beautiful life

They were Mexican immigrants, both named Lorenzo.

They came to this country without papers as teenagers. Lack of legal status didn’t stop them from building beautiful lives — a wife, a home, a loving dog. A blue-collar job that paid the bills, weekend carne asadas with friends and family, children who followed their father’s example of hard work.

The Lorenzos enjoyed the fruits of their labor in their adopted land, even as they battled to become American citizens while politicians demonized immigrants as invaders and worse.

Lorenzo Arellano arrived in the United States in 1968 and didn’t get his citizenship until nearly 30 years later. Back then, the path to naturalization was far easier.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo arrived in the early 1990s, when those opportunities were becoming severely limited.

Lorenzo Arellano is my father, a happily retired truck driver living in Anaheim.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, who ran his own construction crew, was on his way to a job with his brother and two other men when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot him dead on July 7 in Houston.

When I see a photo of Salgado Araujo beaming in front of a cake with the number 52 on it at the well-kept home he built with his own hands, I’m reminded that we’ll be celebrating my father’s 75th birthday next month. When I see video of Salgado Araujo’s feet twitching on the ground with two ICE agents next to him as he bleeds out and moans for help, I weep.

Only geography, age and Donald Trump separated the Lorenzos. Even their children — he had three boys, while my father had two boys and two girls — are similar. The Salgado Araujos, like the Arellanos, are college-educated. The eldest son, Ronaldo, is a teacher like my sisters. He wears glasses like me and is now telling the story of his father to the nation, as I have for decades.

I write about my Papi as the puckish personification of immigrant America.

Ronaldo is eulogizing his dad way too soon.

“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said proudly at a news conference the day after his father’s death — words I’ve always said about my Papi. “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE’” — words I hope to never utter but can sadly see as a possibility given la migra’s unapologetic shoot-first approach and indiscriminate targeting of anyone brown.

Salgado Araujo’s killing came as part of the Trump administration’s newest deportation surge — the New York Times reported that the feds have arrested nearly 2,000 people a day since the end of June. The rate is higher than ICE’s campaign of terror last summer, yet it hasn’t drawn the same attention, fulfilling the promise of newish Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that la migra would operate far more quietly and efficiently than under his reckless predecessor, Kristi Noem.

Those quiet times are over.

Ronaldo Salgado, son of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, dries his tears while talking at a news conference on July 8 in Houston. His father was shot and killed by ICE agents the day before.

(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)

Vigils are popping up across the country in Salgado Araujo’s name. Stories about his life and death have replaced those about Mexico’s World Cup run on my social media timelines. They are heartbreaking, infuriating and a baleful reminder for Mexican Americans that these last five weeks of soccer, as joyful as they were, didn’t change our precarious status in this country under President Trump.

“He deserved to live a quiet life as a husband, a father and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American dream,” Ronaldo said at the news conference through tears as his younger brother, Lorenzo Jr., comforted him. That their father never will — that the Department of Homeland Security is now smearing his name by claiming he “weaponized” his van by trying to run over an agent, even though video evidence proves no such thing — is the latest indictment against the Trump administration’s cruelty toward the undocumented.

Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the target of ICE’s operation. His family said he had applied for a work permit and was on his way toward finally obtaining legal status.

We should heed Ronaldo’s words about his father. As people protest and seek justice, we should also hail the life of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo the way we one day will hail the life of Lorenzo Arellano — as Mexicans who made it, challenges be damned. And we should continue to fight for immigrants who remain in legal limbo, afraid for their lives more than ever.

I called my father to ask how he felt about a tocayo — someone with the same first name — losing his life to la migra.

“I put myself in his place and lament that ese [that] Lorenzo couldn’t get the citizenship that I could,” Papi said in Spanish.

He remembered how immigration agents “did it with respect” when they caught him living in this country illegally in the 1970s and 1980s.

“They asked you for your papers, and if you didn’t have them, they put handcuffs on you, you got deported and that was that. None of these beatings or shootings that are happening now under Trump,” he said. The worst it ever got was when he said he was going to Los Angeles, and an agent snapped that he was going to L.A. but now had to return to Mexico.

Papi asked me what justification ICE has offered for killing Salgado Araujo.

“I hope they put those people who killed him in prison for many years,” he said with disgust. “Will they?”

I replied that probably wasn’t going to happen. ICE has shot and killed 11 people during Trump’s second term, both citizens and noncitizens, and scores more have died in immigration detention. No agents have faced charges for any of these deaths. The agents involved in Salgado Araujo’s killing didn’t even have dashboard cameras or body cameras, a convenient oversight that a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson blamed on “multiple government shutdowns.”

“Pues, Dios sabe que todo se paga en la vida,” my dad responded. Well, God knows you reap what you sow.

Ronaldo Salgado and Lorenzo Jr., sons of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, hold a photograph of their father during a news conference July 8 in Houston.

(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)

Nothing can bring Lorenzo Salgado Araujo back to his loved ones. But I hope they find solace in his namesake, St. Lawrence. Tradition has it that Roman authorities roasted the Spanish deacon to death after Emperor Valerian demanded that he turn over the treasures of the Church. Instead, Lawrence presented the emperor with the city’s poor and maligned, insisting that he confront the oppression he had forced on them.

May we remember Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as a modern-day martyr, killed because our government refused to give him and so many others a chance at living in this country without fear.

May his name resonate through the ages as embodying the promise and tragedy of the American dream.

Brian Lindstrom, a filmmaker whose documentaries shined a light on society’s underdogs and inspired social change, has died. He was 65.

Lindstrom’s wife, author Cheryl Strayed, confirmed the news on Instagram Friday.

“Brian Lindstrom died this morning the way he lived — with gentleness and courage, grace and gratitude for his beautiful life,” she wrote. “Our children, Carver and Bobbi, and I held him as he took his last breath and we will hold him forever in our hearts. The only thing more immense than our sorrow that Progressive Supranuclear Palsy took our beloved Brian from us is the endless love we have for him.”

According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, PSP is caused by damage to nerve cells in areas of the brain that control thinking and body movements. The rare neurological disease progresses rapidly.

Strayed, who penned the bestselling memoir “Wild,” which was later adapted for the big screen and starred Reese Witherspoon, announced just weeks ago that Lindstrom had been diagnosed “with a serious, fatal illness.”

Lindstrom was born Feb. 12, 1961. The son of a bartender and a liquor salesman, he was raised in Portland, Ore. — which he and his family still called home.

He was the first member of his family to attend college, which he paid for by taking out student loans, landing work-study jobs and working summers in a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska. During a 2013 TEDx Talk, Lindstrom said that after he’d exhausted all the video production classes at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, his professor Stuart Kaplan gave him a gift certificate to a class at the Northwest Film Center. There, Lindstrom made a short film about his grandpa that landed him a spot in the MFA program at Columbia University.

It was a train trip with his grandpa that inspired Lindstrom to tackle challenging topics with a lens that restored dignity to his subjects. His grandpa was a binge-drinker, and on day three of the trip, he woke up with a hangover and was missing his dentures. Lindstrom, only 5 at the time, noticed the way other passengers treated him and his grandpa differently.

“I think what my films are about is that search for my grandfather’s dentures, the humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between us and them and arrives at we,” he said.

Lindstrom said he returned to Portland after film school and “did several projects with the Northwest Film Center that had me putting a camera in the hands of kids on probation, homeless teens, newly recovering addicts, hard-hit people who had hard-hitting stories to share.”

“Those projects taught me so much about the transformative power of art, and they gave me permission I felt in my personal films to ask people if I might follow them, so that an audience could better understand what they were going through, and by extension, better understand themselves,” he said.

Lindstrom’s 2007 award-winning cinéma-vérité-style film, “Finding Normal,” followed long-term drug addicts as they left prison or detox and tried to rebuild their lives with the help of a recovery mentor.

“What I’m most proud about is that ‘Finding Normal’ is the only film to ever be shown to inmates in solitary confinement at Oregon State Penitentiary, and not, I might add, as a punishment,” Lindstrom said.

In 2013, he released “Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse,” a documentary that illuminated the life of a man who grappled with schizophrenia and examined his death, which happened in police custody. Discussing the film with LA Progressive in 2018, Lindstrom said that he doesn’t make films for audiences.

“I make them for the people in the film. It is my small way of honoring them,” he told the outlet. “That doesn’t mean I don’t delve into dark areas or that I ignore that person’s struggles. I’m much more concerned with trying to achieve an honest depiction of that person’s life than I am with any potential audience reaction.”

Lindstrom’s work aimed to inspire empathy and humanize those suffering in the margins of society, but it also catalyzed policy change. His acclaimed 2015 documentary, “Mothering Inside,” followed participants in the Family Preservation Project (FPP), an initiative helping incarnated moms establish and maintain bonds with their children.

Midway through filming the documentary, the Oregon Department of Corrections announced it planned to nix funding for the FPP. Lindstrom hosted early screenings of the film, which inspired grassroots advocacy that reached then-Gov. Kate Brown, who subsequently signed legislation that restored funding. The film’s release also helped make Oregon the first state in the U.S. to pass a bill of rights for children of incarcerated parents.

Partnering with Strayed, Lindstrom made the documentary short, “I Am Not Untouchable. I Just Have My Period,” for the New York Times in 2019. The film highlighted the experience of teen girls in Surkhet, Nepal, and the menstrual stigma they faced. Most recently, the filmmaker released, “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill,” which examined the folk-rock singer’s life from her traumatic childhood and drug-addled adolescence through her rise in the Laurel Canyon music scene and untimely death.

Lindstrom, discussing “Judee Sill” and his style as a filmmaker, told Oregon ArtsWatch, “It’s the chance to kind of focus on the question: What does it mean to be human? The person that the film is about, what can they teach us, what can we learn from them? What can they learn from themselves?”

In 2017, Lindstrom received the Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon for his work advancing civil rights and liberties. That same year, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Lewis & Clark College.

In Strayed’s post announcing Lindstrom’s death, she described their more than 30-year partnership as a stroke of “tremendous luck.”

“We loved each other and our kids with deep devotion and true delight. He was a stellar husband. He was the most magnificent dad. He was a man whose every word and deed was driven by kindness, compassion, and generosity,” she wrote. “He saw the goodness in everyone. He believed that we are all sacred and redeemable.

“His work as a documentary filmmaker was dedicated to telling stories of people who, as he put it, ‘society puts an X through.’ He erased that X with his camera and his astonishing heart.”

Strayed’s memoir — which followed her as she hiked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of her mother’s death, a battle with drug addiction and divorce from her first husband — concludes with a happy ending. She finished the months-long hike and sat on a white bench near the Bridge of the Gods, a stone’s throw from the spot where, she writes, she’d marry Lindstrom four years later.

“His greatest legacy is Carver and Bobbi, who embody everything good and true about their father. Their extraordinary grace, courage, and fortitude during this harrowing time was unfaltering and grounded in the undying love Brian poured into them every day of their lives,” she wrote. “We do not know how we will live without him. We’re utterly bereft. We can only walk this dark path and search for the beauty Brian knew was there. It will be his eternal light that guides us.”