By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan / Common Dreams
Immigrants helped build this country, a fact no amount of racism or xenophobia can erase. Immigrants, including children, work in fields and factories, driving our economy. A group of immigrant men were working late last Tuesday night, filling potholes on Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge.
At 1:27 am, the Dali, a massive cargo vessel, 948-feet long and laden with roughly 4,700 shipping containers, lost power and rammed into the bridge, causing it to collapse. Two survived the disaster, six died. Only two of their bodies have been recovered from the cold, murky water of the Patapsco River.
Their tragic deaths occurred as increased immigrant arrivals are being exploited by former President Donald Trump and his right-wing extremist allies to foment division and to boost Trump’s presidential campaign. Just hours after the bridge collapse, FoxNews host Maria Bartiromo, interviewing Florida Republican Senator Rick Scott, attempted to link the maritime disaster to immigrants at the U.S.’ southern border:
“I want to understand the threats or the potential threats that this country is facing right now given the wide open border, the fact that we don’t know who is in the country. The FBI is looking… to ensure there was no foul play.”
“While we’re being talked about as like this invading horde that’s coming to destroy the country, what does this story actually show us? That immigrants are filling our potholes at night so that we can have a smooth drive to work in the morning.”
This is the same dog-whistle racism that Trump invoked in 2015, launching his first campaign: “When Mexico sends its people…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Trump continues his white supremacist ranting, saying at a recent Ohio campaign rally, “I don’t know if you call them people… These are animals and we have to stop it.”
Maximillian Alvarez, editor-in-chief of the Baltimore-based Real News Network, interviewed coworkers of the deceased. He said on the Democracy Now! news hour, “While we’re being talked about as like this invading horde that’s coming to destroy the country, what does this story actually show us? That immigrants are filling our potholes at night so that we can have a smooth drive to work in the morning.”
The six who died while working on the Key Bridge were hardworking men, from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Miguel Luna was a welder, a 49-year-old father and grandfather, a native of the Usulután Department in El Salvador, ravaged by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military and paramilitaries in the 1980s. He played on the professional soccer team in the town of Berlin in his home region. His widow, Maria del Carmen, owns a food truck. Miguel was a beloved member of his community.
Miguel and another victim of the collapse, Maynor Suazo Sandoval, were members of CASA, an immigrant rights non-profit founded in 1986 to build solidarity with those impacted by the U.S.-backed violence in Central America. CASA wrote, “Maynor migrated from Honduras over 17 years ago, and he alongside his brother Carlos were active members in the activist committee of Owings Mills… Carlos said ‘He was always so full of joy, and brought so much humor to our family.’ He was a husband, and father of two.”
Details are still emerging of the other named victims, Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, of Mexico and Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Guatemala. Their bodies were found inside a pickup truck, submerged in the river. Two more victims, also reportedly from Mexico and Guatemala, remain unnamed by their respective governments.
Millions of enslaved people also built this country, a point worth remembering as we mourn the immigrant laborers on the Key Bridge. The bridge was named after Francis Scott Key since, while watching the British navy bombard Fort McHenry in 1814, not far from where the bridge was built in the 1970s, Key wrote the poem that would become the national anthem. His poem has four stanzas, the first made famous as “The Star Spangled Banner.” Key was a slave owner, and denounced those who fled enslavement in 1814 to fight against the United States, for the British, who promised them freedom in return.
“No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,” Key wrote in his poem, words left out of the national anthem, but which nevertheless noticeably rhyme with “Land of the free and home of the brave.” This should be considered by those tasked with naming the replacement bridge.
The lives of Miguel and the five other workers have been cut short, but the hatred of immigrants, sadly, is alive, well and growing this election year. Pledges from President Joe Biden to quickly open Baltimore’s port to commerce parallel campaign rhetoric on both sides to “shut down” the southern border to people seeking asylum.
“Immigrants like Miguel are building bridges to connect communities, not building walls to divide them,” CASA wrote, eulogizing Miguel Luna. Let those words inspire an embrace of immigrant communities, an anthem we can all rally around.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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