Pro-immigrant rights Pilsen church vandalized twice

For two days in a row, neighbors of a Pilsen neighborhood church have awakened to see racist graffiti on the church’s doors.

Swastikas and the message “Rape Mexico” were scrawled in white paint across the glass doors of Lincoln United Methodist Church, 2242 S. Damen Ave.

Lincoln United Methodist is the sister church to Adalberto United Methodist in the Humboldt Park neighborhood where Elvira Arellano, a Mexican immigration activist who was living in the U.S. illegally, sought sanctuary for more than a year starting in August 2006. On Easter Sunday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke to the Lincoln congregation about the importance of immigration reform for Christians.

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“We’ve always been in defense of keeping families together,” said Sara Walker, a member of the church since 2012. “We believe that Jesus and his family were migrants themselves.”

“We’re going to be more vigilant and ask our neighbors to do the same,” Lozano said. “I really believe God is going to protect us. We just need to let people know what is happening and they should not fear people who are already here. Their families are trying to stay together.”

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[Photo courtesy of Chicago Tribune]

“On good days I feel I am a bridge. On bad days I just feel alone,” Sergio Troncoso writes in this riveting collection of sixteen personal essays in which he seeks to connect the humanity of his Mexican family to people he meets on the East Coast, including his wife’s Jewish kin. Raised in a home steps from the Mexican border in El Paso, Texas, Troncoso crossed what seemed an even more imposing border when he left home to attend Harvard College.

Initially, “outsider status” was thrust upon him; later, he adopted it willingly, writing about the Southwest and Chicanos in an effort to communicate who he was and where he came from to those unfamiliar with his childhood world. He wrote to maintain his ties to his parents and his abuelita, and to fight against the elitism he experienced at an Ivy League school. “I was torn,” he writes, “between the people I loved at home and the ideas I devoured away from home.”

Troncoso writes to preserve his connections to the past, but he puts pen to paper just as much for the future. In his three-part essay entitled “Letter to My Young Sons,” he documents the terror of his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis and the ups and downs of her surgery and treatment. Other essays convey the joys and frustrations of fatherhood, his uneasy relationship with his elderly father and the impact his wife’s Jewish heritage and religion have on his Mexican-American identity.

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