quickly circulated in newspapers and newscasts worldwide.7
Felipe was surprised to find that few locals even seemed to know about the hotel incident or the other sites on the city’s Freedom Trail.
“What’s the Freedom Trail?” an attendant at the visitor’s booth said when they asked for directions.8 How could people learn from history if they didn’t even know what had happened? he wondered.
Soon after the group reached Georgia, they met local members of the NAACP for lunch in Albany. As they talked, the NAACP leaders mentioned in passing a Ku Klux Klan rally to be held halfway across the state the next day in the eastern town of Nahunta, home to some 375 mostly white households, about a third of which were barely scraping by. The Nahunta mayor had publicly grumbled about the event but essentially claimed his hands were tied. The city wouldn’t give the KKK permission to march, but as long as the group didn’t obstruct traffic, it couldn’t stop it either. The Klan rally provided a reality check outside the bubble of religious allies and other immigrant advocates whom the four usually met with. The noon rally promised three distinct themes: prayer in schools, the rise of sexual predators, and the “Latino invasion.”
Felipe and the students decided to check it out. After weeks on the trail of long but relatively quiet days, they were itching to come face-to-face with those who objected to them.
On the ride over Felipe was nervous, but when he stepped out of the RV and saw the ring of FBI agents, including their contact at the DOJ, separating the NAACP protesters from the KKK, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The robed men, old and young, with their pointy white hoods, seemed straight out of the history books.
Did I just get into a time machine? he asked himself.
“Mexicans don’t have a patriotic sense,” one speaker called out. “They should deport all the Mexicans. It’s a plague is what it is, and they should be eradicated.”
In fact, many more people had gathered in opposition to the Klan than in its support. Others had their phones out, filming the scene as if capturing a circus act.
Still the speaker’s words made Felipe’s stomach tighten.
Juan tried to laugh it off, especially one speaker’s efforts to link immigrants and global warming. “How did we do that, with jalapeño peppers?” he asked with a smirk.
With so many law enforcement officers present, the KKK rally turned out to be one of the safest events the students attended along the trail. In many ways, the Klan itself seemed almost like a harmless throwback, a last gasp of a dying order. Felipe was more scared of the white supremacist movements that operated without sheets, that raised funds and recruited online, the trolls whose comments he knew were being deleted from their blog by the support team. Between 2008, when Obama was elected, and 2010, the United States saw the number of domestic extremist groups, mostly anti-immigrant and pro-white supremacy, increase by about two hundred, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.9
Yet after they blogged about the event, one online response made the day feel worth it.
“As the granddaughter of a KKK member and grandniece of a grand wizard, I apologize for the ignorance of my ancestors and current members of that hate group,” a woman who identified herself only as “Nancy” posted on March 1, 2010. “. . . While we loved ou
r elders, we eventually saw what their twisted agenda did to people and families. . . . Continue your march.”10
For Felipe and the group, scarier than the Klan were the times they tried to meet with local sheriffs and other law enforcement officials. Along the way, they set up meetings with the officials to ask them about their detention policies. Some listened in stony silence. Some never showed. But sometimes their response was surprising.
Only months before, The Nation magazine had published a story about Immigration and Customs Enforcement sub-field centers, including one in Cary, North Carolina,11 where immigrants could be held, sometimes for days, before families could track them down. The four walkers joined a church group outside the detention center, located in a remote, woodsy office complex with the most minimal of signage. An Immigration and Customs official who identified himself as Brian met them at the entrance. One by one the protesters questioned him about the government’s stepped-up deportation efforts and the treatment of the detainees at Cary. To their surprise, Brian listened and politely argued back in a series of exchanges the activists recorded.12 The demonstrators were protesting against the wrong people, he insisted.
“I do not make the laws,” he said, his shaved head and gray stubble towering half a foot above the rest of the crowd. “It’s grassroots. Talk to your congressmen, talk to your senators. Get the law changed.”
Eventually Felipe introduced himself and explained about the march. “I wonder if you get the chance to talk to the people you are locking up. When you lock up people, you are locking up students like me.”
There was something almost comical about Felipe’s earnestness. Brian looked at him as if he were wondering, Is this kid for real? Yet it was precisely Felipe’s vulnerability that seemed to disarm him.
“I know you are just enforcing the law, but there’s a cost—”
“There’s a human cost,” Brian echoed in agreement.
A few minutes later Felipe gave Brian one of the demonstrators’ posters. “No human being is illegal,” it read.
Felipe also asked for a hug. Brian leaned in awkwardly, giving a what-the-hell shrug.
Felipe handed him a card with the group’s information, “so you can spread the word about the four students walking to Washington,” he said.
“You guys are actually walking all the way to Washington?” Brian asked, eyebrows raised, for the first time seeming somewhat impressed. “Not in cars?”
Felipe explained that was why he had so many blisters on his feet.
Brian nodded his head and puffed out his lower lip.
As they left, the demonstrators noted that another agent had ripped up the poster they’d given him. Brian said he planned to keep the one they’d given him in the office to remind himself of the group.
“Really?” the group asked, incredulous.
“Yes. This is the first time something like this has happened to me,” he said.
Often, though, the confrontations along the road weren’t with law enforcement officials; they were internal. The four knew very well that despite the uncertainty in their lives, they were doing relatively well for undocumented immigrants. They’d worked hard, studying at odd hours, signing up for every club, some days barely eating, sometimes spending three hours a day on the bus to get to classes, grabbing every opportunity they could. But their efforts had been met with academic and social support. Although every member of the group but Juan could face deportation, they already had a leg up on many of their peers. All but Felipe came from middle-class backgrounds, at least in their home countries. At times, tensions flared between Felipe Vargas and the rest of the group, and van rides turned into political arguments. Sometimes he questioned his role as a Mexican American chauffeuring around “privileged South Americans.” He wondered if the group had received its protection from law enforcement because of their light skin color.
“I ask myself everyday why is it that these dreamkids have not been picked up,” he wrote in his blog.
“. . . Being the only Mexicano on the trail it has been challenging for me on many levels to make sense of why I am walking and supporting 4 South Americans that came here legally and overstayed their visa,” he continued. “ . . . South Americans have always thought they were better than me. They have always made me . . . feel as [though] they knew what was best for us and had to speak on our behalf. In Indiana or in any newly emerging Latino community you find the same phenomenon . . . South American immigrants, often more privileged in our global class system, often more privileged in the public education system, and often privileged by our broken immigration system will be asked to speak for Mexicanos or Central Americanos.”13
Felipe Vargas did not accompany them all the way, but in the end he decided the four young walkers did more good than harm. If they were willing to listen and help give voice to those who were not such stellar students, who did not have access to college, then, yes, they could very well represent him.
If the walkers’ youth and earnestness impacted the officials they met, the children Felipe and his friends came upon along the trail seemed to have a similar effect on them.
One local civil rights activist who was helping set up meetings and speaking gigs for the group, Adelina Nicholls, of the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, would turn to the audience after each speech and ask if anyone had anything to add. One afternoon, an eleven-year-old boy named Oscar was the only one to raise his hand. Nicholls motioned for him to come forward. The short boy, with a bowl cut and big brown eyes, looked as if he were straight out of a Mexican pueblo, thought Felipe. Then the boy opened his mouth. Out came a Southern drawl as thick as molasses.
Yup, this kid is from Georgia, Felipe laughed to himself, embarrassed by his own assumptions.
Oscar hadn’t planned to talk, and his bravado melted away as he stood in front of his audience. “Please don’t send my dad away, President Obama,” was about all the fifth grader could get out before his eyes filled with tears. His thirteen-year-old sister spoke, and she, too, began to cry. She had been called a wetback all her life, even though she and her brother were Georgia natives. Their dad, who picked pecans for a living and later told Felipe he was proud of helping feed people through his work, had been detained after officers stopped him, found he was driving without a license, and then discovered he was in the country illegally. Now he faced deportation, while their mother worked from home decorating cakes, too afraid to look for outside work.
Gaby walked into the audience and hugged the girl, her own tears spilling into the teen’s hair.
The group stayed overnight with Oscar’s family. That weekend, Oscar and his sister walked two days along with the students through the intermittent rain, cracking each other up with jokes as they twirled their bright-colored umbrellas and jumped puddles.
Sometimes, Oscar waxed philosophical. He compared his family’s situation to that of African Americans in the United States in the 1960s, when they couldn’t vote and were given only the lowest-paying jobs. Felipe would do a double take, reminding himself that the boy was just eleven. Only when the students once again broached the subject of their parents’ immigration status did the siblings’ preternatural confidence crumble.
“It was as if we opened Pandora’s box,” Felipe wrote a few nights later. “ . . . Their pain was so evident that I couldn’t do anything else other than cry as loud as they were.”14
AT EACH STOP, local Spanish-language TV, fledgling news sites, and occasionally local English-language reporters showed up thanks to the constant pestering by Presente.org and Maria Rodriguez’s team back in Miami. Media interest in the Trail of Dreams continued to grow. By March, they were earning press coverage in Georgia in Spanish and English, including a spot on the Atlanta-based CNN. Each of the walkers received attention in his or her native country, as well as in Canada, Spain, and even Taiwan.
Meanwhile, United We Dream, which had declared its independence at the conference back in 2007, upped the action as it helped enc
ourage solidarity marches around the country. In late February, the National Korean American Service & Education Consortium, NAKASEC, helped organize an eighteen-mile Trail of Dreams in Los Angeles, while Latino activists farther south in Santa Ana led their own walk. Some two hundred immigrant students in Milwaukee also marched in solidarity that month. Later on, workers from Long Island’s service industries marched to New York City and then to Washington, DC. Students in Manhattan organized a walk to DC. as well, with the group Make the Road New York. Some of the groups called for passage of the DREAM Act, others for comprehensive reform. Their actions, informally coordinated through United We Dream, made the veteran Washington advocates take notice.
In Chicago, Tania Unzueta, the aspiring journalist and activist who had spoken at the Windy City’s 2006 marches, had begun to test strategies to help stave off deportations for friends through trial and error, compiling information on what kinds of letters worked, which calls were most effective, and which legal arguments were most successful. Yet even as she gained local prominence as an organizer, she was still relatively quiet about her own unauthorized status ever since Dick Durbin had helped her return from Mexico. It was one thing to advocate for a friend, another to give her story to reporters and risk deportation herself.
Now, spurred on by the Trail of Dreams, Tania and dozens of other young adults in Detroit, New York, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, finally came forward on March 10 and declared themselves “undocumented and unafraid.”
The events were billed in press releases as part of a “National Coming Out of the Shadows Day,” inspired by the similarly named event LGBTQ activists had organized decades before. Like Felipe, Tania and others were beginning to realize there was a certain safety in coming forward with their story, a network ready to react should something happen to them.
Still, many remained afraid. Even at the March event in Chicago, Tania was the only one of eight young immigrants who allowed the media to use her full name.
The Making of a Dream Page 12
