Mr. Rendon used to dig the graves at St. Mary’s Cemetery in my home town. He buried a lot of my kinsmen and maybe some of yours.

Until I rounded the corner onto Akard Street last Sunday, just one of several hundred thousand on the way to City Hall, I hadn’t thought of him in years. Mr. Rendon spoke some English and his wife spoke only Spanish. That wasn’t unusual to me. After all, out of the seven houses in my area, there were only two people who did not regularly speak German in their conversations with each other: me and my mother.

I was a good friend and parochial school classmate of Mr. and Mrs. Rendon’s son Crispin, one of their many children. We lived a quarter-mile from each other, just outside the city limits. Crispin’s father was a thin, quiet man, heavily chiseled by years of hard labor and the other things in life that form us. Everyone I knew respected him and his family. Like me and the other kids, the grownups all called him “Mr. Rendon.”

Somewhere on Akard Street I also thought about Feliz, the Mexican who ran the ranch of my best buddy’s grandfather. He could do anything. We would occasionally take Feliz and his fellow workers into town after dark for beer and a meal at the café, then return them over the rocky and hilly roads to their small bunkhouses. Occasionally, Feliz or one of his boys—and boys they were—would take off for Mexico to see their families for a few weeks. Then they would make their way back. As you might expect, unlike Mr. Rendon, Feliz and his vaqueros didn’t have any papeles, let alone citizenship.

Then I thought about some of the others. The ones I grew up laughing and running barefoot with along the border near Juárez during the first few conscious years of my life, while my family, and many of theirs, traveled with the road and bridge construction crews that my German immigrant father worked for. There was the half-headed one my dad and I tearfully watched just down from Ysleta, near El Paso, the concrete hardening around him as we waited for the Mexican authorities to retrieve his body. And God bless “Little Joe,” the one who miraculously saved my father’s life a few years later in a devastating construction accident in the 1960’s. He was what some people called a “wetback.” Maybe they still do. I called him a hero and so did my mother. Anyway, I thank God he got here and allowed me to know my old man, crippled or not, for more than twenty more years. And there was that fat and happy young fellow, even younger than I at the time, whose name I can’t remember, the one I took12 feet to the ground from atop a half-finished bridge a moment before a dragline’s loose boom with a concrete bucket at the end of its cable would have done it for us—the identical event that sent the young Mexican near El Paso to meet his maker. And there was Paco, or “Frank” as some called him, the Mexican man I picked up at 4:30 every morning as I worked my way to the IH-10 project near Comfort, Texas, and who always delighted in telling his compadres the story of the day I was “arrested” by the Border Patrol because I was the only one who didn’t run when the “la migra” set upon our bridge crew. To be sure, I was working illegally, but by age, not citizenship. Anyway, the list is endless.

I don’t remember their “stories,” but I know they all were born somewhere in Mexico. But then, no one had to tell me his story. Although unique in a very personal way, each was undoubtedly like that of the others from south of the river, like it was for my father when he arrived at Galveston: they came seeking a better life for them and their families. That is something that motivates most of us, I hope.

When I and the others made it to City Hall last Sunday afternoon, we looked around and saw a sea of American flags. My friend Domingo Garcia started the speeches with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a prayer. By the time we’d arrived, I’d spoken to other friends of many years—Pauline Medrano (whose now-deceased father Pancho was close to me and my wife for two decades), Jose Angel Gutierrez, a man of substance I first met back in the Crystal City days, Adelfa Callejo, another ally in so many ways, Roberto Alonzo, currently a state representative who has campaigned with me and I with him, and, among many more, Peter Johnson—a true man-of-the people who walked the walk with Martin Luther King. I guess each of us has had our disagreements in the past, but not about Sunday.

It was a good thing to happen in Dallas, the march for the immigrants. If I was struck personally by anything other than how well-mannered everyone was, it was that three Latinos thanked me for being there. I don’t know why they would have done that, except that someone has created an atmosphere that seeks to pit “them” against “us”—an atmosphere that is unnatural to me.

Much of the immigration “debate” has me agitated. No, not the part about whether we should secure our borders in a reasonable way. I agree that we should. Immigration, legal and illegal, is a serious issue. Although a seemingly reasonable proposal, even the compromise bill that stalled in the Senate last week has its own significant defects, in my view. For instance, the guest worker program troubles me because it has the potential of institutionalizing a whole set of people who have no voice in our government, while giving business interests a ready market to take advantage of their cheaper labor costs. But the House bill—the one which criminalizes people as its primary objective, and the one which proved a catalyst for the marches around the country—is simply wrong. You want to shut down illegal immigration? Then aim your arrows at the interests that are the magnets. Don’t demonize Raul, Frumencio and Juan for taking the bait, based on motives that are anything but sinister.

This whole debate should never have become a vehicle for the right wing to create its next political whipping boy: immigrants from the south of us. You need only rummage through the comments to the articles on DallasBlog describing last Sunday’s march to know what I’m talking about. Or listen to a few of the so-called talk radio shows, filled with hateful and intemperate comments. While I, for one, have little respect for a Mexican government that has pummeled its own people for so long, my first reaction is not to dish out more of the same to them when they come here, effectively at our request. To say they only take and never give is nonsense.

I told Eduardo last week that I was going to participate in the march on Sunday. Eduardo is a bus boy in a local establishment near Downtown Dallas. He’s personable and sharp as a razor. He’s from Guanajuato, a beautiful city northwest of the Mexican capital. I was there but a few months ago, having hopped the Americanos bus out of West Dallas for the ultimate destination of Oaxaca.

Eduardo was very interested in Sunday’s march. He wanted to be there, but he had weeks before promised his boss that he would work that day and there would be no one to cover for him. He knew the details and the issues, and he also said he would much prefer being with us than cleaning tables. “Will you walk for me, too?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “It’s the least I can do.”

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