Catholic Worker house is multinational: Houston effort grows to assist immigrants on Mexico's borders

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 12, 1996 by Arthur Jones

Houston effort grows to assist immigrants on Mexico's borders

HOUSTON - The Zwicks, Mark and Louise, never- intended that Casa Juan Diego, the Houston Catholic Worker house they founded in 1980, would become the Worker movement's first major multi-national operation.

Nor one if its largest. In addition to the two main buildings in Houston, one for men and one for women, there are some 15 more houses around the city that shelter battered women.

On two borders, Mexico's with the United States and Guatemala's with Mexico, Casa Juan Diego operates houses for stranded, abandoned and abused would-be immigrants. Plus there's a house just outside Mexico City.

"We never meant to be big," explained Louise Zwick, who five years ago quit her work as a children's librarian to devote her time to the women's house and services. "We started very small with the ugliest building in Houston. But the need is enormous and it has gradually grown."

She added, "The Catholic community in Houston is really very beautiful. The parishes, bishop, church community are very supportive. We don't seem to have quite the horrendous divisions and pain that some people talk about and the NCR writes about."

Rather the pain is in the people who come to Casa Juan Diego. The men's house, a former steel-fabrication factory, incorporates a shoe-repair school attended by paraplegics, undocumented men, some shot in the back since they arrived in the United States. Two of the men lost their legs riding the rails. "When the hospital calls up, no one will take these guys," said Zwick, "so we take them. Once they accept their plight, there's an energy that comes forth that's amazing. That's a blessing for us, because they move on."

Most of the houses and apartments are for battered women. We don't unlock the door here, as you can tell," said Zwick. "Staff live here. Louise and I live across the street. The women feel pretty safe. We change their names, so if a man comes asking for them, we don't even know what their real name is."

As in any culture, said Louise Zwick, sometimes the wife goes back to the battering situation. "We say, `We believe in marriage. We understand you would want to try again. Just keep this house a secret and if he doesn't change - Land we hope and pray he will - you can come back again,'" Louise said. Some women have returned and stayed three and four years before moving on, she said. Louise calls Casa a"choice" house where women, who might be forced by partners or circumstances to have abortions, can live during their pregnancies and be helped by local parish organizations.

The Mexico and Louise and Guatemala houses, explained the Zwicks, are an extension of their everyday work in Houston.

"Anna was a Salvadoran, abandoned at the border by her woman friends who got jobs," Louise said. "A coyote (one who guides undocumented aliens across a border for money) offered to take her over the Rio Grande. He took her across, raped her and gave her to other coyotes who did the same. That woman showed up with a letter from a priest who didn't know English very well. `Please, in the name of God, help this woman,' he wrote."

They did, with the assistance of a Houston Salvadoran physician's wife. And they opened the house in Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, for other women - and men - like Anna.

They also opened a house in Tecun Uman, Guatemala. "That town's a hellhole, an ugly place," said Mark. "The plaza's loaded with people sleeping overnight, women into prostitution by the hundreds because they lost everything when they crossed the border into Mexico. They're pushed back into Guatemala, sometimes even without their clothing."

A quartet of Mexico City-based women religious who were giving up their academy to go into social justice work now staff Tecun Uman, and four more run the Mexico City house. Because of Mexico and Guatemala, the Zwicks have a sharpened perspective on economic and multinational issues (see accompanying story).

The Zwicks, admits Mark with a shy smile, were 1960s liberals - he with a University of Chicago master's degree in social work and experience in mental health work in California; she with a master's in children's literature and library science from Berkeley.

They were briefly with Maryknoll, then in El Salvador at the time of Fr. Rutilio Grande's murder. Then they worked for the Texas Catholic Conference's Volunteers for Education and Social Services program.

By the end of the 1970s they were directors of religious education in the Brownsville diocese, until a Houston nun persuaded them there was work to be done at a Houston parish. They arrived in 1979. "At the start of the '80s, people from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala were beginning to pour into Houston, sleeping in the used-car lots on Washington Avenue," said Zwick. "We'd say to each other, `Mark, if you had any guts you'd start a Catholic Worker house.' `Louise, if you had any guts you'd start a Catholic Worker house.' The day Louise got a job with the public library, because her Spanish is excellent, it clicked. I didn't need to work, we agreed. So we started Casa Juan Diego on New Year's Eve 1980."