New immigration contest with magical prize!
To get to Carrollton, the suburb just north of Dallas where my sister lives, you have to drive through mean little Farmers Branch. Which is yet another burb, lately in the news because the town has been trying to keep landlords from renting apartments to “illegal aliens.” I passed through Irving, Texas too – where police are stopping people for the tiniest infractions, demanding papers, and turning those without immigration documents over to federal authorities so they will be deported.
Metro Dallas is small compared to Houston. It takes extra shlep time, but if you’re phobic about 65 MPH, as I am, you can drive from one end to the other without ever getting on a freeway. You see a lot that way – big, bleached, plainsified sky, noble old prairie architecture, and the city’s core, which still has lots of WASPs and WASP churches and white-people emporia.
Out on the perimeter, though, mostly what you see is Mexicans. Christmas-painted restaurants with words like Zacatecas and Tenampa. Endless little night clubs and bakeries and furniture stores with neon-winking Spanish. And people everywhere, going about their business, eating, driving, shopping with wife and kids and grandma.
Harry Hines Boulevard is Mexican. Irving, Mesquite, Market Center. A half million people converged on the May 2006 immigrant civil rights march in Dallas. Mostly Mexicans.
I picked up the local version of Mike Lacey’s New
Times (The Dallas Observer) and went by the Mexican consulate to snap a picture of someone reading Gustavo Arrellano’s “Ask a Mexican” column so I could send it to Arrellano and get a free copy of his book (alas, I have since learned he already has a picture of the Dallas consulate). If you dial the phone number of that overworked agency, you often get a message, in Spanish, that you should leave your name and number if you’ve been a victim of the dragnets, and someone will get back to you.
On Sunday morning I went botanica hopping in Oak Cliff, a section of Dallas that appears to date from the 1920s to 1940s. Botanicas sell candles, herbs and powders, as well as statuettes and prayer cards depicting the saints. Botanica magic is based on European folk practice, syncretized with African and indigenous healing and spell casting in pre-Columbian and slaveholding Latin America. According to my mom, my grandmother was into the Old World version — as well as Old-to-New-World immigration. She bribed and sneaked her way out of one of the early-20th-century progroms in Kishinev, where dozens of Jews were murdered. She escaped by masquerading as a peasant (complete with over-the-top crucifix jewelry) and hiding, for a price, under hay in the wagon of a farmer (Bessarabia’s version of today’s coyote). Her own mother gave birth to 20 children and lost 11. To save the other nine from sickness, she wore a garlic chain around her neck. I am here because of such ignorance and hope. Botanicas, even in Dallas. They’re a national treasure.
I asked a few store managers which saint a customer should pray to, to ward off an immigration dragnet.
“All of them!” advised one woman.
“Saint Jude. For impossible causes,” said another.
Being Jewish and not personally worried about deportation this time around, I skipped the frankly Catholic items and chose others.
One, a packet of “Pancho Villa powder,” responds to undocumented immigrants’ lack of access to decent health care here in the U.S. Back in Mexico, there’s a Pancho Villa miracle sect, in which ailing people gather to worship the fabled revolutionary, hoping they will get well. I went to a prayer and healing ceremony once in Cd. Juarez. The main event was the playing, on a thrift-store machine, of an old 33 rpm record of “steed music” — songs dedicated to Villa’s favorite horses.
There are still middle-class white people in Oak Cliff, but – as in the rest of Dallas — most send their children to private schools. Over and over I’ve been told the public system is terrible. But it’s all the immigrants have. That and “No Child Left Behind.”
If “No Child” doesn’t work, there’s always this blessed botanica item you can wash your kids with. Jabon del Estudiante, Soap of the Student. It promises “marvelous changes,” presumably in academic achievement.
Great! But will the changes make a difference in the long run? For years now, immigrant groups have been trying to get the national “Dream Act” passed in Congress. It would allow undocumented young people to gain citizenship by enlisting in the military. Or they could use their marvelous academic skills to attend college. Even though the bargain offers up human life (and even better, brain power) for our homeland, Congress keeps nixing the bill.
I forgot to query the botanica owners about which product we should use to get the Dream Act passed.
So here’s the contest:
Ask the above question at a botanica in Dallas or anywhere else. First person with an answer and a mailing address gets my Pancho Villa powder or jabon del estudiante.
Get to your nearest Latino neighborhood and enter now!
November 8th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
One man’s dream is another man’s merda.
November 12th, 2007 at 3:26 am
wonderful, debbie. almost as busy as my blog, though i make no free offers of vintage items!
what’s with the “stemmons” photo superimposed over text? perhaps you were trying to be creative in picture arranging; i’ve suffered from that also. we’ll have to talk. washing powder picture does smack of teacher abuse: is she going to hit him with that stick?
we enjoyed immensely meeting you both and look forward to the next time–before too long. yours, naomi
November 16th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Eons ago, you recommended two botanicas to me, one in the Bronx and one in Queens, for a book I was planning on unusual things to see and do in NYC. I went to both and loved them. I am so glad that you are continually finding new botanicas!