Maegan’s thoughts on 9/11

Note: The events of September 11th have caused us to feel a wide wave of emotions from anger and sadness to hope and remembrance. Earlier today, former contributor Maegan la Mala expressed her viewpoint on the 9/11 anniversaries here in the U.S. and in Chile. Her thought-provoking post was originally published in VivirLatino and reproduced here with her permission.

I almost feel like I’m obligated to write something today about 9-11 and frankly, I’m tired of the date. It’s exhausting on so many levels since the combination of numbers can be multiplied, added, subtracted and divided in so many ways. It’s a date that carries real physical weight and reaction in my muscles and bones. I can feel it settling, heavy in my gut.

I survived 9-11-01. Not in some abstract way but in a real sitting in a subway car underground in downtown Manhattan for hours as smoke and fire rose above. My mother survived 9-11-01, feeling the World Trade Center reverberate from the impact of a plane, she managed to lead all of her employees to safety. It was the second time she survived an attack on the WTC.

Pero I also have to sit down with my hijas, half Chilenas, and talk about their relatives that did not survive 9-11-73 or the 17 years of U.S. sponsored military dictatorship that followed. It is why the family of my younger daughter came to the United States. It is why the family of my older daughter remain active in Chilean politics in the southern part of that country.

Pero given the current political climate, with undocumented immigrants used as throwaway compromises in health care reform and with comprehensive immigration reform played as a waiting games while people are killed because of what they look like, how they speak, and where they are assumed to come from, I think of the undocumented today.

It wasn’t too long ago that the undocumented were blamed for 9-11-01 while denying that I wonder what happened to those families, the families of the undocumented that once had a bill introduced to help them stay in the U.S. . Have they been detained, deported? Do we remember them today?

Image- 911-911movie.com (The sites of violence – the World Trade Center in New York City 9-11-2001 and Palacio de La Moneda in Santiago, Chile – 9-11-1973. From the animated short film 9-11/9-11.”)
Online Sources- VivirLatino, GovTrack.us