By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

ALTAR, Mexico — In Altar’s aging Catholic church, as well as in roadside shrines throughout the borderlands of northern Mexico, a familiar image of the Virgin Mary seems to brighten even the most daunting shadows.

For many, her glowing halo is a taut flame of hope illuminating an often deadly road — one that leads to a place of dreams for some and a parched perdition for others.

A Mennonite Central Committee learning tour, held Jan. 28 in conjunction with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, Ariz., explored Altar and saw where many of these migrantes make the final preparations for their journeys into the United States, usually across the desolate Sonoran Desert.

In Altar’s Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, ministry to the migrantes has become a hallmark of the Catholic Church’s outreach in northern Mexico.

This is thanks in large part to Rene Castaneda Castro, a young priest who has revolutionized how his parishioners look upon their fellow Mexicans as they pass through their community of 16,000, about 60 miles from the U.S. border.

“My most effective weapon has been my pulpit . . . to sensitize people” to the migrantes’ plight, Castaneda said.

Castaneda hopes to sensitize people of other faiths to the keen obstacles these sojourners face, from militarization of the U.S. border to immigration laws that restrict who can enter the United States, even while American firms capitalize on Mexico’s cheap and willing labor.

To this end, Castaneda has opened the Community Center for Migrant Services, which offers a variety of help, from basic medical care and clean overnight lodging for families to advice on the dangers of crossing the Sonoran Desert.

Castaneda and his volunteers — including the most recent mayor of Altar — also stand up for migrants abused by police and offer help to others deported after being stopped at the border, often after being robbed or roughed up by disreputable “coyotes” hired to take them across.

Inside the church — where many migrants light votive candles and negotiate the marble aisle on their knees — large posters list various options, and risks, for those heading north.

Some in his parish have challenged Castaneda’s devotion to the migrantes and torn the posters down. But others in the church hierarchy, including the influential archbishop of Hermosillo, have given Castaneda a green light.

“The bishop sent me here to serve all of you,” he told one parishioner who opposed opening the church to the thousands of migrants who pass through each day. “I’m here to serve God and all of God’s people.”

Despite the mixed reaction to his emphasis on the migrant exodus, others are eager to support such a ministry.

“They’re not criminals; they’re not terrorists; they’re human beings,” Castaneda said.

Castaneda’s message of hospitality and service to the migrantes is being heard elsewhere, too. In September, he met with Mexican President Vincente Fox and various interior officials about the situation in Altar.

“We had an opportunity to tell the president about the work we are doing here, and he recognized the importance of the work we do,” Castaneda said through a Spanish interpreter. “We are motivated by our encounter with Jesus in the gospel, so our work comes 100 percent from our faith. The only law we obey here is the law of Jesus Christ.”

Even with all this support, one feat Castaneda and other border rights advocates have not been able to pull off is stemming the large number of fatalities among those who try to enter the United States.

In the Altar community center, ribbons of white paper stream from a cross hung in the foyer. The hundreds of narrow strips were trimmed from a government report listing migrant fatalities in the Sonoran Desert.

Each strip means a lost life — a confetti of names and causes of death.

Typically these deaths are laid to dehydration or car accidents or listed as “unknown,” meaning the body was too decomposed to determine how the person died.

In some ways, Castaneda is in a bit of a legal bind when it comes to serving the migrantes. Helping Mexican citizens, even those seeking to enter the United States illegally, is not an offense. But aiding others, such as Central Americans who also head north, presents a legal dilemma under Mexican law.

But Castaneda, like others in the Catholic hierarchy in northern Mexico, is standing firm when it comes to ministering to people viewed essentially as economic refugees.

“We’re trying to put into action here the theology of hospitality,” Castaneda told the MCC learning tour, which also included a number of Catholics and Protestants, as well as a Muslim imam from Phoenix, Ariz., and others from the Arizona Jewish community. “If it’s a crime to provide charity, I’d rather be a criminal.”

This support for the migrantes is strong north of the border as well. In Arizona, Gerald Kicanas, the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tucson, has been instrumental in drawing attention to the suffering of those who hazard the perils of the desert to enter the country.

Standing in the sanctuary of Castaneda’s church in Altar, Kicanas said American and Mexican bishops hope to establish a view of the region that defies any boundaries.

Inspired by a 1999 Vatican document, Ecclesia in America, released by Pope John Paul II, Kicanas said bishops in the region would like to create a “diocese without borders,” to help relieve the vast social and fiscal disparities between the two countries.

“Ecclesia in America has raised a level of consciousness,” Kicanas said.

And unlike the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s, when Catholic bishops were reprimanded for supporting refugees fleeing violence in Central America, support among the church hierarchy for assisting the migrantes is strong, Kicanas said.

Yet the exodus continues unabated. Parked all over Altar are any number of old pickups or minivans, usually with the words “Altar-Sasabe” soaped in the windows.

These are the taxis that take the migrants to the border town of Sasabe. From there, the desert looms ahead.

The two unpaved roads to Sasabe start just outside of Altar, where a toll booth attendant collects a few pesos before moving a rope and allowing another load to pass.

While the group from Tucson held a prayer service at a migrants’ memorial nearby, two men waited on the dusty road a hundred yards away. They wore new coats and carried little more than a few jugs of water.

As the group intoned, in Hebrew, Psalm 133, and the imam prayed in Arabic and the rest of the circle sang the Lord’s Prayer, a pickup stopped and the two men loaded into the back. As the service concluded, the truck disappeared in its own dust.

Still, there is an abiding hope amid such desperation, some say — a hope not only for survival in the desert and beyond, but that someday, the migrants will be able to return to a country offering a better way of life.

In Altar’s church and others like it, a special “Prayer for Our Migrant Brothers and Sisters” is included in each mass.

Composed by the archbishop of Hermosillo, the prayer calls not only for safe passage for those headed north, but for the day when they will come back again.

“Touch our hearts with your goodness, Lord, as we see them travel,” the prayer concludes. “Protect their families until they return home, not with a broken heart, but with their hopes fulfilled.”