It has been a little over two weeks since Julie and I arrived in San Antonio, and I have been feeling as if I’m being thrown around by a cultural tornado. Mostly in a good way. We came here as volunteers to help with tasks at the Casa de Maria y Marta. We have our own room upstairs and share a bathroom downstairs. Immigrants being transitioned from the border to final destinations in the US are dropped at the Greyhound station downtown. We provide overnight shelter for various of those families. We’ll give you more details about that process in a later blog. My goal for this post is to describe some of the local context.
To start, when I was five years old, Walt Disney introduced me to Davy Crockett, my first hero. I have sobered up on Davy since then, but now, oddly, live a mile and a half from the Alamo, where he died.
We walk for exercise on the San Antonio River Walk which we can access just three blocks from our house. It runs the length of the city, beautifully green where we start on the south side and lined with brightly lit restaurants and bars through the city center. When we returned home last week walking down another street, we passed a home with a large basket of grapefruit outside their gate with a sign reading, “Free. Take some.” Inside the fence was a tall tree with hundreds of beautiful fruit. They were delicious.
The San Antonio Mennonite Church (SAMC), which owns La Casa, occupies an old building going through major remodeling and repair that makes my Columbus Mennonite Church Facilities Commission role look like a Caribbean vacation cruise. They have one part-time pastor, and, as far as I can tell, no regular custodial staff. Even while this renovation is going on they offer office space to three other non-profit groups, including Conjunto. The word conjunto describes a Tejano accordion style of music. Mondays and Thursdays there is an open mic workshop from 3 PM till nine PM. Saturdays three or four teachers are giving accordion lessons, and students are sitting in the hallways warming up or practicing. Check this link. Is this what your church sounds like? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCjLTXVCd1s
Helping with the remodeling has me well-acquainted with the local Home Depot. As far as I can tell, all the staff are bi-lingual. At HEB, the giant Texan grocery chain, at least 25% of the bread section is tortillas, which is to say, there is no specific Hispanic food section.
The Catholic gentleman, Rodollfo, who started the conjunto program a couple years ago has started to attend SAMC and has become so moved by the immigration work of the church that he is donating his family “ranchito” or small farm to the church. For the last couple decades it had been rented out to a pig farmer who accumulated two old mobile homes, three RVs, and massive piles of junk. The mobile homes are currently temporary housing for two families from Central America, and the church is seeking funding to upgrade the water, sewer, electrical infrastructure. The land has been in Rodolfo’s family since 1778.
One last cultural tornado image. Jordi was a tall, thirteen year-old Angolan boy who loves basketball and LeBron James. We had been looking at Google Maps on my laptop, and he asked if he could show me something on YouTube. So, I was sitting on the sofa with this kid who had been in the US three days, who speaks a local Angolan language, French, and a little bit of Spanish, and we were watching a Britain’s Got Talent video of two British boys singing an amazing anti-bullying rap song. A very special moment.
