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 Editorials | November 2006 
It's Time for Son of Immigrant to Leave Spotlight
 Mary Schmich - Chicago Tribune
| | Saul Arellano, 7, of Chicago takes a picture while being held by an unidentified man at the Mexican Congress in Mexico City, Mexico, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2006. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo) |
Valiant little Saul Arellano should be allowed to retire.
He has been a good soldier. He has been a good son. But it's not helping his mother, or her larger cause, to exhibit him as the mascot for the injustice and illogic of the U.S. immigration system.
It's been three months since Saul, age 7, was drafted into the war over illegal immigration.
From August through November, from L.A. to D.C., while his mother, Elvira, has stayed sequestered in a Chicago church to avoid deportation, Saul has been a traveler.
You probably saw the latest pictures. Saul in Mexico City.
He was taken there this week as part of an effort to persuade Mexican lawmakers to pass a resolution urging the United States to hold off on deporting his mother and other undocumented immigrants with children who are U.S. citizens.
The lawmakers obliged. Lights, cameras, action.
In the pictures, Saul appears as a sober brown-eyed boy in a tan suit, dwarfed in a thicket of handlers and reporters.
If you saw those photos, your heart probably went out to him--but quite possibly not for the reason desired by Elvira Arellano and her counselors.
Arellano's closest supporters hope that when the rest of us look at Saul, we'll sympathize with him and with the legions of kids like him, children who by virtue of being born here inherited the right to stay, a privilege denied their undocumented parents.
Saul has been enlisted as the face of all those kids. If they stay here, they risk losing their parents to deportation. If they leave, they'll lose the opportunities of this, their native land.
But that's not necessarily what people see when they see Saul. With every new appearance, it gets likelier that more people see only a boy thrust into a battle of sound bites and staged images, a boy who's being used.
They feel sorry for him, yes. But they don't blame the immigration system. They blame his mother: Poor little guy. He looks so alone. How could a mother do that?
I've interviewed Elvira Arellano. I've talked to other people who know her. I found her to be reasonable and likable, opinionated but not strident, a little sad. She loves her son.
She seems to sincerely believe that Saul's public appearances are not only in her interest and the interest of other immigrants, but for his long-term good. His current life isn't the one she'd wish for him, but neither is a life back in Mexico.
She fights for him, he fights for her; it's the nature of love, and of family. That's how she sees it.
She also believes you and I would do the same in her place. She is probably more right than most of us understand or would admit.
But what Arellano and her counselors don't seem to have grasped is that Saul's high profile is backfiring. On her. On him. On their larger campaign.
If it's fair to extrapolate from conversations I've overheard and my own visceral response, even people sympathetic to Arellano, to undocumented immigrants, have grown uneasy witnessing this lone little boy in the jaws of politics.
Is the media exposure really hurting Saul? Who's to say?
Watching his mother hide, knowing she might be taken away, surely hurts and scares him.
But airplane flights, flashing cameras? Plenty of kids have survived much worse.
Elvira Arellano seems to be an attentive mother. She helps her son with his homework. He has missed only three days of school. For all we ringside psychoanalysts know, it helps Saul to feel he's helping his mom.
But I don't think he is helping her. It hurts to watch him out there in the media onslaught. Watching him, it's hard not to feel he's being hurt.
Elvira Arellano is dependent on public perception. She'll help herself, her cause, and possibly her son, by relieving him of mascot duty.
mschmich@tribune.com |
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