Over beef empanadas, torta de papas and fried plantains, a group of friends and I recently talked about the awful outfits we wore in grade school. Lauren, now a third-grade teacher at a dual-language school, laughed over her red corduroy bodysuit. “You know, the kind that SNAPS!” she said. ” Que pensaba!”It was the beginning of Lauren’s bachelorette party. I grew up with her. We loved the same boys, had bad mushroom-shaped haircuts, and made dreadful fashion mistakes. I moved across the country and Lauren moved to Central America before we made our way back to Denver.
We’re both engaged now, and we talk about the same things — the cakes, the caterers, the excitement not so different from tap dancing in talent shows — but it’s different. My fiance’s family is allowed to come to the wedding; hers isn’t.
At my wedding, Luke’s family will watch us slip thin rings on each others’ fingers and help us eat our butter-pecan cake. After Lauren’s wedding, Joel’s family in Honduras will just hear about the details.
Three weeks ago, Joel’s family made the four-hour drive from San Pedro Sula to Tegucigalpa, where they had hoped to obtain their visas. The American gatekeeper asked for their passports, took one look at them, and said, “No. You can’t go.” Backtalk can lead a family to getting red-flagged, so that was it. They left with a single sheet of paper that said they had been denied visas for one of six reasons, with no reason specified.
In order for Joel’s family to reapply for temporary entry into the U.S., they would have to site the reason they were denied in the first place. It doesn’t exist.
This is what happens when policies turn people into bar codes.
And I wonder: Is this about racism or about losing the ability to listen? Is this about language or the fear of brown skin post- 9/11? Perhaps it’s about a lot of things, but it’s not about honest people whose reason to cross the border is that they love their son.
And theirs isn’t a unique situation. A coworker of Lauren’s, who also teaches children how to speak Spanish and English, was getting married recently, too. Her sister was denied a visa twice from Peru: once to attend the wedding, and once again to attend her niece’s baptism. She was a single woman with no kids, labeled by the U.S. as a “suspicious case.”
In a word, they are hamstrung: severely restricted, cut off from further movement. In limbo. The tragedy is, these “suspicious cases” are good people who love their sisters, their sons, and buttercream frosting.
Sitting at dinner, surrounded by people who move fluently between English and Spanish, I realized how little our legal system strives to see things dynamically. If tight border control is to keep out the bad (drugs, terrorists, convicts) the door should also swing the other way to let in the good. How can we be judicious about who we don’t allow past the border without also knowing what honest intents look and sound like?
I think in time, as more and more people are wrongfully denied visas, the current system of border control will create a widespread “what were we thinking?” reaction. Now, it looks to me like a less silly, snapping bodysuit that our nation outgrew long ago.
Megan Nix (thenixionary@gmailcom) of Centennial is an editor at DiningOut Magazine and is working on her master’s in Denver through the University of Alaska.
