Portrait of an immigrant

Last week I was driving along one of Colorado’s busier streets. In an area dominated by small shops and chain stores, I noticed a man at the curb selling flowers and mangoes. Not an unusual site on thoroughfares in many parts of the country. That he was Mexican became fully apparent when I pulled off to purchase a bouquet and a couple of mangoes. He didn’t speak English, and I flunked Spanish three times but somehow, with smiles and counting fingers, we got the transaction done.

As I drove off, it occurred to me that that man is incredibly courageous.

There he is, every day, alone on a busy street, putting his integrity and presence out there for thousands to see. On that hot, busy corner, breathing all that toxic exhaust, he’s working at making an honest, if small, living, to support himself and probably a family. He embodies what this country professed to value for generations.

He’s not working angles; he’s not stiffing his supplier; he’s not cheating his customers; he’s not assaulting women or degrading children. Instead, he is living out the bootstrapping ethic so lauded in our American mythos.

He dares to start at the bottom, to work honestly and hard. Slowly, through grit and determination, he aims to start climbing toward what was called the American Dream. He dares to publicly stand on a first rung of the American economic ladder. He dares to stand where he is incredibly vulnerable to simply being disappeared by either the masked and brutal thugs of ICE or others of the badged and lawless among us who prey on those who are named as targets by their fellow thugs in the White House.

He’s young, he’s married, he and his wife likely have a child or two whom they love, nurture and fiercely protect. It is for them that each and every day, on a busy street corner, he takes up a place in American society. Each and every day he faces into a ginned-up hurricane of hatred and racism. He braves this storm invented by the rich, the powerful and the connected, to divide, conquer and deliver even more of your money and mine to the obscenely wealthy. Each and every day, as he goes to do his best for them, this young man kisses his family goodbye and wonders if he will see them 15 hours later.

He is a man of deep integrity who knows that sacrifice in the face of very real threat and fear is the one toe hold he can give his family on the ladder of hope. By simply standing on that corner, working to make an honest living, a stranger in an ever-stranger land, he is saying to all of us that the freedom to provide for your family is precious indeed. He is saying to all of us that defense of that freedom is worth the personal battle with fear and the very real danger that each and every day brings in a land that each and every day sees more and more of its freedoms ripped away.

Standing on that corner fearful, yet unblinking in the face of tyranny, he is a living signature on this country’s founding declaration of the inalienable human right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ... John Hancock’s was writ no larger.

– Paul Garrett, Bayfield