Help Jose Martinez & His Family Recover from Deportation

All of the funds raised here will go to Jose Martinez and his family in Honduras. His family is scraping by, trying to recover from the injustices done to them. The money will fund their living expenses until they get back on their feet in their country of origin. They primarily need housing, but the cost of food and travel have also been challenging so far.

They came to Irving, Texas seeking safety and stability. Their story is largely not mine to tell, but the conditions in Honduras were extreme enough to warrant this decision. Their journey to America took more than a year. They slept on concrete floors for most of it, and walked much of the distance on foot. They had no connections or family in Irving, but they got to work quickly, settling in and making themselves a home. They were productive, happy members of the Irving community until they were served a deportation order.

I teach 11th grade English, but I met Jose when he was a freshman. He was drawn to the guitars on display in my classroom. He became an essential member of our new guitar club. He was talented and faithful, friendly and always happy to teach others. The trouble for them started immediately after Trump’s inauguration. Jose, normally happy and talkative, shrunk down. The rhetoric around him, the reports of ICE testing public schools, stories of family friends getting deported all stacked up quickly.

Over the past two years, he frequented my classroom daily. He borrowed my guitars to play during lunch break. He gathered an ever-shifting group of 6-8 friends who lugged around instruments all day just to play for 20 minutes in the hallway during study hall. They made plenty of noise, but nobody ever complained. They were good! And they had so much fun--nobody could be annoyed by them.

Jose made close relationships with just about everybody in the school. On his last days, he spent time walking the halls with friends and sitting in administrator's offices. He came to my room often, setting a soundtrack for my reading lessons. He wanted to spend as much time as possible celebrating his relationships. Jose was truly beloved by people all over Nimitz High School. For weeks leading up to his departure, his quiet moments filled with turmoil. His voice shook gently. He sighed, mumbled Oh, man, and rubbed his face. He was afraid. He told me stories about his hometown--none that I'm at liberty to share.

He learned guitar soon after he arrived in America so many years ago. His father drove him 45 minutes to buy his first guitar for $40, a Davison guitar he found on Facebook. The guitar's bridge was missing screws (he used 2 pennies pinned to the saddle with string tension), the wiring was faulty, and the tuners barely did their job. But he spent hours every night learning songs by ear. Every minute spent practicing was a minute not spent thinking about things he saw.

Before leaving the states, Jose gifted this guitar to me.

He wanted me to remember him. I gave him one of my guitars to remember me by as well (an acoustic, which will be easier for him to play consistently). I am now working with a YouTube star and incredible musician named Dovydas to preserve Jose’s gift and spread the work of his story.