This issue of the magazine came together through the inspiration and editorial leadership of our managing editor, Bill Lueders. I can’t take much credit for it, and I leave it to Bill, who pens our editorial Comment this month, to describe his idea for an on-the-ground take on life in Trump’s America.
I am off on a new adventure, having moved with my family to Oaxaca, Mexico, for the year. I will stay in touch, writing regular columns and contributing dispatches to our website. But I am stepping away from day-to-day operations at the magazine to immerse myself in life on the other side of the Wall.
My reasons for going are both personal and political. I go to work every day and wrestle with how to respond to our new political reality in the age of Donald Trump. My kids come home with stories about their peers enduring chants of “build that wall!” at football games. Their high-school and middle-school principals—both strong, charismatic men, one African American and one Latino—each lost his composure over the P.A. system the morning after Election Day, announcing Trump’s victory to a diverse group of public school kids.
Whatever it is we political types have been doing in liberal enclaves like Madison, Wisconsin, where The Progressive is based, one thing is clear: It’s not enough. Now seems like a good time to do something radically different.
So my husband, three daughters, and I have decided to live for a while on the other side of the Wall. It’s our own personal act of rebellion and solidarity with our Mexican neighbors, who have been viciously maligned by our President. We are leaving behind the anxiety and pessimism that threaten to overwhelm us every time we look at the news, and heading straight for a place where the same crushing global forces that are destabilizing things in the United States have been bearing down on people for quite a while.
We want our kids to learn Spanish, and to see a bigger world. We think we might learn something from getting an outside perspective on our country. We want the girls to know that there is more to life than the culture of middle-class striving that has soured so rapidly in recent years in the United States. We want them to understand that the world is a big place, and that we reside in a pretty puny and relatively privileged part of it.
Right now, as I write this, my daughters are sitting with a couple of our neighbors—boys their age—who are helping them with their Spanish. Since we arrived in Oaxaca, we have found people to be incredibly warm and friendly.
We are living in a little house at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by flowers and fruit trees. Chickens regularly cross our yard and the neighbors’ burros occasionally burst into frantic fits of wheezy braying.
Oaxaca is a beautiful, fascinating place, enriched by a lively indigenous culture with sixteen distinct ethnic groups speaking sixteen different languages.
On the very day we left the United States, violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. We took in the news from Mexico, along with Donald Trump’s appalling remarks tacitly supporting the bigots.
I happened to be waiting in line at the U.S. consulate, trying to get help navigating the red tape surrounding our visas, when the news broke that Trump had canceled DACA—the program that allowed 800,000 undocumented youth to pursue jobs and education in the United States without fear of deportation. Nervous people joined me in line, clutching file folders of paperwork. I called in to a press conference with the ACLU, United We Dream, and other immigrant-rights groups as I waited in line. The spokespeople from those civil-rights organizations were audibly upset.
Cristina Jiménez, executive director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the United States, which pushed for DACA in 2012, was outraged. The decision, she said, “fulfills the very sick white-supremacist scheme developed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to terrorize people like my brother, who is twenty-three and has DACA.”
We have a lot of work to do to uphold a better vision for our country. I’ll keep you posted on our insights.