Saturday, July 4, 2009

Tempest-Tost

On this 4th of July, New York City celebrates the re-opening of the crown of Lady Liberty, closed in the wake of the 9/11 attack.

The Statue of Liberty's face was created to look like the French sculptor's mother. A chain that represents oppression lies broken at her feet.

How ironic that women, many of whom are mothers, are often barred from our country? Women who face violence at home, violence along their journey to our border, violence when they are captured, criminalized and deported?

Some words from the poem, "The New Colossus," written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 speak to Lady Liberty's intended message of hope for people seeking freedom:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

A beautiful message for many immigrants -- which is most of us who now call ourselves American. My own family came from Ireland and Poland, Italy and Germany.

But for those who come from countries less popular than that of my ancestors, Lazarus' poem doesn't ring true.

Women and men detained in federal or local prisons are often denied access to their American citizen children, to legal representation, to sufficient medical care or protection from felons.

Few feel the compassion nor recognize the justice our country offers others when they're tossed back into the teeming shore that was their life back home - an existence so dire, so frightening, so deadly that they risked their lives to come to America in the first place.

What I witnessed, and the first-hand accounts I recently recorded while traveling across the border into Mexico woke me up to the cycles and layers of violence inflicted on migrant women - not just those coming from our Spanish-speaking neighbors to the south, but to women who flee, and those who are unwittingly trafficked into the U.S. from European, Asian, South American and Middle Eastern countries.

Images and testimony to be published at a later time. For now, I sit with this knowledge, hearing the voices of the women migrants I met, praying for their deliverance to safety.