Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
Healing in Community
by Lauren Reichelt
The playground grew out of a recurring dream.
Years ago, during childhood, I dreamt a terrifying dungeon, its only window barred: the window of the state psychiatric facility where I'd once visited my mother.
I thought Mom was in jail then. I knew she hadn't committed a crime. I imagined she'd been imprisoned for something I had done. I just didn't know what it was.
As I grew older, the dream dungeon became a house with its balcony built around a courtyard, many closed doors beckoning, promises of marvelous hidden rooms. Oh how I longed to open those doors!
I was the mother of a newborn living in Española. The dream seemed more real than my surroundings.
I'd been dwelling in this sandy, faded northern New Mexico town for three years without meeting anyone. Española was a barrio. I was vaguely afraid of its residents, having been assured by other Anglo friends in Santa Fe that Española was full of criminals. I'd paid as much attention to my neighbors as I had to shadows in the years preceding my daughter's birth. Now I resolved to remove self-imposed bars. Had I still been in Chicago, I might have strolled to a neighborhood tot lot to meet other mothers, but my new home had none. So on this particular day, upon awakening from my dream, I scrawled a playground design on a piece of notebook paper and began knocking on doors.
I showed it to anyone willing to listen.
"I want to build a developmentally appropriate, culturally relevant tot lot out of recycled materials here in Española," I bubbled enthusiastically. "Our playground will resemble a Spanish castle so it'll inspire kids to ask questions about their own history and culture. I want to use volunteer labor. That way we'll build social networks while creating public infrastructure. It doesn't seem right that Española moms have to feed their kids fast food at McDonald's just to let them run around on a play structure. And it makes sense to use volunteer labor, because in the past, whenever people needed a house or a barn, the whole community came together to build. We're reviving indigenous customs."
Actually, I knew nothing about Española's customs. My scribbled design resembled a Japanese dojo. Most of my ideas about cultural relevance and volunteerism had been gleaned from my grad-school reading list of Japanese Meiji era scholars.
"You'll never find volunteers," I was repeatedly assured. "People in Española don't volunteer."
Nobody seemed to mind the Zen-like quality of my design. Every neighbor I approached offered something. The newspaper interviewed me an hour into my campaign. Two days later a local bank contributed $2,000. City government supplied land. The home improvement store donated trucks and sand. A high school AutoCAD class developed a concept sketch, and a video class filmed a documentary. Later, I would convince a news network to air the short video statewide. County welders crafted my barred windows. "But we'll only have two walls," I told the welder. "No child should ever feel trapped. They should be able to run to their parents."
People I had never met held pancake breakfasts to raise money. A board of directors formed. Each new participant added his or her story.
"The viejitos say they never noticed the Depression. They didn't know they were poor. One vecino grew corn, one grew chiles, and at harvest time they traded. The pleve helped each other out."
"Folks around here always used to do things for themselves. We didn't have no grocery stores back then. We relied on our families."
"¡Y jolé! When I was a kid we didn't need a garbage dump, because we reused things. We didn't need plastic, que no? We used clay."
Our new board of directors (composed of neighbors I had not previously known) decided to hold a "name-the-playground" contest in the schools. I wheeled my wobbly stroller to schools in town, talking to each class. Dark hopeful eyes glistened with excitement as children contributed ideas.
The winning submission was "Venessa's Hideaway," a memorial to a nine-year-old girl who was murdered when she surprised a heroin addict ransacking her home for syringes. Venessa Valerio had been diabetic. She was a glowing girl with a winning, gap-toothed smile and hair that fell to the back of her knees. She was the second child in her fourth grade class to be killed that year in a drug-related shooting. Española, it turned out, led the nation in drug overdose deaths.
Venessa's mother, Annette, became the playground's champion. As beautiful as her daughter, Annette bore a striking resemblance to the Virgin of Guadalupe, even wearing her boxy brown UPS uniform. Hair streamed down her back like a veil. When she carried her photo of Venessa before her, people parted to let her pass. When she talked about her daughter's last day on earth, they cried.
Annette's huge extended family of aunts, uncles, in-laws, compadres, comadres, and cousins flocked to Valdez Park each weekend over the summer of 1995, a weekly building pilgrimage. Venessa's grieving classmates painted the sign. We were joined by released jail inmates from the Rock Christian Outreach, gang members living in projects across the street, and assorted townspeople. One day a girl with no legs wheeled up and began to lay brick. The county hired me to finish the project and to organize in other communities. As we built, the city planted. Our once dusty park turned green. The city installed picnic tables. Families began using the park.
Picnickers joined us. "What are you doing?" they asked.
We explained, "We're building Venessa's Hideaway."
One couple answered, "Bless you. Our jita, Melissa Salazar, God rest her soul, was murdered last year. She was just twenty-two. They found her by the side of the road, pobrecita."
Annette hugged them. "Nessie was such a special child," she reminisced. "She died in my arms. Her last words to me were, ‘Mommy! Mommy!'"
In time, other grieving parents joined. We told stories as we worked, soothed by the familiar smell and sticky texture of cement, mud, soil, and paint. The work made us whole again. It healed torn souls. "I feel like we're building a shrine," I said to Annette, "a shrine for children to play in." When the tot lot was complete, we planned a celebration. We invited every district child.
"It can't be done," I was told. "The schools never participate. Española kids are too wild. They'll get in fights. It will be a disaster."
We decided to hold a nonviolent event. I invited the Santa Fe Children's Museum to teach cooperative games. A local political aspirant invited the National Guard, the fire department, and the police. We had puppeteers, tanks, Ronald McDonald, Sparky the Firedog, twenty-four police cars, a fire engine, a rescue helicopter, hot dogs, hamburgers, magicians, face painting, clowns, a purple poison-control dinosaur everyone mistook for Barney, volleyball games, and a police anti-drug rock band.
The schools bused in 2,000 students, nearly one-quarter the population of the entire town, in shifts. Children frolicked on tanks and set off sirens. They played cooperative games. They sat in the helicopter. They ate hot dogs and hamburgers. They listened to speeches. They remembered the dead.
There were no fights. There was not a single report of unruly behavior.
After the playground was complete, Linda Pedro, a civil rights activist, asked me to help coordinate a pilgrimage. I drove down a dirt road past cottonwoods, a weaving gallery, horses, and chile fields while dogs charged my car. Linda lived in Chimayo, in an ancient adobe home modified to accommodate her needs. She was quadriplegic. She lived at the epicenter of Rio Arriba's underground heroin trade.
"We have to do something about drug violence," she exhorted, rolling her wheelchair into the kitchen. "I'm surrounded by dealers. All night, I hear shooting. I'm terrified. In the old days, the Hermanos would never have tolerated lawlessness." She was referring to the secretive, indigenous religious brotherhood that had evolved in the absence of Franciscan priests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in New Mexico's remote communities. "I'm going to ask them to lead a pilgrimage to the Santuario de Chimayo." Every year on Good Friday, thousands of pilgrims lined the road, walking from Santa Fe and Española to the Santuario. "We'll have a public interfaith ceremony there. It'll be the Hermanos' first public prayer in four hundred years. I need your help."
"Me?" I asked incredulously. "What can I do? I don't know anything about the Penitentes." I'd been told that they were a voodoo cult and they shot anyone who spied on their secret ceremonies.
"No. But you know the mothers. I want them to walk in front of the procession carrying photos of their children. The Hermanos will follow, chanting, and then the other houses of worship. Also, you're with the county. I need porta-potties, a police escort, and some ambulances. We're praying for healing."
"Drugs are an epidemic requiring a public health response," I concurred.
"Exactly," she said. "No child should ever have to visit a parent in jail. No parent should lose a child."
I gathered the mothers. We made buttons of their children's faces, telling stories as we worked. "My Ricky was such a good boy," mourned Donna, Annette's next-door neighbor. Her seventeen-year-old son, Erik Sanchez, had been thrown off the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge by carjackers, his body shattered on rocks six hundred feet below. "The police told me his fingers were crushed," sputtered Donna. "He tried to hold onto the bridge but those pinche tecatos stomped on his hands! He built his car himself."
"My Ricky loved his car, too," Martha reminisced. Ricky Martinez, also seventeen, was killed by a drunk driver. Eva, Juanito's mother, sobbed without speaking. Eleven-year-old Juanito perished fighting off Eva's estranged husband, who knifed him after slitting her throat. When Eva awoke from her coma, Juanito was gone. Buried.
The smiling faces of the dead piled up in a cardboard box.
Several hundred men, women, and children pinned buttons over their hearts and hiked solemnly eight miles up a winding, two-lane mountain road through rain, wind, and snow. Linda led the way, using her wheelchair, surrounded by mothers carrying framed photos of their murdered loved ones. Members of the moradas (or neighborhood chapels) followed, chanting prayers. Churches of many faiths made pilgrimage behind them. After checking to make sure that the ambulance, porta-potties, sheriff's escorts, and refreshment tables were all in place, I took up my place at the end of the line, walking beside Lynn Gottlieb, a rabbi from Albuquerque.
I regaled Lynn with my theory. "A shrine is a psychic mass fueled by lost lives. When we make pilgrimage to a shrine, we increase its energy, its mana. That was the purpose of human sacrifice in ancient times. It's more ethical to fuel a shrine with lives that have already been lost."
"There are plenty in the modern world," Lynn observed.
I continued. "I think I'm beginning to understand the Zohar." I was referring to a book of Jewish mysticism written in twelfth-century Spain. I took a breath, unsure of myself, and ventured, "De Leon translated the first line of the Torah: ‘With Beginning [the ineffable One] created God.' The ‘I' within is the ineffable One. When we become blank slates, casting out prejudice in order to listen, opening ourselves up to our fellow man, we bring God into the physical world. The line means, ‘With Beginning, I created God.'"
Several hours later I stood with other mothers and our young children under a gray and blustery sky, listening, candles burning in our hands. A Pentecostal Minister prayed ecstatically, Lynn and the other clergy beside her. The minister beseeched, "If you're there God, give us a sign!"
A tremendous gust of wind blew my daughter's umbrella inside-out. A clap of thunder shook the trees. Our candles went out. It began to hail.
Nobody moved. Not one person ran for shelter.
Lauren Reichelt is the director of Health and Human Services for a county in Northern New Mexico. She has served as a successful community organizer in Japan and the United States and is writing a book about organizing as a healing process.
Reichelt, Lauren. 2010. Healing in community. Tikkun 25(2):19.
