After month in sanctuary, immigrant confident of victory
After month in sanctuary, immigrant confident of victory
BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
September 13, 2006
Copyright by The Chicago Sun Times
A puppy is barking behind Elvira Arellano's closed bedroom door when I arrive at the Division Street storefront church where she took refuge a month ago Friday, the dog apparently anxious to meet her visitors. The rumble of buses and overamplified bass occasionally intrudes through the open second-floor window.
Arellano's niece is already here with a group of friends vacationing from Mexico. They make their excuses to leave but not before asking her to pose for group pictures. You can see they regard Arellano as a hero.
That's when I notice Arellano has switched out of the T-shirt depicting Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata that she wore during the first two days of the media siege.
"Who would Jesus deport?" her new T-shirt asks. I can hear her detractors sputtering now.
It's much easier to find a parking space in the 2600 block of West Division with the satellite trucks making only sporadic visits these days to Adalberto United Methodist Church.
'God is watching me'
Last time, Arellano's supporters were keeping a 'round-the-clock vigil, but it's mid-afternoon and the doors to the church sanctuary are locked. It would have been impractical to keep up the previous pace. The church still opens for a two-hour prayer service every evening.
The door leading upstairs to the church office/apartment where Arellano has taken residence is locked, too, and the buzzer doesn't work, but eventually I found the right telephone number, and Roberto Lopez, director of an immigrant rights group working with Arellano, led me to her.
I have come unannounced, mostly to get a sense of Arellano's day-to-day existence under this self-imposed house arrest -- which, when you think about it, is the practical result of her decision to assert the ancient doctrine of sanctuary to avoid deportation.
But I'm also here to once again confront those detractors -- and those in the middle -- with the human side of the person at the center of this controversy.
Somehow, many people have come to see Arellano as an aberration in the immigration debate, when actually she's pretty much the norm, just gutsier than most about fighting for herself and for her 7-year-old son, Saul.
Saul, a citizen by virtue of being born here, has started back to school in the second grade.
"It was very hard because all his life I've been the one to take him," Arellano tells me.
With everything going on this year, he really wanted her to go with him, she says. But that wasn't to be. Arellano said she hasn't left the church even once.
She tells me it might be possible for her to slip off to the park or to go shopping, then sneak back home undetected to keep her interview appointments, but she doesn't dare.
"My commitment is to God," Arellano says. "God is watching me, and I don't lie to God."
She tells me all this in Spanish with Lopez translating for me. This is one of the things that gets folks riled up, but I'll bet she has a better command of English than most of them have of a second language. She reads English and can speak it when she must. She even did a talk radio program recently entirely in English. But she feels more comfortable having conversations in Spanish.
"I didn't have the opportunity to go to school because I was the father and the mother," she explains.
By now, the dog, Daisy, has been freed from her temporary exile and is curled up in Arellano's lap. She says Daisy is a mini-Doberman, but she reminds me more of a Chihuahua with longer legs and Doberman markings. "Daisy is a citizen, too," she jokes.
Saul gets home from school and bounds into the room, followed soon after by Arellano's pastor, the Rev. Walter "Slim" Coleman.
Saul has started going to the neighborhood Boys' and Girls Club after school. Someone has supplied him with an X-box and Game Cube to help him keep busy. His mom oversees his homework and fixes his meals in the back kitchen.
200 marriage proposals
Coleman tells me Arellano has "had about 200 marriage proposals" in the past month.
"Everybody on Division Street wants to marry her," he says, adding that she's not interested. I ask if these proposals are shouted up through the open window. "No, they're very respectful," Coleman says. "They say, 'Pastor, tell her I'd like to marry her.' "
Her days are mostly like this one: a steady succession of phone calls, visitors, interviews, reading and taking care of her son. It sounds monotonous, but her resolve seems as strong as it did a month ago.
"I feel good. I feel tranquil," she says, convinced that she will soon have clearance to stay in the country. Then, she says, "I can continue with my daily life and work and take my son to school and have a normal life like any other family."
I'm starting to think it's just as likely I'll be meeting her at the church again in another six months.
BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
September 13, 2006
Copyright by The Chicago Sun Times
A puppy is barking behind Elvira Arellano's closed bedroom door when I arrive at the Division Street storefront church where she took refuge a month ago Friday, the dog apparently anxious to meet her visitors. The rumble of buses and overamplified bass occasionally intrudes through the open second-floor window.
Arellano's niece is already here with a group of friends vacationing from Mexico. They make their excuses to leave but not before asking her to pose for group pictures. You can see they regard Arellano as a hero.
That's when I notice Arellano has switched out of the T-shirt depicting Mexican revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata that she wore during the first two days of the media siege.
"Who would Jesus deport?" her new T-shirt asks. I can hear her detractors sputtering now.
It's much easier to find a parking space in the 2600 block of West Division with the satellite trucks making only sporadic visits these days to Adalberto United Methodist Church.
'God is watching me'
Last time, Arellano's supporters were keeping a 'round-the-clock vigil, but it's mid-afternoon and the doors to the church sanctuary are locked. It would have been impractical to keep up the previous pace. The church still opens for a two-hour prayer service every evening.
The door leading upstairs to the church office/apartment where Arellano has taken residence is locked, too, and the buzzer doesn't work, but eventually I found the right telephone number, and Roberto Lopez, director of an immigrant rights group working with Arellano, led me to her.
I have come unannounced, mostly to get a sense of Arellano's day-to-day existence under this self-imposed house arrest -- which, when you think about it, is the practical result of her decision to assert the ancient doctrine of sanctuary to avoid deportation.
But I'm also here to once again confront those detractors -- and those in the middle -- with the human side of the person at the center of this controversy.
Somehow, many people have come to see Arellano as an aberration in the immigration debate, when actually she's pretty much the norm, just gutsier than most about fighting for herself and for her 7-year-old son, Saul.
Saul, a citizen by virtue of being born here, has started back to school in the second grade.
"It was very hard because all his life I've been the one to take him," Arellano tells me.
With everything going on this year, he really wanted her to go with him, she says. But that wasn't to be. Arellano said she hasn't left the church even once.
She tells me it might be possible for her to slip off to the park or to go shopping, then sneak back home undetected to keep her interview appointments, but she doesn't dare.
"My commitment is to God," Arellano says. "God is watching me, and I don't lie to God."
She tells me all this in Spanish with Lopez translating for me. This is one of the things that gets folks riled up, but I'll bet she has a better command of English than most of them have of a second language. She reads English and can speak it when she must. She even did a talk radio program recently entirely in English. But she feels more comfortable having conversations in Spanish.
"I didn't have the opportunity to go to school because I was the father and the mother," she explains.
By now, the dog, Daisy, has been freed from her temporary exile and is curled up in Arellano's lap. She says Daisy is a mini-Doberman, but she reminds me more of a Chihuahua with longer legs and Doberman markings. "Daisy is a citizen, too," she jokes.
Saul gets home from school and bounds into the room, followed soon after by Arellano's pastor, the Rev. Walter "Slim" Coleman.
Saul has started going to the neighborhood Boys' and Girls Club after school. Someone has supplied him with an X-box and Game Cube to help him keep busy. His mom oversees his homework and fixes his meals in the back kitchen.
200 marriage proposals
Coleman tells me Arellano has "had about 200 marriage proposals" in the past month.
"Everybody on Division Street wants to marry her," he says, adding that she's not interested. I ask if these proposals are shouted up through the open window. "No, they're very respectful," Coleman says. "They say, 'Pastor, tell her I'd like to marry her.' "
Her days are mostly like this one: a steady succession of phone calls, visitors, interviews, reading and taking care of her son. It sounds monotonous, but her resolve seems as strong as it did a month ago.
"I feel good. I feel tranquil," she says, convinced that she will soon have clearance to stay in the country. Then, she says, "I can continue with my daily life and work and take my son to school and have a normal life like any other family."
I'm starting to think it's just as likely I'll be meeting her at the church again in another six months.
posted by Carlos T Mock @ 5:24 PM
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