Border Calling

Sojourners Magazine, Mar 2005 by Reel, James

Annunciation House reaches out to the undocumented with faith and hospitality.

The only thing separating El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is a canal that a child could wade across. That, plus a gross disparity in job availability, wages, and quality of life. Not to mention official U.S. border policies designed to keep undocumented guest workers out, even while unofficial economic policies all but encourage American farms, restaurants, and hotels to hold consumer prices down by hiring undocumented laborers ior the roughest, most menial work.

And so every year perhaps up to 4,000 people-no one is sure exactly how many-wade north across the canal when they think the Border Patrol isn't looking, or wedge themselves into the nooks of cars or vans crossing one of the congested bridges linking the cities across the Rio Grande, or pay coyoiei and poKeroi-people-smugglers, the latter term meaning "chicken wranglers"-to sneak them across by some other means. Today, 8 to 12 million undocumented immigrants are in the United States, many of them living in hiding and in poverty.

Yet they needn't live without a home. Since the late 1970s, El Paso's Annunciation House has opened its doors to immigrants and refugees on the U.S.Mexico border. The 20-volunteer organization includes a residence for immigrants trying to get on their feet, as well as separate facilities for those seeking political asylum and for women and children, and a building in a Juárez squatters' neighborhood that provides support and space for community-building efforts. Sometimes the Border Patrol looks the other way; sometimes it arrests Annunciation House volunteers. In early 2003, an agent shot and killed a 19-year-old guest who was running away with a pipe in his hand.

The work can be discouraging, but it's an essential component of its founders' faith. "We're working with an unequivocal certitude that for God there is no such thing as an illegal human being," says Ruben Garcia, Annunciation House's director. "And God would have no problem providing hospitality to these people."

IN 1976, GARCIA WAS running the youth department of the Catholic Diocese of El Paso. "The young adults I worked with wanted to buy into something that had depth and substance," he says, but they didn't know exactly what that might be. During weekly meetings over the next several months, the group reflected on how its members could live lives with meaning, and do so in a substantive way.

"As we reflected on scripture," he recalls, "we realized that the God we believe in is one who first and foremost identifies with people who are oppressed, people who are enslaved, the stranger in our midst, the poor. We realized what we needed to do was place ourselves among the poor in our own area."

In early 1978, five members of the group gained rent-free access to the second floor of a building owned by the diocese, still without a clear notion of what to do. "We started trying to understand where it was that the poor would take us," says Garcia.

The group had no money, and initially its members circulated through El Paso's impoverished neighborhoods, connecting people with social service agencies. Eventually they realized that the city's two homeless shelters would not accept undocumented immigrants. That's when the volunteers of Annunciation House discovered their mission.

By word of mouth, people began to hear about the house and guests began to arrive, seeking the very basic food and shelter Annunciation House could offer. There were only four or five at first, but within a few years the organization was offering hospitality to 120 people at a time. Garcia estimates that over the past quarter-century, Annunciation House has hosted more than 80,000 immigrants, refugees, and undocumented workers.

Although the origin of Annunciation House coincided with the Sanctuary movement, in which many American congregations declared their churches to be sanctuaries for people fleeing political upheaval in Latin America, Garcia's group stood apart from that effort.

"These churches would go through a long process of discernment to make the decision to declare sanctuary and take in a single family," says Garcia. "I'd tease them and say, 'You've gone through this long process to take in four people, but at Annunciation House we already have 100 people. You've got the theology, but we've got the bodies!'"

IN TRUTH, THEOLOGY-or, more precisely, faith-lies at the heart of the work at Annunciation House.

"The God that we believe in," says Garcia, "is a God who says, 'I am first and foremost in among the widow and the orphan, the stranger in a strange land.' So if we are to recognize that in our own work, it requires us to trust in the providence of God, to live simply, to make ourselves available to people without charging anything and without expecting anything in return.

"We said at the beginning that we should shy away from funding sources or resources that would try to control us or make us be something different from what we were trying to be. Almost 27 years later, Annunciation House continues to be sustained by the spontaneous commitment and generosity and solidarity of people, and of course by a volunteer staff. Individuals come from all over the United States and from six or seven countries to commit to living and working in our houses for one to three years at a time, with no financial help."