The weeks leading up to Easter in El Paso, Texas are marked by los vientos de cuaresma, or the winds of Lent. 

It’s been like this since anyone can remember. 

Newcomers to the city are always taken aback by their first experience, partly thrilled by the novelty and partly hypnotized by the magnitude of the hazy swirling sand. 

But first impressions fade fast. There is nothing pleasant about it. High-velocity winds pulverize the city with the sand of the Chihuahua Desert. The grains insinuate themselves into every car engine, window sill, filling your nostrils and even getting stuck between your teeth. After-school activities are cancelled; parents leave work early; traffic slows to a crawl. The jagged peaks north and south of the city vanish, and so does the steel border wall. Everywhere haze obscures the sky, and it can be nearly impossible to tell the sun from the moon. 

Verily, verily, it’s apocalyptic. And it happens every year. 

Los vientos de cuaresma announce a different kind of Lent. It’s not a set of things you give up—cutting out cream and sweetener from your coffee, for instance—or a set of spiritual practices. You can’t learn it on YouTube, or like it on Instagram. In El Paso, Lent is something that happens to you. It is an event, whether you like it or not.

Other changes mark the season, too. Mom-and-pop restaurants and parish kitchens bring out the menu cuaresmal, replete with lentils and fish and bread pudding, and people who never dare to darken a church suddenly start fasting, not just on Fridays, but every day. The old ladies smoking near the international bridge as they wait each night to help widows living in Mexico collect social security checks and say the rosary together.

And the wind and the sand always come, a stinging spiritual exfoliant. 

One of the temptations of Lent is moralismo, the idea that we can march ourselves into the Kingdom of God by sheer virtue of our practices, affectations, and purity. 

The readings for the Third Sunday in Lent say otherwise. 

The Moses who meets God in the burning bush on Mount Horeb in Exodus 3 is the same Moses who murdered someone in a fit of rage one chapter earlier, burying his victim in sand. He didn’t “deserve” to meet God; it just happened to him. Isn’t it so with our own salvation?

But there is something different about the vientos de cuaresma this year. 

In El Paso there are more than 50,000 people without legal paperwork to be in the United States, just as there are 12 million immigrants throughout the whole country without documents. In El Paso, one out of three of them live with a child who is an American citizen; 70 percent have lived in El Paso for at least a decade, some more than twenty years. 

In this way, the face of El Paso hasn’t changed. After the United States violated the terms of the Hidalgo Treaty in 1848 by shifting the border with Mexico south of the city, successive U.S. governments acted quickly to disenfranchise those with darker pigmentation throughout the borderlands, constitutional protections be damned. The generations and generations of migrants who have made El Paso a vibrant and resilient city have always had to fight to salir adelante, beating a path forward in spite of racialized politics. 

Now we have a president promising mass deportations and a government breaking all kinds of laws in order to carry them out. That lays a heavy psychological and spiritual burden on the city, where families of mixed documentation status are the family across the street, or the family upstairs, or even your family.

Donald Trump and his allies believe that migration itself is a crime. They claim migrants are a threat to American communities. But conversations with their victims reveal otherwise. Many who have crossed the border report living with a constant, suffocating feeling of ostracism, ashamed that they lack the bare necessities of life. How strong, how powerful really is the community that, in the name of security, inflicts violence on the helpless? 

Thank God, Exodus offers a response. The God who sees the plight of migrants in the borderlands is the same God who spoke to Moses, revealing himself the as the redeemer of a poor, stateless, immigrant people: “I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers, so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them…” 

Here, in El Paso, we know which way the wind is blowing.