Sunrise over Orizaba, Mexico, seen from the Cerro del Borrego nature preserve. | Photo by Mercedes Falk. Courtesy Puentes/Bridges
In Tlaquilpa, a mountain village in the clouds, women wearing long skirts and colorful blouses walked to mass. Outside a colonial church with bright orange and yellow walls, a crowd of people holding Baby Jesus dolls celebrated Candelaria, the February holiday that combines Catholic and pre-Hispanic traditions, marking the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of spring.
Shuan Duvall, a retired Spanish teacher from Alma, Wisconsin, and her husband Jamie, a retired judge, rolled past the church on Feb. 2 with a truckload of other U.S. visitors and stopped in front of a small restaurant. The owners, Maximino Sanchez and Gabina Cuaquehua, have two sons in Minnesota, who’ve been away from home for more than 20 years. Shaun got to know the sons when she was working as a translator on dairy farms in western Wisconsin and Minnesota. Later, she and Jamie became godparents to their U.S.-born children.
Sanchez and Caquehua greeted the Duvalls in their living area downstairs from the restaurant and performed an impromptu ceremony, lighting incense and hanging flower leis around the Duvalls’ necks while reciting prayers.
“We thank you because you are like second parents for my grandchildren,” Cuaquehua said. “You help them and accompany them on the path of life.”
“I ask that over there you take care of our children as if you were their parents,” said Sanchez. “You’re there in person, not like a video call or a cellphone call, which isn’t the same.”
The Duvalls were surprised and moved, still wearing the flower leis around their necks and wiping tears from their eyes when they met up with the rest of the group outside the restaurant.
Shaun Duvall described the experience as an honor. By becoming a godparent to the family’s children, she said, she hoped to honor them, too, for “all the things they go through, the struggles and sacrifices and also the joy, because there is real joy.”
The same motivating idea drives Puentes/Bridges, the nonprofit she started while working as a translator, to help build cultural understanding between Midwestern dairy farmers and the families of their Mexican workers.
Duvall has helped a lot of people, fostering better communication and better relationships between farmers and the immigrants they employ, connecting workers with medical care and helping them get away from abusive bosses and partners, and sharing her appreciation of the people of Mexico with a whole generation of Midwesterners who have had life-changing experiences going on the trips she organized for two decades, before she retired a few years ago from the organization she founded.
“I don’t think what I did was that big. I helped people out when they needed help – who wouldn’t do that?” she said. “It’s some kind of connection that goes beyond helping people — [to say] you are a treasured, precious person in my life.”
That spirit of warmth on Duvall’s part, and on the part of Mexican families who’ve put their trust in her and in the Midwestern dairy farmers who employ their loved ones, shines like a beacon in our current political moment, when the ostentatious cruelty of the Trump administration threatens to stomp out the quiet virtues of compassion and human connection.
The most remarkable thing about the relationship between Midwestern dairy farmers and the Mexican immigrants who work on their farms is not the economic ties that bind these two groups of rural people, or the astounding amount of money the workers contribute to the economies of both Mexico and the U.S. Instead, it’s the realization that getting to know and care for each other can transform and enrich our lives.
Carrie Schiltz has had that transformative experience. Her Lutheran congregation in Rushford, Minnesota helped put Octavio Flores — a relative of the same family that honored the Duvalls — through forestry school. Schiltz learned of Flores through his sister, who is a member of her congregation, which has made it a mission to build relationships with immigrants in the area.
During the Puentes/Bridges trip, Flores shared what he’d learned with Schiltz and the rest of the group, taking them to see the dramatic Cascada de Atlahuitzia waterfall and explaining his work on a project to restore biodiversity in the national park around the Pico de Orizaba volcano and with the Sembrando Vida program, a reforestation effort through which the Mexican government pays farmers to plant trees and preserve local plant species.
Part of the goal of Sembrando Vida (“sowing life”) is to help people in rural areas stay in Mexico, instead of migrating to the U.S. to support their families.
Mexican economist Luis Rey says there is a need for more such efforts to to help keep Mexican families together. “There is no value, in Western economics, placed on the grief of a mother whose children go to the U.S. to work and leave her alone. Her loss means nothing in mainstream economic terms.” Rey, who teaches at the University of Oaxaca, has students from rural villages who work on projects to preserve local culture in their communities, including recording local, indigenous songs and dances in order to preserve them. That form of cultural wealth and community cohesion should be valued as much as monetary earnings, he believes. But staying in your village in Mexico can also mean living in poverty.
One of Rey’s students worked to convert an abandoned building in his town into an arts center, where he offered music lessons. The community center he created was a triumph, giving local musicians, dancers and artists a place to share and pass on their art. For his final project, the student gave a performance, Rey recalled, “And I noticed he had used a black marker to color in his socks so no one would notice the holes in his shoes.”
José Tlaxcala, a builder who worked in Oregon framing houses for several years, returning to Mexico after he injured his spine, said something nagged at him from his time working in the U.S. “When I was helping to clean out and demolish houses in Oregon, three times we cleaned out houses where elderly people lived, and they died horribly, all alone. The houses were full of garbage, alcohol bottles, rotten food. That’s not how I thought people ended their lives in the U.S. I think of people there having a higher standard of living. But the young people had moved away and left these older adults, who died all alone in horrible conditions. Here, older people live with their families. What do you think about that?”
There is no one right answer to the question of how to live a good life. But the hollow triumphalism of the current president of the richest nation on Earth, proclaiming the supremacy of wealth and power by terrorizing immigrants and threatening to inflict maximum suffering on the most powerless people among us is a sure sign that we have lost our way.
In her many years of work building bonds between rural people in the U.S. and Mexico, Duvall has come to see the human relationships she’s watched develop as “sacred” — although she feels a bit self-conscious about using that word.
“Mexican traditional culture can be deeply sacred,” she said, reflecting on the moving ceremony binding her to the grandparents of her Mexican godchildren. “Those bonds are so important — way more important than money.” But there is also plenty of cruelty to be found in Mexico, she added. It’s a profoundly unequal society. The U.S. is quickly moving in the same direction.
People everywhere have the capacity for both good and evil, Duvall said. “Maybe the challenge in life is to really emphasize the sacred aspects of ourselves, so we can kind of evolve away from the cruelty.”
This story is Part Four in a four-part series. Read Part One: Amid Trump’s threats to deport workers, Wisconsin dairy farmers travel to Mexico Part Two: A deceased farmworker’s son finally returns to Mexico to meet his father’s family and Part Three: Deportation threats give people pause, but not for long, Mexican workers say