Washington DC Metro Victim’s Family Receives Phone Calls Questioning Legal Status

Ana Fernandez was one of nine people who died in a Washington DC Metro crash on Monday. Since her death, her family has been receiving harassing phone calls from strangers asking about Ana and her children’s legal status in the United States. 

Ana moved to the United States from El Salvador years ago, is legal, and had all six of her children in this country. 

Of course it’s moronic to assume that a Latina born in another country is likely to be an illegal immigrant. And of course it’s vile to ask such xenophobic and intrusive questions of her family as they mourn. But why was such a question even asked? What does Ana’s legal status have to do with a train crash? What does documentation and paperwork have to do with the fact that this person is dead? 

All this for a clause, really: “Ana Fernandez, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was among the dead.” And a clause that adds nothing to the report, at that. 

A thought: Latinos? Are human. Illegal immigrants? Are human. 

Even the more arguably positive reports on Ms. Fernandez focus on stereotypes often associated with immigrants and/or Latinos in this country. This report, for instance, mentions that she raised six children with the salary she garnered as a cleaning person, and that she was born in El Salvador. Of all the things to mention about a person. Of all the two things to mention together about a person. There’s nothing inherently bad, of course, about being a cleaning person. It’s the juxtaposition of these two things together in a way that paints the portrait of the humble Latina hoping for better things in the golden land of opportunity that works to reduce this person into a palatable and/or politicized caricature that we find problematic. If her last name was Jones we highly - highly - doubt that her place of birth and occupation would have been tied together so neatly in a retrospective of her life. We’re sure they’d have included her educational background, or that she liked to garden, or that she rode a bike to work. You know? God damn it. 

And while, as we mentioned, there is nothing bad about being a cleaning person, we’re not sure if having been one is how one wishes to be remembered. Our grandfather, at one point in his life, scooped feces at a zoo. That was his job. And he fucking hated it. If he’d died, we’re not sure that this, the awful thankless mundane smelly job that he hated, would be the thing he’d want most mentioned upon his death. 

A woman crushed on a train is not automatically a part of the immigration debate because her last name happens to be Fernandez, because she had a cleaning job, or because she wasn’t born in this country. To politicize this woman’s life and death, especially so soon after she was killed, is to ignore the fact that she was a human being with a life, with family, with struggles and opinions and aspirations that had nothing to do with immigration. 

To think that, when we die, we might become nothing more than an ethnicity or a comment about legal status is… God, it’s debasing.

So. Our thoughts are with the Fernandez family. 

Metro Victim’s Family Getting Hate Calls [NBC]