Love Letters : Immigrants’ Words of Hope and Fear Are Gathered by a Los Angeles Poet

Tell Yisel that with what sheet metal there is you can make a tiny little house. Look, don’t go and forget that you’re going to leave some flowers on the boy’s tomb for me. --Excerpt of 1988 letter from Amparo Ramirez in Los Angeles to her children in El Salvador

Who was the boy now lying in a tomb? Was he Amparo’s son? How old was he? Why did he die? We never learn.

“Between the Lines” is a collection of letters between undocumented immigrants in Southern California and their families and friends in Mexico and Central America. It is not about the particulars, rather about universal feelings and problems.

We learn that the people who clean the kitchens of Los Angeles, sell the oranges at the freeway entrances or stand outside the paint stores in hopes of a day’s labor are plagued by the same worries and comforted by the same affections and pleasures as the Angelenos who hire them. Or those who drive by, eyes averted.

As a result, what detail there is in the collection strikes with the force and unadorned clarity of poetic imagery.

It is deliberate.

The book is the work of Larry Siems, 33, a poet who works with young adults at the California Conservation Corps. He conceived “Between the Lines,” made the contacts, collected, edited and translated the letters--running Spanish and English versions side by side in the book, even preserving the sometimes confusing punctuation and grammar.

He wrote an overall introduction but chose not to supply explanatory precedes or footnotes for each letter.

“I didn’t want to parade people in front,” he explains. “I wanted readers to recognize them as people they know, not as foreigners or characters: ‘Don’t forget to put flowers on the boy’s grave.’ That says plenty. There’s a feel of identification by not getting specific.”

The book is full of love, of the painstaking efforts of exhausted and often semi-literate people to maintain intimacy.

But people who love each other are not always loving. Those left behind in the villages often nag, complain, criticize, caution.

Wives and mothers warn their men to avoid drink and prostitutes, to beware of AIDS. Family members chastise young women in advance of their behavior in the big foreign city. And relatives inform those far away of husbands who accuse their wives of deserting them, of grandmothers sick with grief and worry about the dangers and emotional costs of these departures.

It becomes apparent that the maids, nannies, busboys and day laborers of Los Angeles are people with enormous pressures. Not only must they find shelter and food here with low or sporadic wages. They must also labor through their days here haunted by requests for money to buy medicines, school uniforms or a new cow, saddened that the money they have sent didn’t stretch very far and worried about village gossip.

But for all the hardship in both places, life includes luxuries. Gifts of cassettes, videos and fiesta clothes and precious photos make their way back home to delight.

And, of course, loving descriptions of daily life, of mangoes ripening, of prayers said, of fond memories, of a voice or laugh that is missed.

*

In their letters home, those in Los Angeles say little about the harsh realities of their lives.

“My close family understands the situation,” says letter-writer Lety Martinez Gonzalez, here five years from Oaxaca, Mexico. “But the general impression is that we are rich up here. People return and tell only the good stories. Especially in the villages, they go back and brag.”

Both Gonzalez and Siems speculate that people also do not want to worry relatives.

In one letter, however, Gonzalez let her guard down--about her toddler son left behind with family in Mexico; her husband, Arturo, temporarily living apart from her with a group of bachelors; her college studies and dreams of a career in social work on permanent hold. She wrote in Spanish:

Arturo tells me not to despair but how am I not going to do this if I have a month and a half without work . . . . I’m despairing since they ask you for papers everywhere and whether you know how to speak English . . . . I’ve gone into stores, restaurants, diners, what you’d call everything . . . now I ask only to find work and to get along well with everyone and to be neutral, neither for nor against, well what do you want, you have to be like that in this country, because I’ve noticed that if you isolate yourself they isolate you even more.

*

Now 23 and reunited with her husband and son, Irvin, now 4 1/2, Gonzalez lives in a modern, neat apartment on the Westside. She baby-sits three days a week; her husband works as a busboy. Still undocumented, not speaking English and living on the margins of society, they are considering giving up their $600-a-month quarters and moving in with others to cut costs.

He has told the story about the book’s inception so often that he no longer knows if it’s myth or history, Siems says:

“I woke up one morning and wanted to read the book. I wanted to read the literature of this experience. I knew it would probably exist only in a collection of letters, but I found it didn’t.

An activist who has supported international human rights and social justice issues in his free time, Siems roots his poems--occasionally published in poetry reviews--in the working world, reflecting the balance between the individual and society.

When he arrived in Los Angeles, after years in the Midwest and East, he was struck by the city’s diversity. As he followed the international news, he sensed that “my interests for my entire adult life were actually carried within my neighbors.”

*

Approaching several organizations that serve, and often shelter, undocumented Latinos--like CARECEN, Dolores Mission, La Placita--he became a familiar figure before making his request.

“The reaction was amazing,” Siems recalls. “Some understood the potential value right away. They’d get up, go to their locker and hand them over to me. . . . They would write or call home to recover their letters, and back would come a packet of letters. It was as if in a sense they knew what treasures they were, and I was validating them, saying, ‘You’re important.’ ”

Bertrin and Angelina Dubon have been temporarily reunited with three of their five children, who are here on a visit from El Salvador. They crowd the tiny house he shares in the Valley with other relatives.

Bertrin hopes that eventually he’ll be able to bring the family together. He occasionally works in construction and picking grapes and still plans to retire to the farming cooperative where so many of his family live and work.

“Between the Lines” contains many warm letters from Dubon family members. Angelina’s sister, Ascuncion, gives homey details of family life in El Salvador:

Dad is delighted with the cup you sent him, because he says that though these are his final days, he’s going to have the pleasure of drinking his coffee in gold cups .

And poignant commentary on the many separations:

So God has given us joy, well each time someone has left, it has put a pain into our life, and in each time we have cried out to God, and he has responded to us, and thus each time that one has told us, ‘finally I’ve arrived’ well it has lifted this pain from us.

Angelina Dubon says the book is a great idea: “It gives value to the experiences we’ve had. What comes out with the letters is from deep inside.”

She and her husband agree the book has somehow given them a place in history.

“It’s an opportunity for the next generation to see what came before,” he says. “This was a very difficult time. It was a huge decision to leave, without knowing if you’d see (your loved ones) again. No one knew that the future would be like.”