As stories of immigration top the national and world news headlines, Father Dave welcomes author Mary Fontana to share her experience with a unique Catholic resource that serves the vulnerable at the border. Mary spotlights Annunciation House, a migrant shelter in El Paso, TX in her new book called “Strangers in the Province of Joy: Practicing Radical Hospitality on the US – Mexico Border.”
Mary shares that she first volunteered with Annunciation House after graduating college in 2004. “It was founded in the 1970s by a group of young Catholics who were all from El Paso, which is right on the border; You can walk from there into Mexico very quickly and easily,” She says. “They started what they called a ‘house of hospitality’ to provide very basic humanitarian services: food, clothing, and shelter for the poorest of the poor in the area…Volunteers live in this house, and they open their doors to people in need, who in El Paso are largely undocumented migrants and refugees.”
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“When I was [first] there in 2004, it was a lot of single adults looking for work, what you might call economic migrants,” Mary continues. “In the years since then, it’s really shifted to be a lot of families, especially from Central America, who are here looking for safety, because they’re fleeing heavy violence in the neighborhoods and cities that they come from.”
Mary shares why she defines the work of Annunciation House as radical hospitality. “Very simple biblical acts like feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless — which I don’t think are controversial at their heart — can become very controversial when the people we’re extending that hospitality to have been demonized and vilified,” Mary says. “There’s something radical these days about affirming the dignity and inherent worth of every person, including immigrants, or who some people would say don’t belong or shouldn’t be here. To say we affirm their dignity and we’re going to offer them a share to share in our lives — I think that is a radical act.”
She notes that living in the same home as strangers from another country was initially a challenge. “We shared meals and a bathroom with 60 people that I didn’t know, and so it was really a lot to take in. After two weeks, I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ and after six weeks, I thought, ‘I love this so much, I want to stay here forever,’ because sharing our lives with people in that really intimate way is difficult, but it’s also so rewarding,” Mary says. “I was playing with little kids and learning a lot of Spanish slang, and hearing people’s stories and their incredible journeys. There was always someone new at the door and an interesting story to hear.”
In the book, Mary shares some of those experiences from the migrants that lived at Annunciation House. “[One story is] a young man named Elvis who was 15 years old when he arrived. He’d come up from Honduras, and when I saw him, he struck me really as a kid,” she says. “It had taken him a couple months, and while he had had companions temporarily along the way, he was by himself. He’d jumped on freight trains and crossed the border by himself.”
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“He did all of this because back in Honduras, his father had left his family when he was very young, and he had several younger brothers. His mom really struggled to provide for them all, and so he thought, ‘I’m going to go to the U.S. to work and send money back to my family,’” Mary says, and then notes that Elvis soon discovered he couldn’t work in the United States at such a young age. “He was able to go to high school, as there’s a special visa program in the U.S. for juveniles who, for [various] reasons, are not able to go home.”
Mary adds, “He was eventually able to earn his citizenship and went to college. He himself started a career working with migrant kids, and he coached a soccer team for immigrant kids like himself, because soccer had always been one of his great loves. He’s really done very well, and I’ve been proud to keep in touch with him and watch all the things he’s done.”
