Excerpted From
Finding Jesus at the Border
By Julia Lambert Fogg
I am a 15th-generation East Coast American of mixed European and Anglo descent. My ancestors crossed the ocean—and many other barriers, borders, and boundaries dating back to the time of William Penn—to reach these shores. However, most stories of journey and arrival have been lost to my generation. We did not personally cross those borders, and neither did our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. Immigrant consciousness disappeared from my family’s sense of identity generations ago. Our European ancestors planted their roots firmly in East Coast soil through births, baptisms, farming, building, ranching, and mining, as well as by serving in political office and as lawyers, educators, engineers, and artists.
Although my generation was not mindful of our immigrant status, I was aware of more recent arrivals in my hometown. For example, the mushroom workers in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, arrived as immigrant farm workers. As they followed crops north along the Eastern seaboard, many settled in Pennsylvania and became our neighbors. Others continued moving through the surrounding towns, following seasonal harvests. Despite their proximity, our new neighbors remained largely invisible to us; our lives seldom connected. The children of these immigrants did not attend the same public schools as my brother and me, and their mothers did not shop at our local grocery stores. While I had little awareness of national borders, local borders were prevalent in the mostly white, semi-rural regions of southeastern Pennsylvania. For those seeking immigrant communities welcomed in church, this was not the reality.
We were more aware of the Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish who farmed nearby. We bought fresh produce from them, yet they were not new immigrants; they owned or leased their land and had been in the area for generations. In middle school, I met first- and second-generation German, English, Italian, and Irish immigrant children. We all developed the same local American accent, though our surnames differed. I had no sense of where their families originated or which borders their parents had crossed. I remember my mother’s sadness when my friend Tommy’s family emigrated to Pakistan. I learned the names of places people left for, but remained ignorant of where my friends’ parents had come from, offering little postcolonial guidance for immigrant ministry.
Although I grew up regularly going to Sunday school and learning Bible stories on old-school felt boards, I never heard those sacred stories as narratives of border crossing. Instead, what I knew of border crossing came from aunts, uncles and cousins talking about their time in the Peace Corps or the American Friends Service. I knew their stories, like Tommy’s, of crossing borders to live abroad, to teach or to serve, and then to return home.
When it was my turn to go abroad, I found crossing borders to be relatively easy. I studied in Mexico, Nicaragua and Guatemala. I traveled to Venezuela, Columbia and Ecuador. I lived in Spain for a few years—I was even, technically speaking, undocumented there for a time. I rarely worried about it. It seemed easy enough to take the train from Madrid to Lisbon (long before country borders dissolved into the European Union), spend the day, and get another short-term tourist visa stamped into my passport on the way back. I never thought twice about returning to the U.S., as so many international students must today. This was before September 11, 2001. I had an American passport, white skin and an excellent education. I dressed in a traditionally feminine way, and I was comfortable traveling alone. I rarely drew a second look.
My sense of borders and belonging changed after I moved from the East Coast to California. In Los Angeles, it seemed like everyone I met was a first- or second-generation arrival. In the San Fernando Valley, every other household spoke a different language. Everyone had a unique story of how they arrived, where they came from and why they wanted or needed to leave where they had been. Living among so many immigrants, I constructed my own story of migration. It went like this: I left home in 2003 and came to California to teach religion in a small, private, liberal arts university. At first, everything smelled different. The desert air was different—lighter, drier, with subtle shades of toasted caramel, creosote and sage. I missed the thick, heavy atmosphere before a rainstorm in Pennsylvania, electric with lightning and ear-splitting thunder that resolved into clean, clear air after it passed.
Aside from the weather, culture shock hit me in random ways. Southern Californians never stopped smiling. The ocean was on the wrong side. No one knew how to drive in the rain, so the lightest spritz caused accidents. Drivers piled onto “freeways” that stole hours of time from each week. The most baffling cultural shift for an East Coaster, though, was not the language but the dress codes. There weren’t any. People wore whatever clothes they wanted to, to any event they attended, and never felt over-, under- or improperly (as my grandmother would say) dressed. Shorts and flip-flops or a dress and heels? All were welcome. But the adjustments I made only skimmed the surface of the kinds of cultural and social adjustments people must make when coming from another country altogether.
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Excerpted from Finding Jesus at the Border by Julia Lambert Fogg, ©2020. Used by permission of Baker Publishing BakerPublishingGroup.com.