The procession stopped, huddled in the dark -- children with wet shoes, families buried in puffy jackets, all with cold fingers clutching battery-powered tea candles. They crowded near the door of the Wood Village Baptist Church. Through the windows they sang in Spanish:
“In the name of heaven, I beg you for lodging. Show us mercy.”
Inside it was warm, and smelled of posole and chocolate. A crowd gathered there sang back:
“Go on, and don’t bother us.”
For more than 400 years, friends and neighbors have gathered across Mexico for Las Posadas; the reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging in the days before Jesus’ birth. The tradition immigrated to the United States, where communities still come together each December.
They walk in procession. Time and again they knock, and are refused.
Until finally, someone welcomes them in.
Arata Road cuts through Wood Village, a city less than 1-mile square with fewer than 4,000 people. It has a WalMart, a defunct dog racing track and three trailer parks. It’s population has grown 25 percent in the past decade; Since 2000, Latinos - virtually entirely of Mexican heritage and largely Mexican-born - have come in greater numbers.
Today, nearly 40 percent of the city is Hispanic.
Arata Road is rutted and edged in gravel. Moss-covered cinder block walls separate it from a trailer park on one end. A chain link fence cordons off a power station and more chain link protects the immaculate grounds of a Ukrainian megachurch.Blocky tall shrubs hide all but the roofs of the Wood Village Green trailer park. Diagonally across the street, the Wood Village Baptist Church stands exposed.
Bill Ehmann has been a pastor there for more than 30 years. He was brought up in a legalistic biblical background. The Old Baptists. An “us against them” mentality. He doesn’t ask how anyone votes, but he guesses the congregation leans Republican. The official views on key social issues are sharply to the right in this Democratic county.
“Our congregation has always been more conservative,” he said. “Our official stance is that life is sacred, and marriage should be between and a man and a woman.”
Still, he doesn’t like the word “conservative” or “fundamentalist” to describe the church. It seems like an oversimplification, he says.
The city was a lot whiter when Bill was a young pastor; and then, around the year 2000, Mexican families began moving into the trailer park across the street.
“There was a lot of uncertainty,” Bill said. “At the time, we didn’t know how to communicate. How do you work with someone you don’t understand?”
It’s easy to knock on a neighbor's door when you share a language.
“But when I don’t understand them? They don’t trust me, and I probably don’t trust them,” Bill said. “My heart has changed over the years. I’ve come to realize it’s not about rules; It’s about love. It’s not about human tradition or cultural background; It’s about loving.”
This is not a story about religion. Rather, it’s about a conservative congregation and an immigrant community that learns to trust one another, become friends and, over time, change the face of a neighborhood.
It started with Teresa Rios-Campos, a community health worker, and later Pam Hiller, a community organizer, with Multnomah County’s Community Capacitation Center. Today they are like an old married couple. They finish each other's’ sentences, speak for one another. They complement one another; Teresa is reserved. She speaks softly. Pam booms and laughs loudly.
They were selected in 2003 to work with immigrant Mexican families in the trailer park, Wood Village Green, under a program called Poder y Salud (Power and Health).
“The movement was about identifying natural leaders,” said Teresa. “They’re already smart. They know what they’re doing. It’s about building on a person’s strengths.”
“When we got started police told us they got more calls about violence at that trailer park than any other location in Wood Village,” Pam said.
“It took us years to build up trust,” Teresa said. “People were just beat up. They thought, ‘let’s just stay inside and no one will bother us.’ They were scared.”
“We couldn’t get more than two or three people to go to a class or event,” Pam said.
They needed to find leaders who could encourage their neighbors to get involved.
And they found them; in an unassuming couple who had never finished school.
Lily and Jesus “Chuy” Silva live a quiet, stable kind of life, with three kids, in a double-wide trailer in Wood Village Green.
They can’t afford more than what Chuy brings home from his job at a taco shop, where he’s worked for 20 years.
Neither finished school back in Salinas, Mexico, where they grew up just an hour from each other.
Yet they are the family everyone here trusts; Where they go, the community follows. Good luck getting either to tell you why. They shrug and smile.
But on a recent Saturday morning, after they took a trip to the grocery store, their teenage daughter Elvia, 18, curled up on the couch and talked about her parents.
Her mother Lily got a call from a cousin in California (the Silvas have a lot of cousins). A friend needed help, her cousin said. Lily responded by saying the friend was welcome to come to Oregon. They would put her up. The friend came. She brought her husband, and two kids and their three dogs.
A few years later another cousin in Las Vegas lost his house. Lily offered to host the family until they could get back on their feet So the cousin, his wife and their 10 children, moved into the Silva home. Lily and Chuy and their own kids moved into the garage to make space. The relatives stayed for nearly two years.
Chuy and Lily are the center of a community. When the extended family celebrates a birthday or a wedding, Chuy volunteers to cook. He’ll spend hours preparing food for 500 people. Then he’ll tell them it’s free.
He tells the kids not to get part-time jobs. Their job is to study.
“I don’t know how they make it work, but they make it work,” Elvia said.
Quinceaneras. Weddings. Any party at all. The county’s health workers, Teresa and Pam, were there.
“When they invited us, we went. When someone was baptized, birthday parties, Las Posadas,” Teresa began. “It took us four years to build up trust.”
Once on solid terms with the Silvas - and by extension their extended family (today 250 residents of the Wood Village Green trailer park are some relation to Lily or Chuy) Teresa and Pam were folded into the larger immigrant community of Wood Village. People started coming to their workshops. A lot of people.
“We just came with the flyers,” Teresa said.
“And we passed them out,” Lily Silva said.
They began with law enforcement. Multnomah County Sheriff’s deputies came to talk about drivers licenses, trafficking and how to discipline your kids.
“You had some teens say, ‘you can’t ground me or I’ll call police and they’ll deport you’,” Lt. Harry Smith said.
Smith had completed a Spanish immersion program a few years earlier, and Wood Village residents were thrilled. Neighbors still knock on the Silvas’ door, asking for his number.
Chuy Silva recalled perhaps the most profound meeting with law enforcement. Deputies talked about why, when a suspect shakes or refuses to make eye contact, they take it as a sign of guilt.
Residents explained that averting one’s eyes can be a sign of respect. And shaking could very well be fear; they had good reason to be afraid, after all. Law enforcement in Mexico are institutionally corrupt. And they weren’t always well treated by their counterparts in the United States.
“Before, I didn’t know anything. I was scared of the police,” Chuy said. “Today we don’t have problems. Police used to come all the time. Now they come, but they don’t stop us.”
Instead they wave.
For Smith, that change is the reason he went into law enforcement.
“We start off thinking we‘re going to change the world. Then you get a little more realistic. Often, we don’t see how we changed lives,” he said. “Here, the thing we did right, we always came back.”
Years have passed since those first meetings, but he still gets invited to celebrations. In fact, his team began hosting Las Posadas events for the community each year.
Before Las Posadas, Pam and Teresa and their growing leadership program needed a place to meet.
Wood Village Green’s community center is too small for gathering of 100 or more. But across the street, Wood Village Baptist Church has a cavernous hall that holds more than 200.
“We asked for space at one point, but they weren’t ready,” Teresa recalled of those early years.
“There wasn’t a lot of communication,” said Chuy Silva. “They were there and we were here.”
But Teresa was a member of the church and began pushing leadership to open their doors.
“Some folks were very fearful of this connection,” Pastor Bill said. “There was a lot of listening, a lot of praying, a lot of strong feelings about whether these folks should be here at all.”
Then little by little, “It just kind of happened,” Bill said. “Most of the congregation didn’t even know what we were doing.”
They didn’t hide the events going on in the hall. It’s just that no one seemed to notice. And then the faces of their neighbors became familiar.
Pam and Teresa brought in immigration lawyers and detective Keith Bickford, who responds to complaints of labor trafficking. Then they asked the congregation to step up again.
First it was a homework club. More than 100 kids signed up the first year and the church supplied volunteers.
Then the mothers who came to watch the homework, they wanted help too. So Teresa organized an English class, and pulled in congregants to teach.
“Language is the thing that divides us,” said Gail Wheeler, one of those teachers. “The thing I appreciate most is that they have become friends. It takes time and consistency. The key is getting to know people. It changes how you think and how you feel.”
Her student Amparo Gonzalez said the partnership between the congregation and the immigrant community has changed the neighborhood.
“More than anything it brings together the community,” she said. “We are more united.”
Two years ago Tom Miles was hired on at the church and began working closely with Teresa, organizing the homework club, summer lunches, celebrations and other programs for their Spanish-speaking neighbors.
“We spend a lot of time over there and they spend a lot of time over here,” he said. “We go out and ask what they need. The kids are here every night, playing basketball, soccer, skateboarding.”
The community has begun holding their annual Las Posadas at the church. Congregants come. That first year was awkward, like a high school dance. Spanish-speaking partygoers remained on one side of the hall, while the English-speaking guests remained on the other side.
The congregation even offered to cook one year, serving egg salad sandwiches, which their Spanish-speaking guests politely consumed. In exchange, the guests taught them to stuff a pinata.
Before the pinatas come out on this December night, the first Posada of 2015, there are 250 steaming tamales to serve, and cinnamon hot chocolate to pour. A bible story to recount.
Before all of that, the wide hall doors open, and the crowns gathered on both side sing together the final verse:
“Come in travelers, although this place is poor. I offer it with all my heart."
