Reading
Today’s reading is from the Reverend Stan Perea’s book, The New America: The America of the Moo-shoo Burrito.
Two things were signposts to me of the changing culture. The first is a wedding photograph I have. The groom is a Catholic Asian who was raised in Australia. The bride is Jewish. Her brother is married to an Indian woman. The photograph of the wedding party is a mix of colors. If we were to listen, we would hear a mix of accents. No longer can we assume that a white boy will marry a white girl.
The other signpost occurred in the late 1980s. I had just started seminary and my personal life was already in the midst of change. One day I went to lunch with a client in the newly burgeoning suburb of Highlands Ranch, Colorado. I had moo-shoo pork, which was pretty spicy and was served with what I later learned were called pancakes, although they weren’t anything like the pancakes my wife makes and serves with syrup. I mentioned to the owner how good the moo-shoo would be as a burrito, with tortillas instead of the pancakes. About a year later, the Moo-Shoo Burrito was on the menu. The combination of these two flavors represents the two fastest growing populations in America, the Hispanic and the Asian.
The church I pastor reflects these populations as well. A Korean church holds services in our building on Saturdays, and recently we started a Spanish congregation on Sunday afternoons in addition to our regular services on Sunday morning. The three congregations came together for a concert and potluck dinner. We had hamburgers and hotdogs, the Koreans brought eggrolls, and the Latinos brought Mexican food. One man smothered his egg rolls with salsa and said, “Pastor, these are great Korean taquitos.”
That’s the New America – the America of the Korean taquito and the moo-shoo burrito.
Sermon
As you drive across the hilly countryside of Chiapas you see patches of corn everywhere. These corn patches, or milpas, look nothing like the vast ocean of hybridized, fertilized, industrialized and subsidized corn that stretches from Nebraska all the way to New York State. In Chiapas the corn plants are farther apart than what we are used to seeing, and the corn is mixed with beans and squash in an ancient combination that is sustainable and produces a diet with all the essential amino acids. The corn is tended by hand. The little plots are worked by individual families.
Chiapas is Mexico’s most southern state, bordering Guatemala. Like Guatemala, this is the ancient land of the Mayan civilization. Impressive Mayan ruins dot the landscape and draw tourists. The descendants of that great civilization live today in abject poverty. The children are malnourished. Many never can afford milk. Mayans are on the margins of society. The Mayans live today, as they have for the past 500 years, under an oppressive regime that denies basic human rights.
Phyllis and I were in Chiapas three months ago as part of a delegation sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, the UUSC. We met with people running nonprofit organizations and we also met with Zapatista rebels struggling, with limited success, against centuries of oppression.
Among the things we learned was that the industrial corn in Iowa and the native corn in the milpas are now intimately connected. With the advent of NAFTA, American corn is changing the Mexican economy. The corn tortilla, the staple of the Mexican diet, especially among the poor, is now typically made with American corn. And now, as the price of corn shoots up as corn is converted in ethanol in order to fuel American gas guzzlers, the price of tortillas has jumped.
A little known part of the NAFTA agreements required Mexico to change its laws that allowed for the existence of ejidos, large areas of land owned communally for generations. The moneyed classes can now buy up land long owned by peasant families.
The richest man in the world is a Mexican, Carlos Slim. Slim is in fat city; he is worth more than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. And he is getting richer at an amazing rate. This exists in a country where millions of children have insufficient food, no health care and a woeful education system.
It is an old story. It happened in Europe. It happened in America. Rural families living on small plots of land are being forced to leave. Chiapas is now a leading exporter of people. Thousand upon thousands of economic refugees are fleeing Chiapas. Others from Central America cross Chiapas on their way north. They head for jobs at Mexico’s luxurious beach resorts filled with Americans and Europeans. They head for the slums of Mexico City. Some of the most adventurous risk takers head for la frontera, for the newly militarized border that tries to separate desperate Mexicanos from jobs in America. Hundreds die trying to cross the desert in Arizona and New Mexico. And now we have anglo vigilantes on the border attempting to “protect” America from the frightful prospect of more illegal immigrants. Americans are afraid. Our fear is being stoked by reactionary ideologues like Tom Tancredo and political opportunists in both major parties.
The illegal immigrants who are already here are afraid, too. There are about twelve million of them. They don’t know when a raid by federal authorities will break up families. Children don’t know when their mother and/or their father will be taken away. It happened not long ago in Greeley. It is happening all over the country. This is madness.
You and I live in a new America. My colleague Stan Perea calls it the America of the moo-shoo burrito and Korean taco. California now has more people from “minority” populations than it has “whites.” In Oakland there are something like 70 different languages spoken by children entering the public schools. There are now more Hispanics in America than there are African Americans.
America was once defined by the movement of people from the east to the west. America is no longer the story of people coming to the east coast and moving westward. The new American story is of people moving north from countries to the south of us and from the east: Vietnamese, Koreans and other Asians coming to the west coast.
In the case of the recent rapid increase in immigration from Mexico and Central America, most Americans tend to think we are somehow passive victims. These aliens are pouring over our border and must be stopped.
The truth is very different. Our economic policies, policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, are helping to create wrenching economic dislocations in Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Recall the example of corn and NAFTA. Many of the people trying to sneak into the United States were pushed out of their homes by American policies.
I am not suggesting that our country does not need control of its borders. And I don’t pretend to have all the policy answers. I do know this: We cannot pretend that we had nothing to do with the creation of this problem. And I also know this: We are all connected. We are in this together.
Let’s take a moment to get some historical perspective on our current situation. Let us look some major demographic events of the past 500 years. Let us remember that the arrival of Europeans started a horrific pandemic in the Americas. It was worse than the plague in Europe and many times worse than AIDS. Native Americans had no resistance to European diseases like smallpox. Entire populations were wiped out. It was easy for Europeans to move west across North America because the Indian population had largely died off. By the time of Lewis and Clark the Native American population was a tiny fraction of what it had been in 1491.
Another major demographic move, of course, was the importation of African slaves. Slavery became the basis of an economy producing cotton and tobacco for an international market. The legacy of slavery, racism and oppression, still casts its shadow across America.
A hundred and seventy years ago, the slave based economy of huge plantations growing commodities for export continued to expand westward across the southern United States. But then it hit a border. What is now southeast Texas is prime land for growing cotton. The trouble was that it was part of Mexico. The border was porous, though, and undocumented anglos poured across, bringing their slaves. There was another problem, though. Slavery was illegal in Mexico. The anglo immigrants soon fomented a rebellion—a rebellion aimed at making slavery legal. This is not radical left wing historiography, by the way. This is the standard account of academic historians. This is the interpretation on the University of Texas web site. The fact that the white Texan revolt against Mexico was founded on the desire to extend black slavery somehow has never filtered down to what we teach in elementary schools. After winning their quick little war of Texas independence, the Texans joined the union as a slave state. Sadly, Sam Bowie, Davy Crockett and Sam Houston were not the freedom loving heroes I had been led to believe.
We need to see our present situation in historical context. The border we have now between the United States and Mexico was essentially created to make space for slavery. The fences and guard towers we are building along that border are trying to keep Mexicans from re-entering land that was taken from them. Of course, the Mexican elite, mostly of European descent, were not exactly blameless. The land undocumented Americans stole from them was land they had previously stolen from Native Americans.
So I ask you today, who has a moral right to be here? Oh, it is easy to determine who has a legal right to be here. But what about a moral right?
As a religious people who affirm human compassion, who advocate for human rights, who seek justice, we must never, never make the mistake of confusing a legal right with a moral right. The forced removal of Native Americans from their land and onto reservations was legal. The importation and sale of African slaves was legal. Later on, in my lifetime, we had laws across the south designed to prevent African American citizens from voting. Apartheid was legal in South Africa. The confiscation of the property of Jews at the beginning of the Nazi regime was legal. The Spanish Inquisition was legal. Crucifying Jesus was legal. Burning Michael Servetus at the stake for his unitarian theology was legal. The fact that something is legal does not cut much ethical ice. The powerful have always used the legal system to oppress the powerless.
Yes, as citizens we should respect the rule of law. But more importantly, our duty is to create laws that are founded on our highest sense of justice, equity and compassion.
We have before us some fundamental choices. There are loud voices that urge us to choose fear, denial, reactionary nationalism, and racism. We must resist.
There is a better way. It is way that is urged upon us by every major religious tradition. We must choose the path of compassion and hope. We must choose a path that is founded on the recognition that we are connected, that we are all in this together.
This is the teaching of every great tradition. At the core of the teachings of Jesus is the conviction that we are all one. We are all God’s children. We are all equal. We are supposed to care for one another. Jesus taught his followers that an act of kindness to the most humble human being was the equivalent of performing that act for Jesus.
The prophet Mohammed taught that all the tribal divisions among the Arabian people were wrong. The symbols of those tribal divisions were the legion of tribal gods. Mohammed told the people that these tribal gods were false. There is only one God. This is another way of saying that we all are united. We owe our allegiance to one creator.
Buddhism teaches that if we stop and pay attention, really pay attention, we will realize that all these things we think separate us are an illusion.
It is the same message over and over in every tradition: we are one. We are connected. We are brothers and sisters.
This moral insight that is shared by the great religions should be the foundation of how we treat one another.
What would our community and our state and our nation do if they were guided by the finest aspirations of humanity’s religions? What would we do if you and I were guided by these very same ideas as expressed in our Unitarian Universalist principles? What might we do if we allowed ourselves to be guided by our sense of the inherent worth and dignity of every person? What future might we build if we create policies guided by our notions of justice, equity and compassion in human relations?
I don’t have all the answers. I do not pretend to be a policy wonk on immigration and all the related issues of public education, health care and the economy.
I do know this. Breaking up poor working families who have lived among us for years does not feel like justice, equity and compassion in action. Refusing minimal health services to young children does not feel like the way we should treat members of our human family. Having our police forces profile brown people does not feel like breaking down the walls of tribalism. Creating a huge wall, complete with barbed wire, across hundreds of miles of border does not feel neighborly.
There must be a better way. You and I must help to build a new way.
Barbed wire is not the answer. More border guards and more deportations are not the answer. Paranoia and panic will solve nothing.
We must remember that we are all immigrant stock, every single one of us. Even Native Americans immigrated here from Asia.
We must also acknowledge that we helped to create the situation in which displaced people look to find a home here. American has already been transformed by the latest waves of immigration. Our children and grandchildren are going to live in a multi-cultural society—a society of moo shoo burritos, egg roll tacos and whole wheat tortillas.
We need not be afraid of that. We must not be afraid, for fear will lead to violence and repression.
Instead, let us embrace the wondrous possibilities before us. Let us be guided by love and hope. Let our actions emerge from the deep conviction that people from Mexico and Korea and Canada and Vietnam are ultimately part of our extended family.
Surely, a religious people who have learned to embrace the wisdom of Judaism, Christianity, humanism, Islam and eastern religions can lead the way. We are people who have always affirmed human diversity. We have always looked to the future and seen new possibilities. We must do so again.
Let us be the people who break down the arbitrary barriers that divide us from them.
We are one. Let us, together with all our brothers and sisters, build a new way together. Love and hope will guide us.
Amen.