Angelus News | April 9, 2021 Vol 6 No 7

Mexican-American border town of
Camargo in Tamaulipas. Lopez, 49,
an undocumented worker who had
been deported to Guatemala after a
notorious 2019 immigration raid on
Mississippi poultry plants, had tried to
return to his wife, children, and grandchildren
in Carthage.
“People are in shock. They can’t
believe that something like this could
have happened,” said Father Odel
Medina, a priest of the Missionary
Servants of the Most Holy Trinity, and
pastor of St. Anne.
Most of the dead had relatives among
Carthage’s burgeoning population
of indigenous Mayan workers from
Guatemala. Poultry jobs were arduous,
dirty, and dangerous, but paid more for
an hour of labor than the Guatemalans
would make in two days in their
villages.
Most of the massacred migrants were
from the desperately poor town of
Comitancillo, seeking jobs in Carthage
that Americans had long refused,
Father Medina said.
He called it a bitter irony that, seven
months after the government deported
hundreds of undocumented poultry
plant employees, they were declared
“essential workers” during COVID-19.
“If they didn’t work, you would not
have food on anyone’s table,” Father
Medina said.
Lopez grew up in the village of
Chicajala, where death from malnutrition
is common. He had no shoes
for school and was bullied by other
students and teachers alike.
His response, Father Medina said,
was to say, “I’d like to be a teacher and
change the way they teach children.”
He left for Guatemala City in his
teens, entering the United States in his
mid-20s. He was deported a year later,
but soon returned to his wife and baby
in Carthage. They bought a modest
house in which they raised three children,
now ages 11 to 21.
He organized the first Spanish Masses
at St. Anne. In addition to being a
lector, extraordinary minister of holy
Communion, and youth minister,
Lopez was the head of the St. Anne
“directiva,” a pastoral advisory board
that looked after the needs of the
Latino community. He spent four years
studying for certification in Hispanic
ministry through the Southeast Pastoral
Institute in Miami.
Whether he was in a leadership role
or simply participating, “he was always
at the service of others,” Father Medina
wrote in the parish newsletter.
Juanatano Cano, who ministers
among Guatemalans in the Archdiocese
of Los Angeles, never met
Lopez, but had a parallel childhood.
Their adulthoods diverge because
Cano, a
leadership
development
consultant
who is
finishing his
doctorate,
Originally from Guatemala,
Juanatano Cano works with the
Office of Ethnic Ministries for
the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
received asylum and working papers
after entering the U.S. illegally in the
late 1980s.
Cano pins their early hardships on
prejudice against their indigenous
Edgar Lopez (right) and
Father Odel Medina
at a parish event in
Mississippi. | FATHER
ODEL MEDINA
heritage.
“Racism in
Guatemala is
worse than in the
United States.
To call someone
‘an Indian’ is the
worst insult if
they want to humiliate someone,” he
said.
He described indigenous Guatemalans
as descendants of those who survived
the Spanish conquest 500 years
ago by fleeing to the hinterlands. No
government has ever tried to integrate
them into the Guatemalan economy.
“There was no money for education
or health care for us,” he said, “According
to the government, we are an
obstacle to the prosperity of the whole
country.”
People in Cano’s village were stunted
physically and intellectually from
malnutrition. “They said that we are
stupid, that we don’t want to learn, that
we don’t want to succeed,” he said.
In 1981, Guatemala’s long-running
civil war escalated. “I saw the military
bombing little towns and little Indian
villages. I told my mom, ‘Let’s get out
of here. They are going to wipe us
out,’ ” Cano said.
She would not leave. So in 1982,
at age 13, he left alone for the city.
There he did housework in exchange
for room and board, while attending
night school. When his high school
diploma brought no opportunities for
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