March 31, 2008 10:59 AM
Although I blog here at LIWins, my main job is at the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN) in Hempstead and Brentwood. This year celebrates the 25th Anniversary of the organization, and I will occassionally take a trip down memory road.
I started as an intern with CARECEN in November, 1983, just a few months after it opened. I had been active in human rights groups opposed to U.S. support for the military regime in El Salvador as early as 1980. I was drawn to this because, after my mom died when I was a teen, my aunt stepped in to help my dad raise my sister and I. She was a Catholic nun, a Josephite. Her mission was to work with children in poor neighborhoods, particularly with African Americans and Hispanics. I got to see up close the committment of religious women to the poor.
In 1980 the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was murdered by a rightwing death squad. Later that year three nuns and a lay churchwoman were murdered by elements of the U.S. backed security forces. I remember the Reagan administration responding that the nuns had it coming. How dare they work with the poor and displaced. I though of my own devoted aunt, Sister Joseph Alice Brady, as the sort of person the Salvadoran military would love to see killed.
I became involved in efforts to inform Long Islanders about the crisis in Central America. I remember after a speaking engagement being told by an audience member that while the situation down there was terrible, most people Long Islanders did not see how it effected them.
Well, a few weeks later I saw how it would effect us. I had a college friend, Jorge, who was from Nicaragua. He had been jailed by the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. He was my main informant about what was happening in that then volatile region.
Jorge and I were walking down the street one night in Westbury when we saw a group of Latino men lined up in front of a public telephone to make phone calls. Jorge heard their accents and told me they were Salvadorans. I did not beleive him. My village, Westbury, had many Puerto Ricans and some Cubans, but why would Salvadorans be here?
We went up to the men and asked them where they were from. Indeed they were Salvadorans waiting to call home. I had just encountered some of the earliest refugees from El Salvador. They would soon be joined by nearly 100,000 of their fellow countrymen and women.