The myths of demagogues collapsed too
Lost amidst the tangle of steel and roadway that fell into the icy Patapsco River in Baltimore on Tuesday were eight men pursuing their American Dreams. Two were rescued. Crews pulled the bodies of two others from the water on Wednesday. Four others are presumed dead. Will Bunch considers who the victims were and what their lives meant:
From the day in the mid-2000s when a then-20-year-old Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval crossed the border into America, he never stopped working. The youngest of eight children, Suazo was fleeing numbing poverty and a dead-end career path in Azacualpa, a small rural village in the western mountains of Honduras.
The undocumented Suazo wound up in Greater Baltimore, a magnet for Central American refugees with its relatively cheap housing for the bustling Eastern Seaboard, a friendly climate toward migrants, and lots of opportunity. With American dreams of entrepreneurship, he took menial jobs like clearing brush, then launched a package delivery service, and when COVID-19 ended that, started working overnight construction for a Baltimore contractor, Brawner Brothers.
Suazo was described by friends and family as happy, outgoing, and tireless. He had to be. While supporting a wife and two kids, he was also sending $600 to $800 a month back to Azacualpa, enough to help family members buy a small hotel and even support youth soccer. In Baltimore, he was what his brother called “the fundamental pillar” for a growing number of relatives who made it to Maryland. Home from the grueling construction work at 5 a.m., he was out working again by noon, picking up extra dollars cleaning yards, painting houses, or landscaping.
New arrivals like Sandoval, Bunch explains (as though it’s not right before our eyes), “take some of the most dangerous jobs in America, with construction ranked ‘a high-hazard industry‘ by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because of risks like falling or getting crushed under heavy equipment.” * They make up about a third of the construction workforce and more than half of those killed in falls.
You’ve seen such men, as have I here. Latino men, like Bunch says, landscaping, roofing, painting houses, repairing roadways, etc. Others, men and women, perhaps second-generation, speaking unaccented English, operate my favorite Mexcian restaurant just walking distance from the house.
When the Dali cargo ship demolished that bridge support on Tuesday, it also obliterated all the ridiculous lies and myths our demagogues have been spreading around immigration. There were no sex traffickers aboard the Key Bridge that night. Nobody was dealing fentanyl. They were not “animals,” but fathers and husbands like Suazo and Luna, whose wife occasionally showed up in her food truck to bring the men tacos and pupusas. They were filling potholes so their children could have an even better life.
These six workers who perished were not “poisoning the blood of our country,” they were replenishing it. This is a moment of clarity when we need to reject the national disease of xenophobia and restore our faith in the United States as a beacon for the best people like Suazo. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.
Xenophopbia is the other national epidemic. Driven in large part by status anxiety, clods like Trump and his imitators teach their minions to hate what they do not know, and what their families have forgotten. (We’re all immigrants here, even First Peoples if you look back far enough.) But it sells when you’ve got nothing else to offer to people who feel as if they’re hanging onto what little they have by the skin of their teeth or by their fingernails. George W. Bush once spoke of making the pie higher. Trump is peddling zero-sum America. Keep your brown hands off my pie!
Status anxiety breeds hatred. Ignorance fuels it. Ultimately, was there ever a time when strangers were welcome here?
Harbours open there doors to the young searching foreigner
Come to live in the light of the big L of liberty
Plains and open skies bill boards would advertise
Was it anything like that when you arrived
Dream boats carried the future to the heart of America
People were waiting in line for a place by the riverIt was time when strangers were welcome here
Music would play they tell me the days were sweet and clear
It was a sweeter tune and there was so much room
That people could come from everywhere
* Heavy construction work was my gateway to engineering school. Ask me sometime about the hazards.
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