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The Victoria College. Full-time salaried position with benefits available...
DISTRICT "Champions for Community Wellness" has the following positions...
You might disagree with our decision to re-explore the tragedy of May 14, 2003.
Nineteen illegal immigrants died that day after suffocating, dehydrating and overheating inside a sealed tractor-trailer.
Some of you already oppose the long-term project. An online commenter wrote:
Leave it alone. What is the purpose of reliving “any” gruesome horror like this? These were humans who have or had loved ones and who had hopes of a better life.
Why “prostitute” this tragedy or any other? Forget it.
The commenter poses relevant questions.
Lost in the gruesome details — in the worldwide media focus of the tragedy — are the stories that have never or rarely been told.
What type of boy was the 5-year-old who died? Why did his dead father risk the dangerous trip para El Norte?
How has that fateful morning changed your neighbors, the responders who awoke to an unimaginable horror?
Have we learned anything since then?
Stories about Sept. 11, the Holocaust and the Oklahoma City bombings are retold. They need to be. If we don’t learn from history, as is often said, we are doomed to repeat it.
The immigrants’ story — regarded as the worst known human smuggling tragedy in U.S. history — is no different.
Not everyone agrees, though.
Another online commenter notes:
There is nothing to be gained by revisiting this tragedy in detail. After so much retelling of the same story, it begins to smack of crass commercialism. Print for profit motive or morbid curiosity or both would be the only reasons to carbon copy this tragic event five years later.
Richard Streeter, however, offers a different view. This 48-year-old volunteer paramedic was inside the trailer. He sidestepped the dead to find the living.
His compelling story is featured in today’s Advocate.
“Friends asked me why I’m sharing this story,” he said. “If we didn’t talk about the Holocaust, you’d forget it. This is important for those 19 who died. I want their story told. The story needs to be reported forever.”
Streeter’s views about immigration changed that morning. His story only scratches the local surface.
Many other responders offer similar tales.
No matter which side of the immigration debate you stand on — or whether you agree with this story’s retelling — you are bound by an inescapable fact.
U.S. Highway 77 lives. The roadway that delivered these immigrants to a truck stop in south Victoria County breathes today.
The highway winds from Mexico to your backyard, delivering commerce, crime, hopes and heartbreak.
Victoria County Sheriff T. Michael O’Connor said his deputies chase crime there daily, sometimes hourly.
The highway is a paved reminder that humanity’s international dark side is not a world away.
Together with U.S. Highway 59, the roadway funnels Mexico’s desperate and countless crimes through Victoria.
One highway begins on the U.S. side of Nuevo Laredo. The other starts this side of Matamoros.
A gulf borders this funnel on its east side, and a treacherous desert touches it from the west.
While dangerous, this funnel is often the straightest path to Houston, a destination for many immigrants and a launching point for trips farther inland for others.
In 1956, Advocate audio news director Bill Clough began collecting quotations.
In poring through his anthology for a quote fitting for a related online video — posted today at www.VictoriaAdvocate.com — Clough found a Nigerian expression.
The expression may not sway you to re-explore the immigrant tragedy with us — or the lessons learned and lost. But at the very least, we hope it gives you pause for thought:
Not to know is bad. Not to want to know is worse. Not to hope is unthinkable. But not to care is unforgivable.