Today, I drive back from the Twin Cities to Chicago.
Before I go, I visit my mother’s old meat packing neighborhood in South St. Paul, which is still a working-class town and by its looks filled with newly arrived immigrants. Hispanic instead of Eastern European.
Of my mother’s four siblings, all raised solo by my grandmother Anna, one opened a grocery store, Fisher Foods in nearby Newport. One remained a butcher with a packing plant until the plant shut down. One married a man who opened a local hardware store (and he eventually became a leading Ace Hardware franchisee), and my aunt became the first woman vice president of a bank in Minnesota.
My mother Gert moved to Chicago during WWII, worked as a secretary, and just after the war met my father, Albert.
She stayed home in Westchester (a few blocks from what is now the ICE detention facility in Broadview) and had six children, including me.
Like my grandfather, my father died young. He died of a stroke when I was 12 years old. And my mother, like my grandmother before her, became a widow raising a large family.
As my Polish grandmother told me just after my father died, “Jacky, your Pa sure left your Ma in a fix.” Gert worked as a secretary until she died.
Not unlike the successes and challenges of any immigrant family, whether from Poland or the generations of Guatemalans who have long attended our church, St. Giles Catholic Church, in Oak Park.
Or the Hispanics who populate my LA Fitness gym in Melrose Park, where as a white man, I am (comfortably) a distinct minority.
In our end is our beginning.
It’s axiomatic to say that the U.S. has been a nation of immigrants.
Whether we become something different, more insular, shrinking and diminished, is a choice we’ll be making in upcoming national elections.
Unless the likes of Trump, Stephen Miller, Bovino, Noem, and their MAGA supporters in Congress preempt the results of upcoming elections with ICE-like soldiers on the ground who shoot people in the back to suppress turnout in blue cities such as Minneapolis or Milwaukee or Detroit.
If that were to happen, Renee Good and Alex Pretti will have been Sirens, alerting us to act in defense of democracy before it is too late.
That chapter is still being written.
