El Cenzontle

 It was warm and still last Saturday afternoon, when I sat eating lunch on the screened-in porch behind El Refugio's hospitality house in Lumpkin, Georgia. A mockingbird had landed on the powerline stretching across the backyard, and its loud churruping cut through the humidity, and through the cadence of our conversation. We all looked up and smiled. "Un Cenzontle!" said my neighbor, pointing at the bird. I had just been telling her how much I was enjoying the spicy roast peanuts she had brought to share with the guests at the house while she waited for her appointment to visit her son at Stewart Detention Center. She spoke Spanish, and I spoke English, but we managed to understand each other.

Mockingbird at MacArthur Park in Little Rock Arkansas, 2021. Photo by Spongeworthy93. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

It was only later that I learned that "el cenzontle" means "bird of four hundred voices" in Nahuatl, an Indigenous language of Mexico. Mockingbirds are native to North America, so the Spanish adapted the Nahuatl word to create their own variant, "sinsonte" which took the sound without the meaning. I suppose the mockingbird would approve, but to me, the notion of four hundred voices carries more power. It seemed to me that in a little over 28 hours in Lumpkin, meeting with some 30 people, I learned more than 400 words for love, for fear, and for frustration. I offered my hands cooking food and making beds, my indignation and analysis when spare moments allowed for talk among the volunteers, but mostly I offered my ear.

Fear spoke in the language of confusion. 

A woman called from Oklahoma, hoping to confirm that her husband was at Stewart. Once a volunteer helped her navigate the process of looking up his A-number ("alien number") in Spanish, she asked an impossible question. How would she get from Oklahoma to Georgia to see him? El Refugio offers gas cards, but not plane tickets. 

Another woman arrived thirty minutes too late to see her daughter on Saturday. Now in her 40s, the daughter had only been two years old when the family came to the United States as Christian missionaries from Kenya. The mother explained that her daughter had lost her green card status after what was essentially a misunderstanding with police. Being followed by a police officer triggered an anxiety attack, so the police took her to jail. When she threw the phone in frustration, she was charged with "destruction of government property," a felony. She had been in ICE custody ever since, awaiting deportation to a country she had visited only once and barely remembered. The mother, who had taken the incident as a sign that she needed to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, had been fighting for her daughter as she was transferred from facility to facility, knowing that these ICE jails only made her mental health worse. The older woman knew the pain of separation from her family, having attended a government boarding school in Kenya from the age of 7 until she graduated from high school. She was afraid for her daughter, and we did what we could to comfort her. A place to sleep, a fresh change of clothes, conversation about religion and the strange power of national borders.

Frustration spoke in the language of disbelief. 

So many of the visitors this weekend were U.S. citizens whose husbands were in the process of establishing permanent residency. It had never seemed urgent before. After all, they were married. And often, their loved ones had been in the country for years. These were men who owned businesses, who managed farms, who ran music programs at their churches. These were men who were never late for their check-in appointments with immigration officers. Some checked in and never came back. 

Others discovered that arrests for petty crimes—broken tail lights, speeding, leaving a driver's license at home—nullified legal processes that had been in the works for months. Suddenly, they were unauthorized aliens, subject to mandatory ICE detention and, seemingly at best, voluntary deportation. Fighting only made it worse. 

Love spoke in the language of devotion. 

A man awoke at three o'clock to drive his coworker from North Carolina to Georgia so that he could get an appointment to visit his brother on Saturday afternoon. We offered him a place to nap so that he could prepare for the drive home that same night. 

Two sisters bundled their daughters into the car at four o'clock so that they could come for their weekly visit to one of the women's husband. The girls tried to sleep in the car, but they were still sleepy when they arrived. We talked about swimming in the ocean over spring vacation while they munched on donuts, cousins anticipating an hour-long meeting with their father/uncle that would have to sustain him for another week. 

A woman prepared for the likelihood of uprooting herself and moving to Mexico to be with her husband. He was afraid to go back alone, and she didn't want to leave him. Everything was moving too fast. 

A family from northern Georgia turned to their father's landscaping clients for support, having kept his arrest secret for the first three months of his detention at Stewart. The eldest son and daughter quit school to manage the company so that their younger sister could stay in middle school. They asked if it was all right with me if they filmed the inside of the hospitality house to show their community this place that had offered them love. They told us that if a planned ICE jail in their hometown went forward, their father wanted to offer one of his properties to become a place just like this.

Learning the Language of Reciprocity

On the two-hour drive to and from Atlanta to Lumpkin, I was listening to Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. On my way into town, I learned about core ideas that she had developed as a botanist and explorer of her family's Pottawatomie heritage and other Indigenous traditions. She talked about the power of mutual flourishing and the dynamics of a gift economy, of interactions based on reciprocity. When I arrived at El Refugio, I immediately noticed an art piece on the wall in the dining room showing an intergenerational group of people gathered around a table heaped with dishes. Words on the sign proclaimed, "When you have more than you need, build a longer table not a higher wall."

Image captured from https://www.etsy.com/listing/1593786118/note-card-when-you-have-morebuild-a

Kimmerer's words were in my head as I drove back home munching on peanuts while attempting to avoid crunching a dried chili pepper or golden brown garlic chip. As I was getting ready to leave, having said my goodbyes to my fellow volunteers and some of the families waiting for late-afternoon appointments to visit their loved ones, the woman who had taught me "cenzontle" emerged from her truck with a large bag of peanuts. After I sang their praises at lunch, I thought she had left for the day. It turns out that she had gone to fetch more, so that she could wrap some up just for me. I could do so little for her, other than to sit and listen, but the taste of her generosity would linger on my tongue for miles and in my memory forever.