David Michael Miller
By the time you read this, I will be on my way to Oaxaca. I’m flying down to check out the school where we plan to send the kids next year, and the house we will be renting. We’ve found a nice family who will move into our house soon, and arranged to take time off from our jobs.
If all goes well, my husband and I will load our three kids into the van, and start the long drive south in the fall.
Our reasons are both personal and political.
I spent a year in Quito, Ecuador, as a teenager, and experienced the thrill of immersing myself in a colorful, bustling, lively Latin American city, and becoming a full participant in another culture in a way only a young person can.
We have always wanted to take our kids to a Spanish-speaking country, and they have reminded us of that some-day promise with increasing skepticism.
On New Year’s Day this year, we were sitting in a restaurant in St. Paul having brunch, and I asked what everyone’s New Year’s resolution was. My husband said that his was to be living in a Spanish-speaking country by the end of the year. The kids cheered. I gasped. How could we raise expectations like that not knowing how we could ever deliver? My wheels started turning nonstop.
Every day I go to work and wrestle with how to respond to our new political reality, and how to connect with and amplify the voices of resistance in this dark and uncertain new era.
My kids come home with stories about their peers enduring chants of “build that wall!” at high school football games, and about their principals, who lost their composure for a moment over the loudspeaker at two different east-side schools when they announced the election results to a diverse group of students.
Watching anti-immigrant sentiment drive the election, and the feeling in our country change overnight, it seems like the time to do something radically different.
So we are going to the other side of the Wall. It’s our own personal act of rebellion and solidarity with our neighbors, who are being viciously maligned by our president. We are driving away from the anxiety and pessimism that threaten to overwhelm us every time we look at the news, and heading straight for a place where the same crushing global forces that are pressing on us here have been bearing down on people for a quite a while, and where we might learn something from our neighbors, about how other people who have been dealing with corruption and repression are responding.
Not everyone is thrilled that we are going. We have responsibilities here to our work, our community, our friends. (I will still be in touch with my talented colleagues at The Progressive, as we add staff and start a busy new year.) We have family members who think it’s nuts to drive three young girls across the border.
“I understand why people are anxious, and why they think of Mexicans as violent criminals,” a friend who drives down for part of each year told us. “But when you get there, you’ll see that people are so warm and the culture is so much more welcoming than ours — it completely changes the way you think.”
I think it will be fun. I think it will be an adventure. I think it will be incredibly stressful and that we are a little nuts. But most of all I think our kids will get something very valuable from the experience: the sense that there is more to life than the culture of middle-class striving here in the United States that seems to have soured so rapidly in recent years; an understanding that the world is a big place and we reside in a pretty puny and relatively privileged part of it; the idea that you can, and should, take big risks in life and that things can change dramatically, dizzyingly, and that you can learn new skills and survive.
Those seem like pretty good lessons. And as long as Trump doesn’t close the border, next summer we’ll come back.
