What a childhood memory in a farmworker housing kitchen taught me about immigration, dignity, and the gospel.

How a warm tamale and a shared meal taught me more about dignity than any sermon ever could.

The first time I tasted tamales, I fell in love, if it’s possible to fall in love with food. But it wasn’t just the tamales. As anyone who’s ever eaten something unforgettable will tell you, it’s never just the food. It’s the place. The people. The moment. The way everything slows down just enough to notice that something is shifting, not just in your tastebuds, but in your sense of the world.

People travel the globe chasing these kinds of moments. The steak Florentine tastes different on a villa’s patio overlooking the hills of Tuscany than it does at the new steakhouse in your own town. Not only because of the ingredients, but because the moment is steeped in meaning. You are somewhere. You are with someone. You remember.

I was a child. They were handed to me in a farmworker housing community in Oregon, where families working the local farms lived during harvest. The tamales were wrapped in corn husks, warm to the touch. Women stood in a communal kitchen between rows of small, metal-roofed homes that looked like short barns, making food with the efficiency of those who have done it a thousand times and the tenderness of those who know food can say what words sometimes can’t.

We were visitors, my sisters and I. We had tagged along with my mom to deliver clothes and toiletries gathered by our church.

School was out. The kids were running through the grassy patches beneath the trees, calling out to each other, mostly in Spanish. Some of them smiled as we pulled up. Others just kept playing. And as we stepped into that unfamiliar place, something in me felt small. Not afraid exactly, but unsure. I didn’t speak the language. I had never been in a space like this. I didn’t know the rules.

But children are quick to erase lines adults work hard to draw.

We were playing tag within minutes, racing across the grass like we belonged there. Some kids translated for us, but mostly it didn’t matter. Laughter needs no translation.

I didn’t know much about immigration. I had heard adults talk about it, though never to me. What I knew was this: these families spoke Spanish, many had come from Mexico, and Mexico felt very far away. What I didn’t know, not really, was how people arrived here, or what was required of them. I didn’t know what it cost them to be here.

I also didn’t understand, at that time, how recently my own family had gone without.

We had just moved to Oregon. Before that, we lived in a trailer in the Midwest, and I slept on a couch. I don’t think I knew we were poor until we weren’t anymore. My mom’s new job afforded us a rental house. I had my own room. My own bed. And maybe that new awareness of having more made me notice, even at that age, when others had less, and when they gave anyway.

Because that’s what happened. We showed up to give. But they gave more.

They invited us to eat.

There were many things, but I remember the tamales, beans, and rice. The tamale in my hand was warm and soft, the cornmeal outer layer gently holding its shape. I didn’t know what to do with it at first. Thankfully, I watched someone else unwrap theirs before biting into the husk. I remember being curious, a little unsure, but I wasn’t going to decline it. And I’m glad I didn’t.

It was mildly spicy. Nothing wild, but more heat than my Midwest mouth was used to. The kids watched us with wide eyes and bursting grins as we tried not to cough.

“Hot, hot, hot,” we gasped, and they giggled at us, in that way kids do when they’ve found something funny that isn’t mean.

We laughed too.

I hate being laughed at, but I didn’t feel humiliated. I felt included. Even this, my own discomfort, had been welcomed to the table.

Looking back, I don’t remember what my mom said on the way there or the way home. I just remember that she brought us. She didn’t have to. She could have left us at home. And I think, now, that choice said something loud. Maybe louder than any speech would have. She didn’t paint the people there as scary. She didn’t warn us to be careful. She simply said yes to showing up.

And in that yes, I learned something that day that no headline has ever managed to erase.

I know what people say. I’ve heard the language. “Illegals.” “They’re taking from us.” “They don’t belong here.” I’ve watched the policies passed in fear. I’ve seen the images. Children in cages. Families separated. Headlines screaming that we should be afraid. I’ve watched people treat whole groups as criminals because of a few. I’ve seen how we’ve justified cruelty as safety.

But I also remember the kids who laughed with us, not at us.

I remember the women who wrapped food into husks and handed it to strangers.

I remember how little they had, and how much they gave.

And I remember the moment I realized that belonging isn’t something you have to speak the language to offer.

Since that day, I’ve chased the perfect tamale. I’ve tasted dozens. Some were wonderful. Some not. But none have ever come close to the ones from that evening. Not because they weren’t well made, but because no tamale will ever taste like that moment again.

It was never just the food. It was what it carried.

Sometimes I think that if our country knew how to sit down and eat together. If we could play tag before talking politics. If we could smile at the things that make us different, instead of setting fire to them. Maybe we’d stop being so afraid.

But fear convinces us that we have everything to lose. And from that fear, we begin to take. We take land, take labor, take dignity, while telling ourselves stories to make the taking feel justified.

We use language that flattens people’s humanity and weave it into everyday rhetoric until cruelty becomes so normal we stop noticing. We build policies, pass laws, and shrug at cages. We begin to believe that dignity is conditional. That some people are simply worth less.

And somewhere deep down, we know. We know that when we treat others as less-than, we are not preserving something noble. We are dismantling our own humanity.

I think often about how easily, as a child, I ran toward connection. How quickly I joined the game. How the language barrier didn’t matter. How the laughter came anyway. There was no instinct to divide, no narrative of “us” and “them,” no fear of difference. Only the possibility of friendship.

I wish I could go back to that kind of innocence. To that wide-eyed knowing before bias had a foothold. Back to the place where loving your neighbor felt natural. Where the people around you were all potential friends.

We hang the words of Emma Lazarus at the gates of liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” But we don’t mean them. Not anymore.

We claim to be a Christian nation, but ignore what Jesus actually said. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do unto me.”

And when we use labels and laws to justify treating others as less human, we are not protecting our values. We are violating them. We’re building a new empire, cloaked in patriotism, while forgetting the servant-led kingdom Jesus taught us to seek. A kingdom where the first are last. Where the child is the example. Where mercy is the way.

As C.S. Lewis wrote, “You have never talked to a mere mortal... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.”

If we really believed that, how differently would we speak?

How differently would we love?

I remember the children.
I remember the laughter.
I remember the food.

And I remember how those with the least gave the most.

Two things can be true. A country can have borders, and a country can treat people with dignity. We can welcome those who come with hope in their hands, longing for freedom, ready to bless the very ground they walk on. We can create a path for those already here, who have worked, paid taxes, raised children, built lives in our neighborhoods and schools.

And we can stop pretending that traffic tickets and minor infractions make someone the “worst of the worst.”

They are not. And we know it.

We should have policies, and we should look closely at those policies and ask if they reflect the kind of neighbors we want to be.

We can write laws. We can build walls. We can claim to defend morality or sovereignty or truth. But if we gain the whole world and do not love, we are nothing but a clanging gong. A resounding cymbal. Noise without meaning.

Chasing greatness without loving has never saved a nation. And maybe the history we should fear repeating is the part where Babylon always falls.

Because the greatest of these is not cruelty presented as safety. Not power. Not being right. The greatest of these is love.

That day, they gave.
And I remember.
And I will not unlearn it.