The intimate act of assisting migrants in finding new shoes.
by Mary Fontana
In a little room off the main office at Annunciation House, a migrant hospitality house in El Paso, Texas, we kept a pink plastic basin, a bandage roll, tubes of salve and antibiotic cream. When a woman arrived limping, her shoes in tatters, I filled the basin with warm water to wash her feet, which were swollen and deeply scratched from cactus thorns. Once I finished washing, she leaned back in the wooden chair to let me lift her feet up. I rested them on my knees, patted them dry, and smoothed cream along each welt. Then I wrapped bandages around each foot from arch to ball, leaving the toes to peek out. The shoes went in the trash.
I no longer remember her name, or the country she came from, or her destination. This was twenty years ago. I was twenty-two. I doubt she remembers me, either. But in that brief exchange we shared an intimacy that I have not forgotten.
After graduating from college in 2004, I spent sixteen months living and working at Annunciation House, which I’d discovered in an alphabetically arranged binder of service opportunities at my university’s career center. Founded in 1978 by a group of young Catholics seeking to live in solidarity with the poor of their community, the house and its sister sites have provided shelter and comfort for nearly five decades to hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees, mostly from Latin America. They come seeking safety or work or both, wearing shoes shredded by the rough desert terrain or shoes without shoelaces, just released from detention (immigration enforcement agencies confiscate the laces).
The migrants who traverse the remote stretches of border between the U.S. and Mexico further a long history. People have been leaving their shoes in the deserts here for thousands of years. Sandals woven of long-lasting yucca fiber are the most common perishable artifacts found in the lands of the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. From the sandals’ size and condition, archaeologists can glean information about who wore them and for what purpose, and the intricate patterns in their weaves can reveal where they were crafted. Raised treads on the soles of some sandals might even have left footprints revealing the wearer’s clan or village. Today Pueblo artisans study the construction and design of ancient sandals to inform their continuing practice.[1]
Nowadays, the woven sandals of the region’s first inhabitants have given way to more modern artifacts. Border Patrol agents, humanitarians, anthropologists and cleanup crews who patrol desert crossing corridors encounter literal tons of detritus left by migrants and those who smuggle them. Empty water bottles, discarded food containers, backpacks—and shoes, which carry a significance that bottles and cans do not. Shoes offer poignant clues to the identity of their wearers, those who left them behind or somehow walked away without them.
In one year of cataloguing items migrants leave in the desert, anthropologist Jason De Leon collected more than 150 pairs of shoes. The Tucson Samaritans, a migrant aid group, use shoes and other discarded items to determine active crossing corridors where they can drop life-saving water supplies. Across desert landscapes, searchers have found sneakers with holes worn through the soles; carpet-covers worn over shoes to obscure footprints; high heels; and the tiny shoes of a young child.
So many shoes. Worn out or pierced by cactus thorns. Jettisoned for lighter loads. Or shed during the final stages of heat stroke, when the skin becomes so inflamed and sensitive that clothing rubs like sandpaper.[2]
For every tired migrant, there is a tired pair of shoes.
~
At Annunciation House, part of my work was was to help guests find a fresh change of clothing. I led people to the basement clothing bank for “new” shirts, pants, underwear and socks, and shoes, which usually took the longest time to find. Because, as these weary travelers knew better than I did, what goes on the feet matters.
What was the better pick: the newer, nicer pair, or the one that fit better? The consequence of a poor choice in shoes was worse than that of, say, a T-shirt. Ill-fitting shoes could, at best, hamper movement and raise blisters; at worst, break apart and fall off. When nothing fit quite right, I watched people invent creative solutions, like folding down the backs of shoes that were a little too small, turning them into slip-ons.
Elvis, who was fifteen years old when he journeyed north alone from his home country of Honduras, was thrilled to exchange his beat-up shoes for a pair of sneakers. “It was nice not to have spines in my feet,” he told me.
When migrants’ feet were blistered by miles of walking or lacerated by cactus spines, I washed and bandaged them then combed through the clothing bank for a forgiving pair of Crocs or Birkenstocks that could easily slip over bandages.
As the shelves emptied, my job was to refill them from a pile of community-sourced donations. T-shirts and jeans overflowed, but sturdy shoes were like precious gems—rare and scarce. I sifted through bags and boxes looking for matched shoes in good condition. (You’d be surprised how many single shoes end up in donation bins.)
Once I found in the pile a pair of open-toed slides with colorful canvas tops that I wore around the house, flip-flopping up and down the stairs. I returned them at the end of my time at Annunciation House, replacing them with a pair of cherry-red clogs. Funny, I would have never have purchased either pair for myself—they were too flashy, suggesting a vivacity I didn’t think I had at that age. I’d arrived at the border from my home state of Washington with one pair of running shoes and the Teva sandals I’d worn nearly constantly in college. But that was just one beautiful thing about working in a migrant shelter in my early twenties: it allowed me to try on different things.
I often spent a quiet half-hour each day in the house’s chapel, a breezy upstairs room with curtains woven of striped fabric, like that of Mexican rebozos or shawls. This was a habit I’d developed in college, but it felt more vital here, a way to recharge my battery to power the rest of the day’s pragmatic activities.
Even in the chapel there were shoes. Single shoes inside wire mesh boxes someone had assembled and stacked to form a large cross. A black pump with a red rosette on the toe. A well-worn sneaker, its tongue lolling out. A flip-flop. A worn gray loafer. A child’s shoe with a metal buckle.
In that chapel I wrestled with the deep, but not quite fully articulated longings that had brought me to the border. I’d told myself that I wanted to “put my feet on the ground.” I had done little in my life up to that point other than study; outside of school, I spent most of my free time reading. Now I wanted to experience the world and my fellow human beings, intensely and directly, unmediated by theoretical frameworks. I wanted to contribute to something bigger than myself—something that mattered. Also, for reasons both environmental and ethical, I wanted to live simply, to shrink my ecological footprint and tread lightly on the earth.
The chapel cross with its constellation of shoes gave visual form to the ethos I absorbed at the hospitality house: reverence for each person who arrived at the door, for their individuality, for their journey. The shoes were real—they had been tried on and bought and handled and worn—but they were also emblems for the sojourners themselves, those who had passed through the house, those staying there now, those yet to come. Sitting before them, I recognized myself as a kind of traveler, too. The house’s guests had traversed great geographical distances and faced real physical risks, while I stumbled along on a largely interior journey. But I too needed the space and security the house provided. I offered my time and energy, and in return I found connection, compassion, and purpose.
When I left the chapel each day to join the house’s cheerful chaos, shoes followed me, faithful workhorses carrying loads both real and symbolic. On Día de Muertos every November, we placed shoes on the altar in honor of migrants who’d perished that year in the desert. During a vigil to mourn a teenaged guest, Juan Patricio Peraza Quijada, who was shot and killed by Border Patrol in 2003, household members created a path of shoes from the front door to where Juan had died, just down the street.
~
“Roads are made by walking,” wrote the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Which means roads are also made by shoes. All those who stayed at Annunciation House during my time there have walked on—not only the guests, but also volunteers like me. Others have taken our place; in 2019, Annunciation House and its community partners received over a hundred thousand refugees. Since then, the numbers have fluctuated, but the house has stayed put, always open.
For my part, after sixteen months in El Paso, I packed my duffel bag and moved to California to attend graduate school. Nearly two decades have passed, but I still think of that border house as my home. I now serve on the board of the nonprofit that runs it, and do remote volunteer work fielding emails and talking to prospective volunteers. Several times a year I return to visit and offer hospitality to the many migrant visitors who still arrive at the door. It’s routine now: I wear sneakers on the three-hour direct flight from Seattle, carrying a backpack with clothes and one pair of flip-flops for around the house.
On a recent trip, I visited with Nivia, a long-term guest from Guatemala who suffered terrible injuries on her journey north and lost one of her legs to amputation. The last time I saw her, she’d been in a wheelchair. Now, she had a new prosthesis that allowed her to walk up and down the house’s long hallways. We greeted each other with big smiles and exchanged stories about our sons; her son in Guatemala is nearly the same age as mine in Washington. She showed me the silver foot inside her spotless white tennis shoes. She was still adjusting to the prosthesis, but felt optimistic about the possibilities it opened for her.
Soon, she told me, she’d be joining family in California, a journey shorter in distance than mine, but one that took months to finalize, given the logistical hurdles—money, legal paperwork, and physical exertion. As we swapped stories about our kids and plans, I couldn’t help but note the stark differences in our mobility.
~
On one flight home from El Paso, I noticed the family of three across the aisle from me on the airplane was wearing bright orange rubber flip-flops, identical pairs in three different sizes. I had just seen boxes of those flip-flops at our largest hospitality site, part of an ample donation of goods. Perhaps not the most practical shoes, but brand-new and functional; nearly everyone who came through our houses that week left with a pair. I didn’t know this family, or where they were going. Yet their Day-Glo shoes announced to me that for a night or two at least we’d been neighbors.
An old adage encourages us to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. But I’m not sure we ever really can. I’ll never understand what it would be like to leave home, leaving my child behind, not knowing if or when I’d see him again. I don’t know what it’s like to be forced by economic necessity or domestic violence or political persecution to undertake a perilous journey to another country. I can’t imagine how it would feel to cross the border alone, on foot, at age fifteen. I can’t fathom what it would be like to walk for days in tattered shoes across a thorny desert.
My U.S. citizenship gives me an ease of movement and a galaxy of options that remain out of reach for most guests when they arrive at Annunciation House. I simply cannot walk in their shoes. What I can do is walk alongside them for a little while. And it is this—the work of accompaniment—that keeps me coming back.
[1] Informed by Benjamin Bellorado’s lecture “Traversing Domain Boundaries: Cross-Media and Collaborative Approaches to the Study of Identity Through Footwear and Its Imagery,” given through The School of Anthropology Lecture Series. University of Arizona. Tucson. March 21, 2024.
[2] As memorably described in Luis Alberto Urrea’s 2004 The Devil’s Highway, a nonfiction account of a group of Mexican migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border through the Sonoran Desert.
Mary Fontana was born in Louisiana, grew up in the high desert of central Washington state, and studied coastal ecology in Baja California Sur before making her way to the US-Mexico border. After her time at Annunciation House, she earned a graduate degree in immunology and worked as a research scientist while continuing to volunteer part-time as a board member and volunteer coordinator. Her narrative history of Annunciation House, based on interviews with guests and volunteers whose experiences span five decades, is forthcoming from Orbis Books. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.