By the Rivers of Babylon: Blueprint for a Church in Exile

House of the Butterfly

2 House of the Butterfly The Witness of Ruth and Casa Mariposa, Tucson, Arizona But you shall live in tents all your days, that you may live many days in the land where you reside. –Jeremiah 35:7 Casa Mariposa (“Butterfly House”), a purple stuccoed house, was only about a block away from the hostel where I was staying in Tucson. I had been told to visit because this was one of the nerve centers for immigration reform, advocacy, as well as sanctuary, providing beds and table and clean clothing for pilgrims on the way. The house was easy to find: outside someone posted a sign, “Humanitarian Aid is NOT a Crime.” Symbols of the migrant trail littered the property. Inside the house, in the middle of the central hallway, stood a shrine, salvaged from the things left behind on the migrant trail. The building itself was a salvage: at one time, Casa Mariposa served as a railroad house, the back of the property butting up against an alley, formerly a railroad track. Today, its rooms (arranged on either side of the hallway) serve as temporary sanctuary for people who need a safe place to rest. On the far end of the hallway, a central dining area welcomes guests to a simple meal and table fellowship. In a sense, it continues as a railroad house, but today it does so in the spirit of the Underground Railroad communities that helped to “smuggle” African American peoples out of slavery in the period leading up to the Civil War. In one of Casa Mariposa’s side rooms I met and talked with Lucia (not her real name) after her second and, according to her, last undocumented migration across the border between the United States and Mexico.1 As we talked, Lucia, 31 a soft-spoken woman in her late forties with long black hair, sat on a couch, her legs curled up beneath her, wearing a faded orange T-shirt. She was married (but separated), her adopted home being in Colorado, where she earned a living as an agricultural worker on an onion farm. She had been living in Colorado for decades where, in addition to working, she had extended family. Lucia came to the United States as a child, when she was just eleven years old. She said her parents were disabled and poor. They told her to go to the United States to live with family that had already migrated into the United States to work. She crossed, she said, with another boy. They were met on the other side of the border, in Phoenix, and then were driven the rest of the way to Colorado. The first time she crossed, the border was more fluid and open than it is now. Today, the border between Mexico and the United States is both militarized and violent. To cross the same border now is to undertake a harrowing journey, and I asked why she would return understanding the risks. She explained that she went back to her home state of Nayarit (on the west coast of Mexico) to see her mother who, she said, was ill and probably dying. She stayed for about a year. In August 2011, when I met her, she was on the last leg of her return to the United States. She almost didn’t make it. The day before she was found lying down, unconscious, in a convenience store on the U.S. side of the border. Somehow she was placed in the care of a nurse who was affiliated with a church committed to justice ministries for undocumented peoples. It was that connection that led to her receiving temporary sanctuary at Casa Mariposa. “Would you cross again?” I asked. “No,” she replied flatly, “never again.” While the first time she crossed was uneventful (as migrations go), this journey was terrifying but, at another level, chillingly familiar. She told how the human smuggler acted wildly, apparently taking her group in circles, as if he were on drugs; of being physically assaulted by another migrant; of being spotted by U.S. Border Patrol agents in the distance and then hiding in the scrub brush as border patrol helicopters flew overhead, looking for them. Later, she and another migrant would be hunted by border patrol dogs as she hid in an underground culvert and her companion hid somewhere else. What ultimately became of her companion, she didn’t know—she never saw him again. As she spoke, she...