By Kurt Rietema
Kiké’s bus was departing at 10:20pm, the last time we would likely ever see him again. It would take him back to a family and a life in Mexico that he hadn’t known in more than 8 years. It’s a devil’s bargain, but one that nearly every immigrant family is confronted with. As one of my neighbor’s puts it: “In Mexico, you work all week to eat for a day. Here, you work one day and eat all week.” Yet in exchange for those higher wages, immigrants pay a steep price tag. For Kiké it cost him seeing his baby’s first steps, singing Las Mañanitas at his kids’ birthday parties, and long Sunday afternoons with family at the plaza. And with each passing year–a carrot dangled in front of him promising just a bit more economic security–the costs grew. A dance with his daughter at her quinceañera, a photograph with his son in his graduation gown. But on a cold night in December, Kiké finally went home.
In our neighbor’s living room, we said our goodbyes. I told him how much I admired him, the single-mindedness of his purpose, the fidelities he maintained. His sacrifices hadn’t escaped our notice. “Ni modo. Así es la vida,” Kiké responded. It’s one of the most common expressions that we’ve heard over 20 years of living among the Spanish-speaking underclass. “What can you do? That’s life.” Generations of hardship have trained whole groups of people to believe that sending a family member across deserts and seas as tribute is an unfortunate, but normal feature of life. The more quickly you accept that a decent life can only be gained by offering one of your own as a living sacrifice the more quickly you’ll avoid starvation. What can you do? That’s life.
Back home in our kitchen, my wife Emily and I were in tears. It wasn’t that we were particularly close to Kiké. He was a predictable fixture at holidays and neighborhood carne asadas. We’ve had some vulnerable conversations over the years, but that was the extent of it. We cried nevertheless, tears flowing because of the gaping incompatibilities in our definitions of normal. We cried because this alienated life is normal for so many of our friends and neighbors in the Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas. But it doesn’t have to be.
I write this from the warmth of our living room. A fire lazily winds down in our woodburning stove, a spare-branched, but charmingly-shabby, cedar tree we cut with the kids stands in the corner, a mug of hot cider in hand. My Dutch grandma would call this gezellig. It’s nauseatingly idyllic. I’m a Norman Rockwell meme right now and I don’t even care. While far from anything we’d consider normal, these are the kind of “authentic” Christmas vibes we all search for or at least try to conjure up. It speaks to our subconscious, whispering about the way life could and should be and–for the privileged few of us–intermittently intersects and becomes our reality.
But the Vince Guaraldi trio playing in the background was staccatoed by dissonant off notes–buzzing notifications jarring me back to reality. Texts came in from our Congolese friend who moved to Seattle hoping to have more favorable chances with immigration judges there. This week, he received notice that his authorization for employment was denied on the grounds that his humanitarian parole was expired. By the time USCIS had reviewed his case an astonishing 17 months after he submitted his application, even a one-year extension on his parole would have been denied on the same grounds. What can you do? That’s life.
Another friend sent me a text during her break from work. She’s been living without heat as her gas was cut off a few weeks ago and concerned about lighting a fire in her wood stove after a chimney fire last spring. Moreover, she received a letter from the city threatening to sell her home for the mounting property taxes she owes on a home she doesn’t even have clear title to. If we don’t do something, homelessness for my friend is all but guaranteed. What can you do? That’s life.
A few minutes later, another neighborhood friend sends an update on her mom. She’s been in the hospital with broken bones, then COVID a few days into her stay, and just as things started to look up, she was hit with a bout of pneumonia. The blows keep coming. What can you do? That’s life.
I live within a mile of all of them, but their experience of this season of Advent and mine are about as different as you can imagine. While theirs is reminiscent of the no vacancy, last resort trappings of a stable in Bethlehem, the presents spilling out like a cornucopia under our tree evoke a still life tableau with a fat goose on Herod’s palace table. It makes me wonder: which is the “real” Christmas?
In almost every city in America, if you were to search for signs of hope among its most blighted barrios, you are almost certain to find a group of committed followers of Christ serving warm meals and hot showers to the down and out at a Catholic Worker House. The movement to create these houses of hospitality began a few years into the Great Depression, animated by the leadership of Dorothy Day who saw Christ in the face of every poor person on the streets. Because of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25 that whenever we feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit prisoners or welcome foreigners, it is as if we do it for God, Dorothy was insistent we not forget them. “We must talk about poverty,” she writes “because people insulated by their own comfort lose sight of it.”
While I might have preferred a peaceful morning around the fireplace, reading an Advent devotional, the truth is I need these intrusions of my friends and neighbors. While I live among them, I need them because even here I’m so insulated by my own comfort that I lose sight of the burdens they carry. They remind me that my definition of what is normal is anything but normal for the vast majority of God’s children. In this season of Advent, as I try to channel an atmosphere of Christmas we’ve been sold as authentic, they remind me that the real thing was conceived on a quite different stage set more like theirs. Far away from home, following government orders to register their papers, a poor, peasant laborer watched as his teenage wife gave birth to a son with a menagerie of livestock as stand ins for midwives. What can you do? That’s life.
And yet the hope of Christmas is that just as Jesus entered into all of the pains and disappointments familiar to those in poverty and statelessness, so too does he refuse to leave it that way. The advent of Jesus was God’s answer to the plea of God’s children to come and ransom captive Israel waiting heartsick in lowly exile. The suffering they had grown used to as normal would be normal no more. In just a few years, that now baby boy would walk down the aisle as a grown man, open the scroll of Isaiah, and look into the eyes of his neighbors. They were a people like him despised and rejected by the powerful, a people of suffering, familiar with pain. And to them–to Jesus’ neighbors, to Kiké in Mexico, to our neighbors in Argentine, and to all of God’s children living in darkness all over the world–Jesus announces God’s jubilee. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has appointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” The kingdom of heaven has come near.
*Names were changed to protect privacy.
About Kurt Rietema: Kurt is the Senior Director of YF Neighborhood at Youthfront. He holds a Master’s in Global Development and Social Justice from St. John’s University. Kurt is also an adjunct at MidAmerica Nazarene University and at William Jewell College. Kurt and his wife Emily live with their sons, Luke, Perkins and Leo in an under-resourced neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas called Argentine.
