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Jeff Winder and Sue Frankel-Streit cross the border fence. The fence is rusty barbed wire Sue Frankel-Streit and other immigrant-justice activists from the organization The People United crossed into the U.S. from Mexico. |
By CATHY DYSON
The white woman thought it was time to stand up for her brown-skinned neighbors to the south.
So Sue Frankel-Streit, an activist from Louisa County, traveled to Mexico, crawled through a barbed-wire fence to enter the United States and walked almost 40 miles over desert trails and mountainous terrain to reach a border checkpoint in Arizona.
She came home with blisters on her feet, a nasty spider bite on her cheek and a new appreciation for what immigrants endure.
"It's unreal to me that we're creating these horrible situations for people," she said.
Frankel-Streit, 45, and her husband, Bill, live in a Catholic commune about 30 miles east of Charlottesville. For decades, the two have railed against what they call "social injustice" and have protested the war in Iraq and racial profiling by police.
Recently, Frankel-Streit has focused on the illegal-immigration debate and the nation's economic policies, which she believes force poor Hispanics to leave their families and risk their lives as they cross hostile country.
She has helped Spanish-speaking neighbors in central Virginia. Her simple surroundings at Little Flower Catholic Farm may seem removed from civilization, but she's 90 minutes from Harrisonburg, where countless Hispanics work in poultry plants and 40 percent of schoolchildren don't speak English.
Frankel-Streit also attended public meetings in Prince William County, where she saw Hispanics explain their plight to government officials.
"They were taking really big risks [by coming forward], and we felt it was incumbent on us as citizens--as white citizens--to take some of those risks ourselves."
Frankel-Streit and others with the Virginia group, The People United, started planning a trip to Mexico. They realized the danger. More than 2,000 people have died in the past five years attempting to cross the border, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The section of the Sonora desert west of Nogales is considered one of the most treacherous routes. That's the path Frankel-Streit and her walking companion, Jeff Winder of Nelson County, took.
The two spent three days and two nights in the desert. They carried everything they needed--sleeping bags, food and water--in backpacks, just as immigrants do.
The major difference was that the Virginians traveled by day, when temperatures reached 110 degrees, and slept at night. They regularly heard footsteps in the darkness around them.
The risks the others took amazed Frankel-Streit. She and Winder picked their way through deep gorges and along paths that crisscrossed in confusion. How in the world, she wondered, did people make it in the dark?
"All it would take is one misstep," she said.
Winder, 40, hurt his knee early on. His injury slowed the two down, and Frankel-Streit thought about those who had been left behind.
A month before their trip in late April, a 14-year-old sprained her ankle. The guide, or "coyote," who led them went on without her, and the girl died of exposure.
Frankel-Streit and Winder plan to share their story with groups across Virginia. They'll push for open borders and explain what they call the connection between a militarized border and oppressive laws.
"Any time there's oppression, it affects all of us," Frankel-Streit said.
Cathy Dyson: 540/374-5425
Email: cdyson@freelancestar.com
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As two white activists from Virginia crossed the Mexican border into the United States, they carried a sign that proclaimed, "Mexico They were not stopped by the Border Patrol. Hanging from the bottom of the sign were worn-out shoes and plastic water bottles they found along the trail. It was hard for Sue Frankel-Streit of Louisa County to see the discarded items. They reminded her of things Jewish people left behind when they were forced into Nazi death camps, or what the Cherokees abandoned on the Trail of Tears. ONLINE: thepeopleunited .org |
