As the dutiful oldest daughter of an impoverished family, Maria took up the burden of helping with finances, by sneaking across the border to work on the farms of California, sending back everything other than living expenses. It was brutal work in those orange orchards, but Maria knew it was the right thing to do for her brothers and sisters. We do what we have to for love.
Down through history, there’ve been so many names for the blood-thirsty thugs that kill and plunder for the whims of cruel dictators. Legionaries, S.S. Stormtroopers, The N.Y.P.D. This particular situation’s monsters were called I.C.E. but they’re all the same, they’re all in it for themselves and when it’s over, they’ll all say they were just following orders but they love it.
Late one evening, to score points with the bigots at his crass palatial court, the dictator of that place and that time sent the I.C.E. thugs to the field Maria worked, to kidnap the workers and send them back to a place that held no hope for anyone. It didn’t matter that this just made the harvest harder for everyone, dictators care about nothing other than their performative cruelty.
While being processed for deportation, Maria was brutally assaulted by the unforgivable I.C.E. monsters, of course, as the thugs of dictators have always done, not at all for sexual pleasures, rather as part of the punishment. Part of the intimidation. Cruelty always being the only point.
By the time she returned to Mexico three months later, Maria was already beginning to show.
Her family believed her, of course, this was just what the I.C.E. did to people who didn’t have the right piece of paper but there was still a community stigma of being unwed and with-child. Eventually Jose, a widower friend of her father’s, agreed to marry her to save her from shame. He wasn’t rich either but he was better off than Maria’s family, Jose had a pretty good job as a contractor and was willing to continue to help them, financially. Jose was just kind and lonely.
When the I.C.E. came back to Mexico to bomb their city as political theater, pretending that a mythical drug-lord lived there, they had to flee back over the border arduously, into San Diego and when she finally went into labor, they could not go to any of the hospitals as per the I.C.E. raids set up to capture economic refugees. Maria had to give birth in a homeless encampment.
And the point is, no, her son Manny wasn’t the Christian redeemer, but it doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t need to be able to cure the sick with a touch or turn water into wine to matter. Each person is a miracle and deserves dignity over imaginary stuff like borders or irrelevant things along the lines of ethnicity. He could grow up to cure cancers non-miraculously, maybe. You never know. Sinners saints or humble farmhands, we’re all just people and none of us illegal.
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