The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Surge at the Border, and the Children of Morelia

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Nearly a century ago, during the Spanish Civil War, a group of parents put five hundred of their children on a boat and sent them across the ocean to find safety in Mexico. Few of the refugees ever saw their parents again. The youngest of the children was Rosita Daroca Martinez, who was just three. On this week’s show, her granddaughter, the writer and radio producer Destry Maria Sibley, traces the impact of her grandmother’s trauma down through the generations. Plus, the immigration reporter Jonathan Blitzer ties the story to today’s refugee crisis at the U.S. southern border, where a surge in arrivals has put the Biden Administration on its heels.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm Jonathan Blitzer. I'm a staff writer covering immigration, and I've heard a lot of stories over the last couple of years about how war and immigration laws and politics have had concrete impacts on individual families. We don't often get to hear about the long-term impact of some of these events on those families. But then, I recently met a woman who has a story I had never heard before. Nearly a century ago, a group of Spaniards put their children on a boat and sent them across the ocean in search of safety. 500 kids traveled without their families to make a new home in Mexico.

They were escaping the Spanish Civil War when a left-leaning government, known as the Second Republic, and its supporters, who were known as Republicans, were overthrown in a coup led by conservatives from the far right. The fighting was brutal and it lasted three years. The families who sent their children on this journey were from places like Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. Destri Maria Sibley's grandmother was on the boat. Here's Destri. Her name is Rosita Taroka Martinez, my grandmother, or my Abu, as I call her. I'm standing in her house alone. No one's lived here for months. There's dust on every surface. It covers the windows in a dark film, and everywhere I walk, I see.

except on skeletons of cockroaches and the leaves of dead houseplants. I'm here to sort through my grandmother's stuff to see what she's left. The house looks dead, but for me, it's filled with so many memories. I don't know much about my grandmother's past. I know she was born in Spain and grew up in Mexico with two sisters like an orphan. And then she migrated to the United States. To me, she was just Abu. I'm going through our things and I start in on our bookshelves in the living room,

and that's when I see them. They're surrounded by photos and knick-knacks, and I've been in this house a million times and never noticed them before. Two books. One's orange, the other's blue, and there on the first page is my grandmother's handwriting. I was three years when they put me in the barco rumbo to Mexico. I was three years old when they put me on the boat.

headed to Mexico. I don't remember the goodbyes or the long journey. Yes, it's true. It wasn't a happy childhood. The handwriting, it's so familiar. It's the same cursive letters that my sister and I have known since we were little. When it came in the mail and we would get a card from Abu, it was like the most exciting, wonderful thing. And on the cover of one book is a photograph.

it's black and white, a picture of two boys maybe eight years old, and there's something strange about them, the way they're standing and the looks on their faces. It's like they're two old men trapped in children's bodies. Inside the book, I find another photograph, a picture of what looks like a kindergarten class, maybe 30 kids, and there's nothing identifiable about any of the children, except in the front there's one girl with a weary lost look on her face.

and my grandmother has drawn an arrow to this girl and written Rosita, 4 years old. These books, they tell the story of hundreds of Spanish children whose parents made an impossible decision. They put their kids on a boat to save them from a war. They sent them across the ocean to Mexico, and for the most part, they never saw them again. And my grandmother, she was one of them.

My grandmother is still alive, but she isn't herself anymore. She has Alzheimer's and lives in assisted living in Maine. And having a conversation with her and listening to her is really hard. It's already starting that I can't remember. It's already starting that I can't remember. It's okay. Not remember, no. But I can't talk.

Can you help me? This is Abu on a good day. She starts to land on an idea, and then it just disappears. She used to speak to me in English, but now her mind has reverted almost entirely back to Spanish. nothing This

You're doing great Abu, you're doing great I understand everything you're saying Okay Honestly most things she says now I really don't understand But I'm trying My plan was to say goodbye to her house

As a first step of saying goodbye to her I was getting myself ready But then these books I bring the blue one to her the one with the photographs, just to see what she might say about it. She's looking at the picture of the boys on the cover, and she says,

this speaks what I cannot put into words. And then she starts shaking her head and making her hands into fists. And I don't know if she's frustrated by not being able to speak or upset at the memories of Mexico, but she picks up the book with both hands and throws it across the room. And that's that.

Time to get up. So Destri, when did you start to learn this history? Did you learn this history from your grandmother? It's a little embarrassing, but the truth is I knew really none of this. And so part of the experience of finding these books was the recognition of how little I knew. So I started by talking to her, but it became pretty clear, pretty quickly that if I was going to understand, in this history, I needed to look further. So I ended up going to Mexico

in order to find the remaining members of this group of people, these former children, former child refugees, in order to interview them. And so what I heard from them was that their parents made this decision to send their children away out of complete desperation. I heard from one man, for example, whose father, who was a widower, worked on the other side of town

and would go to work in the morning, and during the day there would be an attack, a bomb reed. And he wouldn't know until he came home at the end of the day if his children were still alive. In Spain, people were absolutely starving because of the war. People had started eating their house pets, their cats in coastal cities like Valencia, people were eating seagulls, people were eating squirrels. Right, and there were no signs that things would improve.

The right-wing nationalist forces had the backing of Nazi Germany, they had major armaments. Spain was basically becoming a staging ground for a world war. Absolutely. And when that became their daily reality, they felt that they had no choice but to try to save their children by sending them away. So you're interviewing these people who were all. also on the boat. Were they more or less your grandmother's age? My grandmother was the very youngest of all of the children to take this trip. So she was in her early 80s when I started talking to her. Everybody else that I spoke to was between the ages of

84 and 95. They were all extremely elderly, and these were the last remaining survivors of this group. One man I interviewed passed away two weeks after I spoke with him. So I was really talking to them kind of at the last possible moment that I could. How were their memories? Mixed. Their memories were mixed. But one thing that I did find very consistently that they remembered was this boat. Can you tell me what the boat looked like? Oh, yes.

A boat. A barco. It was like a building. Or what the Red Cross gave each kid before the trip. A pair of pajamas, nine-sito. A pair of pajamas, brand new. A pair of pajamas, brand new. I can still smell the fabric.

La, well, very strong, that odor. But it's a very strong odor. But a pleasant one. They tell me that as kids, they barely knew what was happening. They were just getting on a boat and going on an adventure. How was the voyage? The stomach, of a sudden, it started going up and down, up and down,

up and down, and it was all day. Oh, that first day. I spent the day laying on the deck, puking. It was constant. Up and out. Up and out. The boat was an ocean liner, with three floors and a first class, like the Titanic, only not as nice,

and with 500 unsupervised children. In the book I found, the one with photographs, you can see a picture of the kids crushed together, waving from the decks. The boat seems stuffed full with kids. Who was taking care of you? Yourself. Who were the adults?

No. No adultos. No, more than two seigneuritas. Just two ladies. Flakas, flakas. Skinny, skinny ladies. Those are that you see here, the bones. The type where you can see their bones, right here.

Well, those 500 young, Well, those 500 kids became masters of the ship. My grandmother was so little that she threw her only pair of shoes overboard because she thought the fish would need them. She told me later that this was her first childhood memory. We would run around everywhere. We'd sneak into the lifeboat. Those lifeboats ran out of condensed milk cans

because we'd sneak into them and take the cans. I don't know how... No, he said that he couldn't believe that none of the kids fell overboard. Because it was a chaos. Because it was chaos. For two long weeks, those 500 kids ran around the boat. Throwing up and stealing food, making mischief. And among them, even if I have a hard time imagining it,

time imagining it, even after reading the books and seeing her inscription, was my grandmother, a little three-year-old Abu, and then they saw Mexico. Everybody was yelling, Landho, Landho. So, Abu, when you got off the boat, how was. Well, it was as if we were little animals being set free. That's Destri Maria Sibley, speaking with her grandmother, Rosita Doroka Martinez. Our story continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. We're listening to a story about war refugees, very young ones, an ocean liner full of children. In 1937, their parents sent them away from the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and into the unknown. The boat was headed for Mexico. But those parents must have realized that very few would ever come back home. On that boat was a tiny child, maybe three years old, named Rosita Dorocca Martinez. Her granddaughter, Destri Maria Sibley, told her story to the New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer. So the boat docks in Veracruz, what happens next?

They're given this huge reception by Mexican citizens. All through the course of their voyage across the Atlantic, the Mexican press was covering their arrival and essentially counting it down. I saw in newspapers articles where they were saying, three days until these Spanish war orphans arrive on our shores and we open our borders to them and we welcome them with our open arms, it's almost impossible for us to understand what it would be like for us to receive children in this way from another country.

It's so foreign to us. The people in Veracruz were given the day off from work so that they could go to the docks to greet the kids because it was such a big deal that they were coming and there was so much anticipation. Then they're taken to Morelia, which is in Michoacan, which is central Mexico, and they're installed in a school, a boarding school

that's been set up by the Mexican president specifically for them. And that's where they live for the next number of years. And what does your grandmother and others say about this experience? Do they feel a sense of excitement associated with all this pageantry, or was it overwhelming or scary to them? I think they were really excited. They were also really confused because they were going from an actual war zone,

where they were under attack. None of these kids know what Mexico is. They're told that they're going to the Americas, and they told me that they had in mind that they were going to the American West because that was their only association with America. So they are thinking, cowboys and Indians, they show up there in tropical Mexico,

they're handed mangoes, they have no idea what this fruit is. But they're also thrilled because to them it's like a paradise of abundance because they have food to eat. They said, who wants tortillas? All who are tortillas? And they said to us, do you want tortilla?

And everyone wanted tortillas. Of course. Spanish tortilla. Imagine. Like in Spain, these tortillas of potatoes. Right, these kids have the idea of tortillas. It's like Spanish potato tortillas. It's like an omelet, not these corn discs.

And then they come out with corn tortillas. And everybody started. And everybody started. to throw them as if they were a frisbees. All us put in accord and vola tortillas.

So I found this video made by the Mexican government and in it you see this long dining hall filled with row after row of tables. And the children lined up to eat, and they're all wearing these matching white outfits. They're orderly, the broadcaster announces, as we see the children cleaning their plates. The movie wants us to believe that all is well. But when I actually talked to people who had spent their childhoods in this school, the story became much more complicated.

There wasn't much to eat. We were always so hungry. If they were not even they put in the food, if they were in a soup that was pure water, and frioles, reenons, and the rlemenos. If they gave a soup, it was made from water and beans

and full of bugs. And besides being hungry, the kids were lonely. They missed their families. Yes, I miss them. That was a blow. I don't know how they could have fixed it. I understand that.

it's a natural thing. But that was a very hard blow because you ended up completely isolated from your family. The one thing that would keep the kids connected to home were the letters that they would receive from family and friends back in Spain. The cartero to the carder to the cartes and grittva, The mailman or whoever gave us the letters would yell out letters from Spain. All of us would go running. And we'd ask, what did they write you?

And we'd ask, what did they write you? What's your letters say? And we'd get news from our father. We'd get news from our father. Very pocaptas. Very pocass cards, we received very few letters. We received very few letters. few letters.

At the first you have much but it's a moment it's going to get to

get to get to many but after a while they start to disappear It's

a moment even you know you think in family or many

years there's a moment that you get a moment arrives when you

don't think about your family anymore not after so many

years You your life your A moment arrives when you lose everything. You just live your life, that's it. And your life is as if you'd always been alone.

I go back to the Mexican propaganda film. And there's one scene I watch over and over. It's of the children outside the school in Morelia, and they're digging up the ground with shovels. What pleasure is to rotur the earth and to cover the cedilla. The announcer praises the children for being industrious. Won't our school be beautiful when the plants grow and we can pick the fruit? He asks. And then the shot cuts to a little girl.

She's so young. Her head is shaved. She's dressed all in white, sitting in a hole in the ground. I watch it, rewind, watch it again. I hold the photo from the book up to the screen. That has to be my grandmother. So Destri, what happens to your grandmother next? She ends up living in the school for about six years.

She ends up separated from her older sisters. The oldest gets taken to live in a convent. Eventually, they have to close the school because they run out of resources. So my grandmother gets taken to live with a foster family in Mexico, lives with them for a couple of years, and then becomes one of the very few children who is able to return to Spain after the war. Did Abu ever see her parents again? When she returned to Spain, she did go back to live with them.

But it was a really uneasy reunion. These were people who hadn't seen their children in nine years. really didn't know them anymore, and were also suffering from the psychological consequences of living through a war. And so when they saw them, their reaction was, why did you come? You shouldn't have come. You should have stayed in Mexico. It's so much worse here. And I don't know that my grandmother ever really recovered from that. And it's not like Franco leaves the picture either. So the Spain that Abu is returning to, also for a Republican family, is a pretty menacing, scary place. Absolutely. And everybody knew that the only children who went to Mexico were the children of Spanish Republicans. And so they returned talking like Mexican children, dressing like Mexican children. They had thick Mexican accents. And immediately the family found themselves in a total position of terror because if anybody figured out that they had been to Mexico and why the whole family could have been thrown in prison or worse. And so there was tons of fear.

When does Abu come to the United States? So by age 15, she returns to Mexico to live for good. And she meets an American in Mexico, a Texan, a veterinarian. They fell in love and they got married. By age 20, she's pregnant. And four months into her pregnancy, my grandfather got in a car crash and died. She had my mother in Mexico, but found pretty quickly that it was. wasn't an easy life in Mexico as a young mother. I think a lot of people assumed that she was

a single mother and that my mother was born out of wedlock, which in a very Catholic country was not seen well, even though that wasn't true. And because she had married an American, she had the option to try to create a new life for herself in the United States. And so that's the route she took. Knowing all of this, has it changed how you thought about your own family's story? It's made it much more complex, certainly. I think I had a really simplified narrative about my grandmother that she had just overcome so much and was still miraculously this devoted mother and loving grandmother and was just a survivor. And none of that is false. That's all still true.

but I came to realize later also struggled with this history for her entire life too. And I imagine, too, that those struggles in some form or another get passed down to her children, to your mother. And that then becomes a fact of your mother's life that your mother has to deal with in some fashion. Absolutely. I think that's true. And I don't think it's a coincidence either that it's me and my family, the third generation, to really dig into this story. I think maybe for my mom it was a little bit too close. The question is, is it environmental or is it genetic? I had this idea of Abu as just simply this incredibly loving and generous grandmother. And I think to my mom that she was that, that's true.

She was a loving and generous mother. But she was also, I learned, a really fearful mother. The message was always like, the world is kind of a dangerous place. Oh, really? I don't want anything to happen to you. She was always very cautious. Or even, you know, like, you're going somewhere? Are you going to?

Are your seatbelt? Who's going with you? Oh, okay. Yeah. So you think you got that from her? Yeah, I'm sure I did. And my siblings got it too, like my younger brother Harper. Yeah, he's not a good passenger.

Remember, like, two years ago, all he wanted for Christmas was, like, a car safety kit? Oh, I remember that. It's not a typical gift for a 25-year-old. It was a really good gift. Of course you did. So my mom being an anxious person, how much does that have to do with the fears that my grandmother experienced as a child, her insecure experience of the world? How much can you trace that to my grandmother's worldview because of how she grew up?

If someone were to ask your grandmother what her nationality was or where she was from, how would she respond? So with us, with her family members, she would say, that she had a foot in each country, a foot in Spain, a foot in Mexico, and a foot in the United States. But if someone she didn't know asked her that question, without a doubt, every time she would say that she was from Spain, which is fascinating to me because she spent a total of five years of her life there, three, when she was a little girl, and two, when she was a young teenager. The rest of her life, her childhood was in Mexico, and most of her adult life was in the United States. But any time someone asked her, she was from Spain. She was reluctant to share the Mexico

part of her history with people, not because she had any ill will towards Mexico, as some of the other people did. She loved Mexico, always wanted to visit, always wanted to be there. But she was adamant that she didn't want to be known as a child refugee or a Nina de Moralia. She was very clear that she didn't want to be defined by that part of her life as she had been defined by that experience when she was a child. Now that I've started to talk about this, you realize that it's necessary to talk about it. It's necessary to talk about it.

It's necessary to say it. Because? Because if not, that nobody will know and never know. Because if not, nobody will know about it, and they'll never know. It's not right. Do you think so? Rosita Dorocca Martinez. Her granddaughter is writer and radio producer Destri Maria Sibley.

Now, the question of how refugees are welcomed and how they're treated after they arrived is pressing at this very moment. And on the question of refugee policy, President Biden seems to be struggling to come up with an adequate answer. Jonathan Blitzer covers immigration for the New Yorker, and he's been paying very close attention to the transition from one administration to the next.

Jonathan, when we talk about immigration policy, we always seem to focus on the border and on illegal immigration. And we just heard about a part of the immigration experience that we don't focus on as much. Refugee settlement. It seemed that in the earliest days of the administration, it seemed that Biden was saying all the right things

and immigration activists were pretty happy about that, but then things started to change. By mid-April, the new administration had only resettled about 2,000 refugees. The president himself was reluctant to sign his own administration's declaration about raising the so-called refugee ceiling to resettle more people here. As he waffled and hesitated, people were actually frozen out of their travel plans. So people had already been screened to come to the U.S. Refugees had already been cleared to come here, and they were stuck in this holding pattern

while the president tried to decide whether or not he wanted to go through with this. Then he came out, said that he was going to resettle refugees, but at a much lower number, a number that was consistent with what Trump had set. Then he kind of reversed himself again. I mean, you can see him really trying to duck and weave here and thread the needle. He does not want to seem too generous toward immigrants because he's scared, it seems, that that will hurt him politically, given all of the bad attention he's gotten at the southern border. Meanwhile, people from the Trump administration, people like Stephen Miller, are quite happy with how the president, this new president is framing matters.

Because what we saw all through the Trump years was a deliberate conflation of these two different policy programs. You have the asylum system at the southern border and you have the refugee resettlement program. There are completely different policy channels. The resources are different. The bureaucratic players are different. The politics are different. The political optics are different. But one thing we saw during the Trump years was that Stephen Miller and the White House would insist that, oh, we can only do so much for asylum seekers at the southern border because we're also having to resettle refugees.

We're only doing so much for refugees because we also have to deal with all these people at the southern border. This was being done in bad faith. The programs were completely separate. But for the president now to basically say the same sort of thing, to hold up the refugee resettlement process because of what's happening at the southern border really reinforces. this pernicious logic from the Trump years that we all know was being adopted in bad faith for the last four years, but which now Biden, for whatever reason,

because of his sort of political nerves, is falling back on. And I think that's been really distressing to people. What are some of the non-border immigration issues that you expect to see activists raising now that you've got a Democrat in the White House? I mean, this was one of them. Another would be finding a lot of,

legal pathway to citizenship for so-called dreamers or DACA recipients who have been in the news a lot over the years. You know, comprehensive immigration reform is much talked about. I think given just the congressional gridlock and ugliness of the congressional politics, I think is probably unlikely to move. But there are pieces of that broader comprehensive immigration reform agenda that can be broken off. So citizenship for dreamers or path to citizenship for dreamers.

Increasing legal pathways for people to come to the U.S. as foreign workers, finding ways of reuniting families who are already here. There are a lot of these items that are on everyone's agenda, and the administration has spoken very clearly about wanting to adopt a lot of these policies. But I think the ugliness of the politics is scaring them. If you look at the popularity statistics for President Biden, he is at 50 percent or well over on a range of issues, except for one, immigration. dare to disaster. He's in the 20s on that. What can he do to resolve that?

It's a good question. I don't know that there's much more he can do on a policy level besides what they're trying to do. I think if he owns the issue more, if he speaks more forthrightly about what he wants to do and about why it's complicated, I don't know that's like obviously a political winner. It's complicated to basically say that it's complicated. But I, you know, I think one thing that's clear is we are never going to be in a moment politically where immigration is not a quote unquote crisis. And we spoke a few months ago. You warned right here you warned that if Biden won, he'd have a border crisis on his hands.

Tell me about that prediction. Why did it pan out so accurately? Well, you know, we all knew that basically a regional exodus from Central America has been underway for over a decade. Everyone's clear on that. And nothing has been done to address the. real kind of root causes of why people are fleeing for their lives from Central America. So you have that as a baseline reality. Then layered on top of that, you have COVID and just the

ravages of a major public health crisis that has not only caused all kinds of death and destruction on a public health level, but also economically has just wrought all kinds of devastation in the region. You have two major hurricanes that struck in the fall of last year that displaced tens of thousands of people in Central America. You have the fact that Trump held up another group of tens of thousands of people in the border who were stuck in limbo because of Trump policies. I mean, you had one complication after another kind of piling up. So it was clear that there was going to be, there was going to be a sort of the appearance of a surge at the southern border in terms of people trying to enter.

And then there's the political madness of this with Republicans hammering the president on the usual talking points. And the media on the whole really kind of buying into that narrative of crisis, crisis, crisis, what's Biden doing? And so it was kind of a perfect storm. and everyone saw it coming, and somehow we were all powerless to kind of move through it without the drama and hysteria. Biden appointed his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be immigration czar.

Will that be effective? You know, it's a role that Obama cast Biden in when Biden was vice president. So you see it as a revenge scenario? Yeah, subconsciously for sure. You know, it's funny. It's a tough spot for the vice president to be in because there's very little she can do. I mean, the biggest question that she faces quite honestly is who do you talk to in the region? I mean, you look at countries like Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala.

These are countries that have historically very corrupt governments that the U.S. has coddled and backed for many years. And so here she is being deployed to the region with grand plans to try to come up with some diplomatic solutions to what's been going on. and who does she go to? But are there grand plans? Are we just going to be putting out fires here? Is there really a policy initiative or series of policy initiatives

that the Biden administration can put forward and pass or is it just kind of seasonal emergencies? I mean, I think it's always going to be putting out fires. I think the bigger ticket things that are more ambitious that have the potential to make a dent in the kind of broader numbers of what we see in terms of this exodus are going to take years to put into effect. Not months, years. And, you know, there are things the administration can try. It can do things like try to create regional processing for people

who are fleeing so that you can deal with all of the logistics of setting them up to be reunited with family members in the U.S. before they make this perilous journey, you know, to the border. You can do things like that. That's going to be complicated. It's not been undertaken before. And so, you know, the most optimistic timeline, again, is a couple of years. And the politics are so, you know, bruising that you can actually see, I mean, in plain view, the administration wanting to sort of talk a big game about all it'll do and also feeling incredibly reticent to kind of wade into this highly contentious territory. Jonathan Blitzer, thanks so much. Good to talk to you. Thanks, David. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for being with us. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Our story about the children of Moralia was produced by Rebecca Ibada, with support from Kegan Zama, Hennis Brown, and Emily Boutin. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.