90 Mile Peace Walk from Dilley Detention Center
By Erin, Tsuru for Solidarity member
Photos By Stephen Pavey
I have been part of Tsuru from its early days, primarily as an artist working out of the Seattle hub. Lately, I’ve surprised myself by stepping into a role in the realm of security—for our and La Resistencia’s actions, and all other public events. And so, in late February, Mike Ishii and I joined the security team for a 90-mile, 4-day long peace pilgrimage from Dilley, TX to the nearest big city of San Antonio. The walk was led and conceived by Dianne Garcia, a 40-something, wiry and soft-spoken Mexican American Mennonite pastor. Her goal was to rouse religious leaders and others against Trump’s renewed family and child immigration imprisonment practices at the Dilley ICE Detention Center. Inside, more than 400 children and their families are currently locked up without sufficient food, surroundings, education, or care. A newborn baby is among those children.
Our small core group covered about 27 miles each day for three days, with various others dropping in to join us for short or long stretches. A slow moving car flanked both ends of our procession. We walked quiet dirt country roads, but more often on the shoulders of paved two- and four-lane highways with semi-trucks and other vehicles roaring past at 80 miles an hour. We walked under cloudless skies with temperatures in the 80s-90s, stopping as frequently as our pace allowed for water, calories, and rest. Curious cows, horses, goats, dogs and the ubiquitous Grackles and Pipevine Swallowtail butterflies provided diversion from endless bare mesquite trees, prickly pear cacti and empty winter fields. In a white farming community more than one person called the cops on our harmless group. In a Mexican American farming community we were greeted and encouraged.
We paused for a time at the gates of Dilley and did ceremony together and individually. We laid a strand of tsuru full of the spirits of our ancestors who suffered the same fate during WWII. As time went on, I realized that the entire march was ceremony—an offering of peaceful, determined resistance, in a long history of such actions.
Each of the steps and breaths inside the 60 or so miles that I managed, rose and fell away. I felt proud that my mind was clear and my body was strong for this moment. I thought about all of my relatives and community locked inside of the Minidoka concentration camp. I grieved for my Auntie Irene who was a child there and who recently passed over. Our group found kinship and rhythm and our blistered steps landed and fiercely flew as hopeful wishes to everyone harmed by ICE’s degrading policies.
Pastor Dianne said that part of the point was that the march was difficult — we walk, we suffer, and are transformed. And then, so transformed, we face the next steps on the long road to freedom. She was the only person to walk the full 90 miles. On the last day, she and we were joined for the final nine miles through San Antonio with a large procession of others, chanting and singing. My favorite song goes like this:
Oye mi gente,
// Listen up my people
Traemos la fuerza // Gather our strength
La libertad
// Liberation
Es la única bandera // is the only flag
Rise up my people,
My condor, my eagle
No human being
Will ever be illegal!
We have been building for this moment, and now ask you to rise up, Tsuru family.