Eduardo Galeano, the Latin American novelist and radical journalist who died last month, was a towering cultural figure. According to The Economist, Galeano did more than any writer other than Gabriel Garcia Marquez "to shape the mental image that both locals and outsiders have of Latin America."
As we noted in yesterday's post, one of Galeano's admirers is Maria Hinojosa, the National Public Radio figure who, in her tribute last week to Galeano's life, could not bring herself to acknowledge that he had disavowed his most famous book, a polemical tract titled The Open Veins of Latin America.
Hinojosa interviewed Galeano several times over the years, drawing him out on a variety of topics, including immigration. Galeano's insistence that borders should be open and, in particular, that Latin Americans should be free to migrate to the United States, has had a powerful influence on the defenders of illegal immigration. His views, which are often powerful in their lyrical beauty and political passion, have become part of the U.S. immigration debate. They are worth knowing and understanding, whatever your views on policy to regulate immigration.
In 2006, when Hinojosa asked Galeano for advice on how to respond to criticism that she was too biased to be the moderator of a discussion of immigration, Galeano gave this reply:
Sometimes I fear that our time, our century, our period, our years may be remembered as a sad time in human history in which money was free but people not. Because we are supposed to have freedom to choose the place where we're going to live. And for me it's absolutely unbelievable. We are all migrants since the beginning of time. I mean we all came from Africa. It's bad news for racists, but perhaps we have been all blacks at the beginning, and therefore we are all migrants. I mean human history is a history of movement. ... In a different world, a world deserving to be what the world wanted to be when it was a different world, a world deserving to be what the world wanted to be when it was not yet born. Any newborn person should be welcomed. Welcomed! Say, "Come in! Come in boy or girl! The entire earth will be your kingdom and your legs will be your passport, forever valid."
In 2001, when Hinojosa asked Galeano what he thought of the unceasing Latin American migration to the U.S., he responded:
Being the United States is the center of prosperity nowadays, it's perfectly understandable that people try to come here and improve their lives in the center of paradise. This is what the publicity says. Anyway, it's the invasion of the invaded because all these people are coming from countries that have been invaded several times by the United States.