By Kent Baxter
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Professors Nestor Rodriguez and Jacqueline Hagan, from the University of Houston Center for Immigration Research, receive precious photographs of los desaparecidos, the disappeared, sent by desparate families hoping for news of their loved ones. |
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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1As in the death-at-the-border studies, what remains consistent with all of this work is its concern with public policy. "Clearly, we've chosen projects that a lot of people wouldn't take because they are too politically sticky and, academically, they are not that sexy," says Hagan, reflecting on the center's research. "The studies we do are not going to be groundbreaking in immigration theory, but they are studies that have policy implications right now."
This commitment to influencing public policy is the substance of some of their most cherished achievements. "Migrant Deaths" was released at a time when former President Bill Clinton was meeting with Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico, to discuss border relations. Sources have told Rodriguez and Hagan that their study was a topic of conversation between the two leaders. Whether the rumor is true or not, the talks between the two presidents led to subsequent changes at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which began tracking border deaths and training agents in search-and-rescue techniques.
"The message of the border study was that these deaths did not have to happen, and it was heard in the halls of Congress, and it did affect INS policy," Hagan says with great pride. But, perhaps more importantly, it is a concern for the individuals affected by public policy that has been the true conscience of the center. As Maria Jimenez of the American Friends Service Committee put it in a 1997 Chronicle of Higher Education article on Nestor Rodriguez: "He's a humanist. In the research he does, he becomes very involved with the community he is researching and tends to respond humanely to the set of problems these people have."
During a recent trip to El Salvador to interview deportees, Rodriguez and Scott Phillips arrived bearing phone cards so their subjects could contact the families they were forced to leave back in the United States. As center codirector, Hagan is aware such concern might be criticized for jeopardizing objectivity, but she is unfazed: "I have a political agenda that many people say you are not supposed to have in academia. But I don't think you can ever be entirely neutral. I don't fully believe in value-free work, and the value-free stuff is often boring anyway."
Rodriguez is more philosophical. "It's not just about the immigrants," he says, reflecting on the broader mission of the center. "It's about us, who we are as a people, a country, a nation. I don't know how historians in fifty years will paint what we did today, but we are here today, and we're trying to understand what we are about today."
Perhaps it was the humanist at work in Rodriguez two summers ago when he fielded a phone call from another desperate voice and could not turn away any longer: a family was searching for a son who had disappeared seven years before. Unable to resist their pleas, Rodriguez packed his bags and headed down to the border towns near Brownsville.
With nothing but a name and some flimsy guesswork as to where and when the young man may have attempted to cross, he tried police stations on both sides of the border. With persistent pleading, he was able to convince a sympathetic Mexican clerk to go to the warehouse and retrieve the archived boxes of police records from seven years before.
Minutes turned to hours. Rodriguez decided to kill time at the office of the local newspaper down the street. Leafing through tattered old dailies, he came across a story of a migrant pulled from the river. The date was near the time of the disappearance of the man he was searching for. Attached was a blurry black-and-white photograph of the body. Details were scarce, but the photo caption revealed the body was pulled to shore on the American side.
Back he went for a return visit to the police station on the other side of the border. This time, a search turned up a file on an unidentified illegal who had drowned attempting to cross the Rio Grande just south of Brownsville. Again details were sketchy, but the police report did indicate where the body had been sent: a funeral home only a little ways from town.
Awaiting Rodriguez outside the run-down funeral home was the sad and powerful symbol of those shocking numbers he had compiled so many years before. Over a nearby ridge, at the end of a dusty path lay the vast empty field that is the final resting place of the unknowns, los desaparecidos, the disappeared.
Blistering heat and driving South Texas wind had long since worn away the simple wooden cross that once marked the grave of this unknown, but the funeral home director was able to locate a small bag containing a few personal belongings, including a ring and a small metal medallion.
Rodriguez returned to Houston and handed everything he had found to the victim's sister. "I said to her, 'In my opinion, this is your brother, but you will need to verify this yourself.' So she called the young man's wife, who said, yes, she had given him the medallion when he left."
Rodriguez still chokes up when he tells the story. "You know," he says, "sometimes the work we do is fun and easy... And sometimes it's hard, because, no matter what, you are always dealing with real human drama."
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Kent Baxter is a writer and editor at California State University
and a Houston Institute for Culture board member.
Originally published in Collegium, the magazine of the University of Houston. Used with permission.