The photos accompanying this article are the work of Asher Imtiaz, a freelance photographer based in Milwaukee. For the safety of all involved, no captions are included. Consent was obtained for all photos, including those of children.
The House
Two nights ago a woman died in the rectory of San Mateo Church in Hyattsville, Maryland. Maria, who in life was the sister-in-law of Padre Vidal Rivas, parish priest of San Mateo, died from complications of Alzheimer’s. Her husband, Walter, was at her side. Maria’s wake will be here at the iglesia. Then her remains will be returned to El Salvador for burial. Her four sisters want her home. They have a plot picked out for all five of them, together, as they never could have been in life.
The room is stuffy, smelling of medicines, packed full of blouses and shoes, creams and ointments, but it feels like a little piece of El Salvador, a house in a village, like San Vicente, transported here to Maryland, and made real. Outside in the living room the TV is always on—right now showing soccer. No one is watching it. Women and children come and go. Unidentified cousins and nieces and nephews. There are four dogs, including a mean one who was abused before Padre Vidal rescued him. One fluffy white dog is carried up and down like a doll by Mercedes, age 12, an occupant of the house.
“Mercedes has autism,” Padre Vidal says. “She talks only to Fluffy.”
The women are in the kitchen, pots are going, and coffee is on. Shouting, laughing. The only things missing to make this El Salvador are hammocks hanging in the corridors, chickens fussing along, and a rooster going off every five minutes. It should be dusty, and dry, and it should be 110 degrees in the shade. Heat that can only be relieved with sweet lemonade. Soon, I will preach about Jesus revealing himself to the disciples, glowing, eternal, with Moises and Elias. “Este es mi hijo. Escúchanlo. This is my son. Listen to him.”
Becoming the Body of Christ
Listening to him is exactly what Padre Vidal and the members of the Episcopal Church of San Mateo—Spanish-speaking and English-speaking—have been doing. Listening to him, living his life. Caring for the widow, the orphan, the stranger. Being the body of Christ in this place at this time, in Trump-era America. Earlier this afternoon, while driving past the small, neat houses of Hyattsville, Padre Vidal explains the community as he drives.
“Ninety percent of San Mateo are Spanish-speaking as a first language, and their kids. And of them, 30 percent are undocumented. Another 35 percent have Temporary Protected Status. The rest are residents. Very few are citizens. Of more than 500 parishioners, maybe about 40 are U.S. citizens.” He pauses to wipe his forehead. His tone is strong, and indignant.
“My people are terrified,” he says. “Confused. We don’t understand this hatred that is being directed towards us. We have come here, so many of us, from places of impossible violence, from suffering, war, drought. And we’ve done nothing wrong. We love it here, we have made it home, though we always miss our families, and our land.
“My folks are good, working people. The women in healthcare, lots of them, aides and cleaners, some of them training to be nurses. Working to care for old people, and kids. Many, many of them were on the front line of the pandemic. Going in, wearing all the gear to stay safe. But, even with that, so many got sick, especially in the early days. Three of them died.” He pauses, then grabs his phone. He drives with one hand, phone to his ear, pounds the dash with the other, then looks around for some piece of paper or another in the piles surrounding him. I take a deep drink from my water bottle. I’m trusting God has the wheel.
“Where were we?” he says, hands back on the wheel. “COVID, the ones who passed away … the men are hard workers, too, laborers. Carpenters, plumbers, and some out on farms. They come here to this church, because this is home. Our doors are always open, for everything. We have gone on the line, we have always spoken out loud. Our visibility has protected us. Our bishop, Mariann Budde, she has been with us all along. She came to bless our sanctuary and she even brought us a statue of San Romero, from when she went to El Salvador. The folks at the National Cathedral, the whole diocese, and many others, their kindness never ends. Other churches, Lutherans, Quakers and neighbors, too.”
At the church, Padre Vidal fits me up with an alb and a white stole, and we are on. This is the Mass they film for broadcasting. A small attendance, but a full choir. “We have three,” Padre Vidal says. “This one is the Romero choir.”
The choir sings:
The bosses said that we have to
work hard without complaining.
We thought it was true, but
Romero’s word came to change us.
God will not stand for a new Pharoah
And he sent all the people to fight for their freedom.
Pupusas
Like the wind we are off again, back in the van. Pablo, a Peruvian, rides shotgun. Vidal turns the van down a busy street, passes a taco joint, a dollar store, a laundromat, and then pulls up to the destination: Emily’s Pupusas. The ladies behind the counter come out and hug Padre Vidal. They know him. They love him. They know he is doing everything on Heaven and Earth and Under the Earth to protect them. The good shepherd. We load up. Several dozen pupusas, and we head back to the church hall.
The women and girls from the rectory come over. Others are in the kitchen, making a huge feast for the annual meeting tomorrow. Food for 300. God will multiply the chicken, Irma says, laughing.
For now we tuck into Emily’s still-hot pupusas: thick tortillas stuffed with meat, beans, cheese, and fried until crispy on a griddle. Then slathered in tomato sauce, and topped with curtido—pickled cabbage, carrots and jalapeños.
Later, back in the kitchen, Irma lowers her voice and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Canada?” Her brow wrinkles, and her eyes go glassy. I sigh. “It’s impossible,” I say, shaking my head. “There is a whole system, and very few can qualify. Unless you are a professional, or have a lot of money and power.”
Irma’s face deflates, and piece by piece she tells her story. She’s been in Maryland for 25 years, more than half her life. She has five children. Three are half-Guatemalan, sons of a father who escaped the war and waded across the Rio Grande into Texas. Now, she’s a single mother, and until recently, until the oldest children could work, she has been the sole support for her family. Plus, she sends what she can back home to help her mother. She has worked cleaning offices, in construction and cleaning homes. She has paid taxes, given her whole life to this country.
“I feel like I have failed,” she says softly. “My children are so afraid—even though they were born here. They have papers. I don’t. I’ve tried. What would my kids do without me? Since the inauguration they won’t come to church. They have stopped going out to play soccer with their teams. I can hardly get them to go to school. We are all so sad.”
The Children
At last count, Padre Vidal and his wife, Angelita, have become the legal guardians to 18 children, from babies a few months old to teenagers. They are prepared to step in should any young ones get stranded while their parents are detained and deported. It’s a discreet matter. “Something between Angelita and myself and the families in question,” Padre Vidal says.
“Imagine me,” he adds, shrugging his shoulders helplessly. “I never had children.” (Angelita has three children from a previous marriage but they were mostly grown by the time she and Vidal married.) “And now look at me. Where will we put them all? We’re going to be like Abraham and Sarah having kids in our old age!”
“I’m not a great hero,” he adds. “Anyone—especially if they call themselves Christian—should be ready to take this kind of action. It’s just basic human decency. I trust in God that it won’t come to this. But it breaks my heart to see the mothers crying. They have no one. No family, no one else in the community they can ask to take this on. Something of this gravity. Angelita and I didn’t think twice. But other parishioners have stepped up too. We are ready. We will have all our children covered.”
We have left the dining hall. The pupusa feast has ended. He invites me into his office, and we weave through heaps of canned food, toys and clothes—people will take these things on Sunday morning, he says. I sit on the corner of a sagging sofa, while he perches on a rolling office chair, moving from pile of paper to phone, and back again. “Diga,” he says. “Tell me what you want to know.”
“Well, how did you end up here?”
Padre Vidal is a teller of tales, and he loves to talk. He goes back, way back, to the beginning.
How He Became Padre Vidal
“I was born 60 years ago, in San Vicente,” he says. “We were really poor. We had almost nothing. I am the oldest of 10, and I was born two months early. I almost died. My mother couldn’t look after me at first, so my father fed me cooled hot chocolate and bread soaked in it. Well, look at me—I lived!
“When I was a few years older, I remember this. We had nothing to eat, nothing at all. Another woman, a neighbor, not my mother, nursed me, gave me her milk. That’s how I survived.
“I was 17 when I decided to become a priest. I was at our local parish church. This was just after they killed Monsignor Romero. I used to listen to his sermons on the radio every Sunday. Well, I was there at Mass, and the priest said, ‘If any boy here thinks he may have a vocation, see me afterwards.’ Right away, like a lightning bolt striking, I knew what I had to do. I signed up.
“They sent me to seminary, but I could hardly read. I was so embarrassed when the priest put me in charge of the lesson at the service, and I stumbled and muttered. He yelled at me to sit down. I decided right then to work triple hard. And I did. I became a leader of the seminarians and they sent me everywhere.
“After ordination I went into the war zone. The guerrillas and the army—I preached in one place, and then in the other. I preached using the words, the spirit, of Romero. I knew it was risky, but the people stood with me.
“One day my car was stolen by some men from a gang. I reported it to the police, and they found the car the next day, being driven across the border to Nicaragua. Seven gang members were arrested. Then I had a target on my back. They were going to get me. A week later, I was attacked. They beat me so badly, I was left for dead. After that, my bishop decided I had to leave. So they sent me to the States. That’s how I ended up here.”
Padre Vidal’s story in the United States is a winding one. He was in San Francisco, then in Washington, then back to El Salvador, then back to Washington. He became part of the Roman Catholic Church’s Hispanic mission in the Archdiocese of Washington, assigned to work with the Cursillo movement.
Entering with great gusto, he began to teach liberation theology to the cursillistas, and he began to speak about the example of Romero, and the other martyred Christians of El Salvador, like the Jesuits, Ignacio Ellacuria, rector of the Central American University, and five UCA professors, murdered by the army in 1989, along with their housekeeper and her daughter.
“Archbishop [Theodore McCarrick] didn’t like this,” Padre Vidal adds. “He called me a communist, and he tried to have me returned to El Salvador. I refused to go. It got so bad. I ended up leaving the church. I left my vocation.”
We pause for a moment while he takes a phone call.
“After having been in the church since I was a teenager, I was left completely on my own,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do. It was a very dark time. I did volunteer work in a parish for a while. I worked with catechism classes with children. People were looking out for me. They protested at the diocesan office for months. Then my mother got sick back home. I needed to send her money. I tried construction for a while, but after only one day my body was broken. There was no way. My heart was already broken, and now my body too. I am a priest. There is no work for me but to serve God, and to serve God’s people. I looked around. I prayed about it. Should I become a Lutheran?, I wondered. Return to the Catholic Church? At last, the Spirit led me to the Episcopal Church. I felt like at last I had found my place, a place where I could be fully myself as a Christian committed to the liturgy, and to the people.
“With the support of Father [Daniel] Robles from the Dominican Republic, I began a Latino ministry. The first church we were in was an Anglo-Catholic parish. But it didn’t work out. I had left the Catholic Church and its hierarchies and closed doors. I didn’t want to offer my life in a place that wouldn’t let women near the altar.
“So in 2008 we came to St. Matthew’s, a group of us. They agreed to rent us the church on Sunday evenings. We started a 5 p.m. Spanish service. It grew really strong. Then we took on the 8 a.m. service. We had people coming from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, then Colombia and Venezuela, up and down Latin America. Our numbers kept growing and growing. Finally, we started a 12 noon service, and by then we had become the huge majority. We kept a 10 a.m. English service. By then there were only about 25 English-speaking parishioners. They were happy to see the church thriving, though it had totally changed. In 2011 we officially unified both congregations and became a single, bilingual community.”
“Our church was dying,” says Tony Riggs, a longtime parishioner. “We had no way to carry on. Then, like a miracle, these folks showed up. It has its challenges, but we have no doubt that the Spirit has brought us this chance to be one church.”
Father Vidal adds, “The English-speaking priest retired, and then we officially became San Mateo. I am not the rector here, because we are still financially dependent on the diocese—to the tune of about $30,000 a year. But our ministry is vital. The bishop knows it. The diocese knows it. We are a thriving, fully Episcopal, Spanish-language ministry.
“Now we have this really big challenge before us—this situation where we are watching our innocent parishioners become victims of unjust oppression. Of course we are going to stand up and resist. We feel very supported by our English-speaking sisters and brothers, both in the parish and far, far beyond.”
“Never before has it been a more critical time to be church,” says Padre Vidal, as we make our way in the dark to the rectory. “We need you here as our witness. We need everyone to know about the church we have.”
The Church
By 11:45 on Sunday morning the pews are full, and Padre Vidal is directing a three-ring service: all the pieces in place. Who’s doing the psalm? English and Spanish are flying through the air. Tech people getting the video broadcast ready. A popcorn machine is loaded and a movie ready to show in the hall for the children who will be supervised by the youth during the church meeting. Fire is on under the chicken pot. Padre Vidal throws an alb in my direction. Deacon Sally Ethelson comes by and shares a quick smile and a knowing nod. A polyglot, and recently ordained, Deacon Sally has a particular ministry to multilingual congregations.
As we prepare for the procession, three women looked slightly out of place. They are guardians. They are part of a team: English members of the congregation, and neighbors who aren’t even part of San Mateo, here to protect the Spanish-speakers. They stay at the back, lock the doors during the service, patrol the parking lot looking for vehicles that look out of place. They question any unknown person wanting to come in. They are trained to confront any potential direct action by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On Inauguration Day, President Trump lifted sanctuary protections in churches, schools, and hospitals. A best defense, they say, is to be informed and prepared.
The service proceeds without a hitch. Deacon Sally undertakes a heroic translation of Padre Vidal’s sermon. He speaks in rapid-fire, Salvadoran-style Spanish, blending multiple syllables. She doesn’t catch every word, but she has the tone, and the passion, and her words join his, and fill the sanctuary. She has been key in mobilizing networks of solidarity in defense of her Spanish-speaking congregants.
After the service, the annual general meeting begins. Reports and numbers: 72 baptisms of adults and children in 2024. Twelve active groups. Padre Vidal and Deacon Sally and the lay leadership outline vital ministries and thriving congregational life. There are groups for many purposes: maintenance, fundraising, youth, psychological support, and training for migrants: knowing your rights. There are workshops for door guardians and the hospitality committee.
The meeting in the church ends and the crowd floods into the hall. Irma and Juan move to serving chicken. “Two pieces or one?,” the servers consult. Out the plates go. Then, an emergency: there’s not enough chicken! The pupusas are rolled out onto plates of the latecomers, with rice and salad.
The Two Bettys
The two Bettys appear in a movie, made by a parishioner, that will be released soon. They are sitting at the table, together with their husbands, José and Gerardo.
The first Betty tells her story: “I didn’t see my father for 17 years. He had gone to the United States. At last I was able to reconnect when I came from El Salvador and joined him. I have been here for 20 years, and I have four children. They loved their Grandpa. He would really get in and play with the kids.
“Then he got a cancer diagnosis, and he decided it was all over. He didn’t want to die here. He didn’t want to be buried here. It is too cold,” she says, laughing a bit. “So he went back. But I can’t travel. I couldn’t go and be with him, so he died without all of us at his side. I feel a splitting pain. It never goes away.”
The second Betty speaks up. She fled the violence in their neighborhood. Girls were being claimed by the gangs, she said. “Me and my friend, we both fled.” But her friend didn’t make it. She died. “I lived but she died,” Betty says.
José and Gerardo speak up, scared but proud of their work. “We aren’t doing anything wrong,” they say, repeating what so many have said. “We aren’t criminals. We are part of the community here: nurses, plumbers, gardeners, dishwashers, care aides. We don’t know what to do.”
“Why aren’t we allowed to be here legally?” they ask. “Why can’t we live our lives in peace like everyone else?”
Padre Vidal takes a moment of everyone’s time at the great banquet.
“Don’t go to Virginia now,” he warns. “ICE has a list of 1,200 that they are going to pick up. The governor has deputized state troopers to fully support the ICE agents. Whatever you do, don’t go into Virginia.”
Then he disappears into the bowels of the church, past the new bathrooms recently renovated by volunteers from the parish—those plumbers and carpenters—with donations from far and wide, from churches and the community. The bathrooms are now complete with shower stalls, and shiny new toilets. We are heading to another meeting: Faith in Action, CASA Maryland, Congregation Action Network, Migrant Solidarity, members of the National Cathedral.
“This is a duty, not an option,” says Julio from Congregation Action Network. “I haven’t had a single day off in these terrible times.”
Pancakes
Shrove Tuesday arrives, and the tide of people flows back into the church, into the hall. Angelita stirs vats of fruit, and others help.
Neri, 26 years old, has become Padre Vidal’s other right hand, one of his principal lay leaders. I ask her how long she has been a part of San Mateo. She laughs. Forever. Her mother brought her to Padre Vidal’s first Episcopal church when she was a baby. In 2008, when the congregation moved, her mother moved the whole family with them. Neri founded the youth group, and has stayed on as its mentor after aging out. She now works in the parish day school. She is at the church every day, doing something. Deacon Sally and I (half-teasing) say that she belongs in seminary, training for the priesthood. She demurs, but not entirely, saying she will wait for what God has in mind.
“On the day of possession, when the president took office,” she begins her testimony, “I heard that Padre Vidal was going to take public action. I saw the young people crying. Fear was everywhere. Right then I knew that I was going to fight for the migrants. I have papers. I was born here. You know, my last name is Romero. My family comes from his hometown. So we always say he was my great-uncle or something. I am taking that name seriously. Romero once said that he was going to be the voice for the voiceless. Well, that’s what I am doing. I am going to look after the children, the little ones, who have no voice.”
Neri and I finish speaking and one of the youth, Marcos, comes into the office and plops down on the floor. Neri teased him. “You like to talk,” she said. “Tell us what’s going on for you.” He laughs, saying he was afraid. He doesn’t want to get deported to El Salvador because it was too hot and he was fat. “Fat people don’t do good in the heat,” he says. The jokes continue, and Neri gently coaxes him to share.
“My parents have serious health issues,” he says. “Diabetes. High blood pressure, I don’t know. I think they’ll die if they go home.”
Marcos wasn’t allowed out at all after the inauguration. Now he is only allowed to go from church to school and back to church again. He is an awkward, fat teenager with an incredibly joyous personality. He has a gorgeous girlfriend and a dog, Puki, that he adores. He shows us pictures. Puki sleeps under a blanket by his pillow now, and she helps him when he feels scared.
We talk together for more than an hour, and I realize, remember, we are all one body. We are all one people. One faith, one baptism.
The enormity of what is going on weighs down on me. The hatred and the misery. The terror and the confusion. Some have asked whether Trump is actually deporting any more people than his predecessors. That remains to be seen. What is certain is that, to this community, the rhetoric has created mountains of fear and cuts to the bone. Its victims are sitting on the floor before me.
What Padre Vidal and Angelita, Deacon Sally and Neri and all the others are doing is holding a line, building a wall behind which lies the promise of safety in God’s arms.
Repentance
Before dawn the next day we are up for the 6 o’clock service. It is Ash Wednesday. We ask, from the pulpit and the altar, “What does mean to repent? How has it come to pass that before our eyes our beloved brothers and sisters in Christ have been turned into enemies? How have we come so far from being a city on the hill, a promised land for the downtrodden and the oppressed?”
Before long we are in the van again. Padre Vidal is taking me to the Metro, which I will ride to the airport. The phone rings and Padre Vidal answers, driving again with one hand.
“What? Her foot is broken. Don’t move her, not today. Let’s not talk on the phone. Come over after the 5 o’clock Misa.” Click. He turns to me. “Here in Maryland. ICE came for his wife. She hid in the closet. But we have to move her. They know where she is and there is a capture order. Her foot is broken. She’s wearing a boot. She can’t run.”
The Rev. Emilie Smith is Guest Writer on Covenant. She is parish priest of St. Barnabas Anglican Church, New Westminster, Canada, and TLC’s Latin America correspondent.
Asher Imtiaz is a frequent contributor to TLC. He lives in Milwaukee and attends Eastbrook Church, a diverse, multiethnic church in the city.