Finding solidarity in unlikely places, or, the opposite of watching the U.S. presidential debate
The Houston Airport Holiday Inn Express, giant meatballs, corporate battles, and airport friendships
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At the Houston Airport Holiday Inn Express, a ten-foot-long, framed digital collage was the sole artwork, adorning the wall above a decrepit, carpeted staircase.
The collage’s background was a quintessential cityscape at night – Houston, one could infer. In the left foreground was a launching rocket. In the right foreground was a bucking bronco, bucking over a giant field of oil wells. And in the center foreground was a middle-aged white man in a polo shirt, hitting a golf ball directly into the cityscape.
It seemed a pretty solid depiction of a city whose slogans have included “Houston: It’s Hot” and “Houston: Expect the Unexpected.”
It was hot, but we did not expect the unexpected and were therefore standing in a line at the Holiday Inn Express, which is, in the way of things Houston, not at the airport but ten super-expressway miles away.
Four hours earlier, we had shown up at the gate for our flight to Oaxaca, ready to go after a six-hour layover. At 4:32 pm, twelve minutes before our flight was scheduled to depart, we got a notification via the United App that it had been “delayed” – until 7 a.m. the following morning.
No announcement was made over the loudspeaker. The gate agent said nothing. Perhaps United really assumed everyone would just pack up and go shell out a couple hundred bucks for food and lodging.
After all, once you’re being charged $7 for a can of Pringles and $13 for a “snack plate” involving a cheese stick and two bagged apple slices, how much dignity can you really fight for?
But a group of people began swelling around the ticket counter. Most were Oaxacans, along with a handful of Americans, Europeans, and Australians.
One Oaxacan woman remarked, “But this is a huge American company. They’re not going to give us a hotel?” She was genuinely shocked.
The gate agent ignored the Oaxacans altogether. Despite manning this flight to Mexico, he spoke no Spanish. To everyone else, he haughtily declared, “The flight was not canceled. It was delayed.”
“For seventeen hours,” someone pointed out. He rolled his eyes. “There is nothing United can do,” he said. A European woman insisted this was crazy. In Europe, where the federal government actually oversees corporate behavior, airlines are legally mandated to provide food and lodging in the event of any extended delay, no matter the cause. But not here, baby. Not in Houston. It’s hot. Expect the unexpected.
The gate agent called his supervisor when the mass refused to disburse. Look, the supervisor shouted, the airline is not responsible for weather.
But the flight was canceled only ten minutes before takeoff, someone said, and you’re rescheduling it for another day. There are no other flights. No other options. United seriously is not going to provide anything?
“You can go on United.com and submit receipts for hotels, and they should reimburse you, okay?” The supervisor said this only in English. The Americans, Europeans, and Australians left at this point.
The remaining crowd was entirely Oaxacan. Some of these people had been waiting already in the Houston airport for more than eight hours.
An elderly pair of siblings from Sacramento was flying to Oaxaca to visit their ailing parents. A grandmother in her seventies or eighties, no more than five feet tall, was returning home from a visit with her children in Washington State; she had a disabled adult son with her in a wheelchair.
A young mom from Wisconsin was traveling alone with an infant and a four-year-old to visit her family. A middle-aged woman and her thirteen-year-old son from Buffalo, who’d woken up at 1 a.m. to drive to Cleveland and catch a flight from there, were visiting relatives in their natal village. The woman had spent more than thirty years in Buffalo picking grapes. Her shy son was more than a foot taller than her.
These people were completely ignored. No one spoke to them in Spanish; no one offered them any help.
I know these people. They do not have credit card points they’ll use for downtown hotels, like the young, white American couple from Columbus, Ohio we talked to the next day. They don’t have corporate jobs and paid vacation. Most of them work, and have worked, their butts off day in and day out, like the woman who wakes at 5 am in twenty-degree Buffalo winters to pick American grapes.
“Wait a minute,” I asked the supervisor, “you’re just going to leave these people here without any assistance? Some don’t speak English. They might not know how to chat on the United app with a customer service representative.”
“She can have a room,” the supervisor said, pointing at the young mother with kids. “I know how it is to travel with kids.”
“What about her?” I asked, pointing at the grandmother with the disabled son. “Not her,” he said. “We can’t just give it to everyone.”
Let’s be clear here. United received 7.7 billion dollars – let me say that again, 7.7 billion dollars – in the form of a bailout from the federal government during COVID. It earned 13.6 billion dollars – that’s 13.6 billion dollars, people, billion – in profits in 2023.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, “United got billions of dollars of federal bailout money during the pandemic, and you can’t pay for a hotel room for one night for a grandmother and her disabled son?”
“We’re not responsible,” the supervisor said.
“But you’re telling people they can get refunds online,” I said. “That’s a lot harder to do for elderly people who don’t speak English. And if you can give a room to one family with kids, you can give it to other people as well. At least this woman.”
Nope, the supervisor refused. This is when Jorge and I started to go a little bonkers.
A quick but important point here: this is not a white savior narrative. I did not come charging in and rescue these people. There were at least fifteen Oaxacans there, at the counter, and they all stayed because they knew they were more powerful in a group. They understood that their power lay in their solidarity. I just translated.
The woman with a baby and a four-year-old did not leave when she got her hotel room, as I’d venture many people (understandably!) would. She stayed because it would be anathema to leave when so many others were waiting. She stayed for hours, standing, rocking her baby. Elena played Pokemon with her four-year-old.
The grandma with a disabled son stayed. The elderly couple stayed. Not a single person left when their needs were met. They waited for everyone.
So it was the mass of people that made the difference. I talked, Jorge filmed. We were playing the game: I understood how in this country there are no rules, there is no regulation, there is no expectation of fair play, and to extract meager funds from corporate America’s billions is a sick and exhausting chess match of persistence, verbal prowess, and trickery.
In the end, they gave us three rooms. It took hours to fight for and coordinate with the supervisor in person and after that, when he stormed off and gave up on us, with representatives online, Jorge and I each furiously texting on different people’s phones, but we did it. It cost United less than $1000.
We got one room for the woman with her children, one for the elderly lady with her disabled son, and one for a woman who had just had surgery. The woman with the children figured out it was possible to request two rooms via the voucher on the Holiday Inn website, and with this hack, the three people who’d gotten rooms offered three more to other families.
All of this was possible only because everyone stayed together and worked together, even after an epic twelve-hour day at the airport.
Later, I remembered a detail from a Pacific Standard story I wrote in 2019 about racial reconciliation at a Cincinnati megachurch. The church was running a pioneering program about race in the United States, trying to bring white people and people of color together in the name of greater understanding. I attended the course as a journalist and found it profoundly moving.
One of the speeches was by a white pastor who’d attended Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993, during the Rodney King riots in L.A. At the height of the riots, one of the pastor’s professors had invited all the students to gather in the auditorium to discuss the situation and pray. All in all, the pastor told us, out of a majority white student body, about 200 black students attended. About 50 Koreans came. Not a single white person showed up.
The next morning, at Starbucks, Jorge refused to talk to the Americans and Australians who’d gathered there. Screw them, he said. They didn’t stay. They just took their privilege and left.
They didn’t know any better, I argued. But it was true. They had the means – the technical know-how, the language, the funds – to advocate for themselves, and they did just that and then they each went their own way.
But solidarity is a joy. This is what many Americans do not understand, because it is not a core value in our culture. We conflate individual power and “freedom” with happiness, even though we are a nation overwhelmed by anxiety, animosity, and depression.
Solidarity feels so much better than the lone struggle, and it feels so much better than racist hatred. At the Holiday Inn, where the room smelled like damp smoke, the TV didn’t work, and we ate cold Little Ceasar’s pizza with the texture of a flip flop, we watched approximately three minutes of the debate.
After Trump declared that immigrants – the very people we’d just spent hours with at the airport, who’d refused to leave until everyone was taken care of – were coming here to “rape and murder Americans,” Elena burst into tears and we turned it off.
That kind of righteous, racist, superior anger can feel good. It can feel like a high. It can feel like superiority, like holiness even. But after awhile, it sickens. It corrupts. It taints the soul and becomes the opposite of the purity it espouses.
Solidarity, I wish people knew, just feels so much better. It feels right: it feels like the natural state of the planet, in which we all share air, water, space, heartbreak. It feels like a spiritual and biological truth.
In the morning, we took an Uber from the hotel to the airport. As the sun rose, we drove past miles of abandoned, hulking, concrete malls; a vape superstore; a gym the size of a small town; a restaurant called Hot Biscuit that took up a whole city block; , a billboard that read PSYCHIC with a phone number; chain hotels soaring like islands from dusty wastelands; and several gas stations featuring a chain called Tacolicious.
The Uber driver, a middle-aged white man who reeked of smoke, told us he didn’t like the Northeast, “all the buildings all stacked up like that.” We drove down a superhighway surrounded on all sides by electric lines extending infinitely into the flat Texas horizon.
But once, the driver told us, he’d eaten one of the best meals of his life in the basement of a hospital in the Bronx. “They brought out a plate of spaghetti and it had the most giant meatball on it. And man, I still remember that meatball.”
He asked Jorge about Oaxaca, and if he could “pronounce it in English.” Then he commented that his best friend’s wife was Mexican. “The good thing about the Mexicans is they’re always gonna feed ya.”
At the airport, the elderly lady with the disabled son told us to come to her house outside Oaxaca City anytime we wanted, and she’d feed us.
Dulce, the woman with the two children, rocked her baby gently in his stroller. Elena asked me if she could hold him and I demurred; I didn’t want to disturb them. But Dulce said sure, you can hold him.
She took him out of his stroller and set him in Elena’s lap. He was the happiest baby, laughing delighted giggles as Elena made faces at him. The four-year-old, Diego, put on a big show of tickling under his little brother’s chin. He and Elena arm-wrestled and she let him win and he kept announcing SOY TAN FUERTE! to all around us.
The woman – Maria – who’d spent thirty years picking grapes in Buffalo asked me if I wanted to be Facebook friends. We spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to friend each other because my settings wouldn’t allow it for some reason, and then I gave the phone to her thirteen-year-old son and he did it in two seconds. We laughed and laughed. She sent a message to Jorge later blessing us.
This is solidarity. It feels like joy. Like hope. Like the opposite of what we all witnessed on the debate stage. Like the opposite of hoarding one’s privilege in fear and anger. Like the opposite of sadness.
Like Dulce shouting “Thank you Jesus!” in English when the plane finally landed. It tastes sweet as the grapes Maria picks in Buffalo winters, which those of you reading this newsletter have likely eaten, feeling the juice fill your mouth as you mourn or celebrate, your sustenance provided and shared by a tiny Oaxacan woman whose fate is your own, whether you know it or not.
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