Someone asked me awhile back what the license frame on my car means by “Todos Somos Vecinos/The Poor Are Not The Enemy.” Other than establishing that no flat surface is immune from my opinions, it also has another significance.
Back in 1989, I began my ministry to Mexican immigrants in the Monroe-Snohomish area of rural Washington State, an area about 45 minutes northeast of Seattle. I worked alone, supported by my wonderful husband, and developed as a “motto of ministry” the phrase “Todos Somos Vecinos,” which is Spanish for “We Are All Neighbors.” I called my teaching/pastoring/evangelism/service ministry “Vecinos” to reflect the Biblical idea of loving one’s neighbor, and my goal was always Service, Empowerment, Relationship, and Advocacy, the acronym of which, conveniently, spells “sera’,” or “will be,” in Spanish.
I taught English classes in Spanish, bought cases of bilingual New Testaments, translated at schools and clinics, helped nine women deliver their babies, advocated for my friends when their bosses withheld paychecks or otherwise treated them unfairly, and for a year and a half, until 2000, I co-pastored a small congregation in Duvall, Washington. I worked with a couple of hundred people, and everything I did, I submitted to the idea of service, empowerment, relationship, and advocacy for the glory of God. Those were the hardest, best, and most blessed times of my life. Even now, I would like to think that I consider all I meet to be my neighbors, and nothing else matters a bit if I fail to treat someone kindly.
In ministry to poor people, one begins to understand the scapegoating effect that comes from a society’s introduction to the “other”: in this case, poor, largely undocumented, generally sub-literate Mexican immigrants whose back-breaking work kept Snohomish County dairies, farms, and factories going, and whose buying power kept afloat small stores and apartment complexes, auto dealers and laundromats. Monroe, Washington, experienced an enormous increase in the number of Mexican residents during the 1990s, and the willful ignorance of the influx of new neighbors and the resolve to not become involved with them soon gave way to bitter resentment. Ignorance and avoidance began to spill over in complaints that “their” stores took up all of downtown (which had been in decline previously), or that “they” held up the line at Rite-Aid, or that “no one spoke English.” Even the youth pastor of the largest church in town, a light-skinned man named Ortiz who was born in Mexico but had lived in the states since birth, professed to have no idea that there was such a large community of Mexican workers in town, which conveniently absolved him from ever having to extend his youth ministry to their children. Other Christians dutifully bought Christmas presents for the little ones, and then complained the rest of the year about hearing Mexican music blaring from cars driven by their older siblings.
I began to see in Monroe what I had seen in other places and what I knew was true from history — when a relatively homogenized population experiences a sudden change, when people with strange names, dark skin, and a different language pour into a community, battle lines often are drawn in a war that doesn’t, and needn’t, exist. I realized that my Anglo neighbors were filtering their observations of Monroe’s demographic changes through a screen that guaranteed a barrier between themselves and these new, poor, foreign people. That barrier, sinful in its inception, became a shield; the shield then became a weapon of offense, wielded against those whose “otherness,” whose need, made them not neighbors, but enemies. It was heartbreaking; it was lamentable. And it was sin.
Poor people are not poor, generally, because they’re lazy (an assertion that I find mind-boggling, given the inhuman conditions under which many of my friends worked at jobs that were as dangerous as they were exhausting). This isn’t an Old Testament or even a first-century tentmaking or agrarian society where the causes of poverty might be viewed more precisely as the fault of the one who simply doesn’t choose to make tents or farm fields. The people I worked with, and loved deeply, came here to work, laboring to feed their families and establish a home here while prospering the people most bent on oppressing them. Their poverty was a burden they were born with and one they endeavored to escape from, and they came here not to piss off Americans or even take their jobs. They came here to try to live like you and me.
One could argue that they should, perhaps, aim higher than to try to duplicate a lifestyle that offers comforts and security unknown in much of the rest of the world but nonetheless allows for the vitriolic condemnation of those less well off, and my guess is that they’ll succeed — if the churches would lead the way in proclaiming that there is, indeed, an enemy among us. But his language is not Spanish; nor is it English. It’s the language of racism-as-religion, profit-before-people, and favor-to-the-familiar, and woe to the church, people, or nation that revels in their fluency.