Empty Desks
The emptier the desks become in the school where I teach, the more overgrown the fields down the street from our campus grow.
Not far beyond my classroom window in the southernmost point of Miami-Dade County—Exit 1 off the turnpike—is the flat green stretch of farmland that feeds a lot of the country. By the time my students fill their seats, many of their parents have been bent under the South Florida sun for hours, busy cutting tomatoes, hauling crates of mangos, trimming avocado trees, pulling sweet corn, and picking bell peppers from the fertile soil. For many of them, their labor travels farther than they have ever been since they got to the United States. It ends up across the country stacked in neat pyramids in grocery stores with misted produce aisles and handwritten chalkboard signs.
When the desks thin out, the fields thicken. Rows go unpicked. Fruit drops and splits in the unrelenting sun.
In the news, reporters talk about the economic impact. They notice the missed harvests, the stalled shipments, the contracts broken. But that is the least of it. What’s most important is what they can no longer see, the vanishing hands that do so much more than pick their food and build new homes.
What we are living through feels less like enforcement and more like erasure.
A house emptied of its inhabitants, the door left ajar.
A car abandoned on the side of the road, void of its owner, waiting to be towed.
A series of panicked phone calls to family and friends that go straight to a full voicemail box.
The news says “detained,” a word that connotes the possibility of release. We know it to be a misnomer, as it does little more than sanitize the truth. What we experience is open-ended absence, a wound that haunts the imagination because while we know who has gone missing, we don’t know where they are. And we’re not sure if we’ll ever know.
In the neighborhoods around our school, there have been students wandering through one of the countless new housing developments rising up from the earth like cinderblock crops, asking if anyone has seen their parents. Their aunts and uncles. Their brothers and sisters.
At dismissal, grandparents and family friends arrive with questions about their newfound responsibilities, seeking guidance about how to best establish legal guardianship of their new wards.
Emergency contact forms are being rewritten in careful ink. Students adjust to new schedules and routines as if they’d moved to a new city.
And then there’s the girl.
A junior. Quiet, but not withdrawn. Responsible. The kind of student who always gets her work done on time, and it’s always well done.
The day after her aunt and uncle did not come home from work, she stood in the middle of the spill-out between class periods, thumbs hooked into her backpack straps, staring straight ahead.
The bell had rung.
Hundreds of students swarmed around her in frenzied clusters—laughing, shouting, checking their phones—but she remained still, her eyes anchored to a point only she could see.
When she had arrived home the afternoon before, the house was silent. Neighbors told her what they had witnessed: masked agents pulling up to the job site, roofers loaded into vans. No one knew where they had been taken. No one could tell her how to find them.
They were her only family in this country, the country in which she was born.
From my doorway, I watched her stand in the hallway, suspended between classes, between childhood and something harder. I wanted to say something to her that sounded like certainty. After all, I am a teacher, and providing some semblance of certainty and assurance is part of the job. Instead, I stepped out into her line of vision, hoping to catch her eye, hoping to convey something honest and reassuring.
Even at a distance I could see how rigidly she held herself together.
The fields outside continue to grow.
Tomatoes redden past their prime. Mangos soften and fall.
Inside, I take attendance and pause at the names that do not answer.
“Here.”
“Aquí.”
“Present.”
Silence.
