On Liberty, Tangerine Houses, and Hurricanes

I loved our lime-green 3 bedroom, 2-half bath house on Egania Street, no matter how many times the piping froze in the winter and the toilet got stopped up. I loved that it stood on painted wooden stilts like a circus performer, wobbly under pressure but never willing to surrender. I loved that house, but I sure didn’t love everything that happened around it.

It was late September of 2005, I was 13, and we’d barely begun to recover from the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. While most of my classmates moved with their families across the Southeast, my little 3-person family unit and I were stuck living amongst the rubble left behind. For the 2 weeks or so, we were all-gas-no-brakes when it came to repairing our little green house. Grammy patched ceiling holes while standing on a wobbly foot stool. Mom ripped out the mildewy floor boards and began to replace it herself. I went around the outside with trash bags and made endless laps, trying not to focus on the fact that the vibrant, colorful neighborhood I used to know was reduced to shards of glass, tree branches, and plastic. The thing is, our city as we knew it was gone forever, and we were all mourning that in different ways.

Some quickly jumped up to volunteer at medical tents or food kitchens, some moved away for good, and others stood frozen still in time, like figures in blurry photographs. My mom and grandma were part of the first group, hypomanic in their efforts to quadruple-handed-ly save our Crescent City. Me, though? Volunteering to clean up leftover rotting debris with my grandmother’s church group wasn’t exactly what I was focused on. No, I had my eyes on Orlando Aguilar and Orlando Aguilar alone.

He barely spoke any English but was the most gorgeous human being I’d ever seen in my life. And he was now my next-door neighbor after the LaSalles fled for Baton Rouge, leaving their dilapidated home behind. Before the storm, it was a brilliant tangerine color and had windchimes and sun-catchers galore on its modest front porch. Now, parts of the roof were missing, and the door was blown off. But they rented it out for dirt-cheap, and, by now, they had a soft spot for people who were fleeing. The LaSalles fell into the group of those who moved away for good; there was no logic behind rebuilding when the damage was catastrophic and Baton Rouge was calling. But while they mourned, they helped a family build a new life from the ground up – or at least, from the broken windows and missing door up. For the Aguilars, there was no hole too big to patch.

They were working on rebuilding the city too, a city they fully embraced as their own despite it rejecting them over and over again. In the process, they were exposed to dangerous toxins and working conditions. I want to say that our city embraced them, their tiredness, their poverty, and their yearning to breathe free. But I can’t. Because even in this melting pot of a city, the Aguilars learned quickly that the Statue of Liberty lies, over and over again.

Mr. and Mrs. Aguilar were rarely home, but Orlando was. They’d tasked him with painting over portions of the house with a paintbrush that was really just a bit too small. I watched as he coated the chipped wooden planks with tangerine paint, his T-shirt soaked in sweat. I’m not sure if they felt a duty to honor the LaSalles by choosing that same color or if they actually liked it too, but I started to feel a sort of gut-wrenching sense of nostalgia when the tangerine began to emerge again. Like the sun finally rising over our dark and clouded city.

One day in early October, when boredom hit me, I walked outside to get a closer glimpse at Orlando while he painted the side that faced mine. Soon enough, he turned around to take a swig of the Coca-Cola glass bottle he had sitting next to his stool and caught me watching him.

“Hola,” Orlando called out to me.

“Hola. Qué pasa,” I responded, using the little Spanish we had begun to learn in our 8th grade intro class that school year.

Next thing I knew, he was approaching the porch and speaking in rapid-fire Spanish. I couldn’t understand a single word of what he was saying. My jaw grew sore from the awkward smiling.

“No habla español,” I finally said. I’m pretty sure I even said that wrong.

“Ah,” he remarked, disappointed but smiling. He waved awkwardly and walked back to his bucket, a makeshift stool.

And just like that, he started painting again. I stared at his shiny jet-black hair and his gorgeous caramel-colored skin. I wanted to speak with him so badly that it hurt, the kind of deep, fragile ache that is never quite as intense again as it is at 13.

Thankfully, communicating without words was something I learned how to do quickly, and so did he. His bedroom window faced our laundry room, and I found ways to spend more time in there. I would read perched on top of the washing machine, my legs completely bent in that small space. He’d paint funny shapes on the planks when he caught me looking and then instantly paint over them, like nothing had happened. Sometimes, he’d come closer to my window and knock when I wasn’t looking, making me jump and then laughing hysterically. I longed to be able to speak with him.

The Aguilars were perplexed by my family’s Spanish-sounding last name and were initially ecstatic when they saw it on our mailbox.

“Barrio, no?” The Aguilars had said when they first met us and realized that we couldn’t speak a word of Spanish. “El barrio?”

Though my last name was technically Spanish in origin, I was a mutt if there had ever been one; my father was half Vietnamese, one-quarter Spanish, and one-quarter African American, and my mother was half-caucasian, half-African American. Grammy was just plain white, the kind where you could list out a bunch of random European countries and it would be believable. Of course, the truth was that she had no idea where her origins were.

My thick, textured light-brown hair, oval-shaped yellow-green eyes, and bronze skin made me stand out in public so much that strange men commented on my beauty like I was the only one belonging to some rare species of girl.

“Mutts find mutts,” my mom would always tell me. “You’ll see.”

“She’ll bring home a blonde-haired-blue-eyed Ken doll,” Grammy cackled once in response. “You just wait and see.”

“No, she’s a Magwire through-and-through,” Mom responded with a grin, referring to the surname that Grammy and Granddad created themselves.

“Hush, Tressie,” she snapped back, but she was smiling from ear-to-ear.

I guess she must have been thinking of my Granddad, a Black man who she married at 2am on August 2nd, 1955, in New Orleans when they were both 18 years old. It was an elopement, one that her father was floridly against. Her father, Billy James Magee, was a conservative white preacher in Baton Rouge, and her mother was the perfect Southern wife who did as she was told. The Magees were white supremacists, all decorated with collared shirts, engraved Bibles, and whispered slurs. Naturally, when Billy James found out about the relationship, he disowned his daughter without hesitation, sending her right out the door.

“You’re no Magee; you’re not one of us. You’re a God-damned live wire,” her father had yelled at her right before slamming the door, practically foaming at the mouth.

“No, Daddy, I’m a Magwire,” she snapped back.

Granddad, as the story goes, was waiting around the corner, close enough to hear the encounter but far enough away to protect his own life. In an effort to start from scratch, they changed both of their names. Written on the marriage certificate that miraculously survived the storm are two names: Bethany and Marcus Magwire.

And thus “Magwire” became synonymous with the phrase “Live wire” to describe both my Grammy and my Mom’s fiery personalities. I, on the other hand, was an introverted bookworm, too scared to speak up in class first or strike up conversation with cute neighbor boys. But something about Orlando made my fear into butterflies, ones that I wanted to feel dancing inside of me again and again.

“¿Quieres explorar?” Orlando asked me one day, smiling and pointing at the wreckage that surrounded us.

Some construction company had begun to dig up old pipes and telephone poles that were enmeshed in the debris. So we made a game of searching through the bits and pieces, placing any special findings in a bin I’d brought from home. We communicated mostly by hand gestures and facial expressions, but somehow it worked. We still spoke our native languages when we did this. The exploration lasted for several weeks because we had nothing but time. Neither of us was in school, given that the majority of public schools were still closed at this point, and our families were back working, taking on shifts to scrape up every last dime they could.

I went to sleep each night ready to open my eyes again and see his adorable face. We held hands once for a brief moment and almost kissed once on his back porch. But, at the last minute, I turned my head out of fear, thinking I’d do it wrong. He just laughed and smiled, kissing me on the cheek instead. We were best friends. His face was the first I saw every morning when I looked out my window, and his hug was the last touch of all of my days. We lived in a perfect limbo that I never wanted to end. And it didn’t.

Until one day, one awful, gut-wrenching, devastating, horrifying day. It was 7am, and I was woken up by a scream that I swear made my blood stop moving through my whole body. It was Orlando’s scream. And screams don’t require translations.

He was in danger. I threw off my covers, pulled on the first pair of pants I could find, and ran in the direction the scream had come from. I looked and saw him lying on the ground, his arms charred and his hair frizzy and singed. I gasped. A ladder rested against the shed by his house. It looked like he had been trying to grab a large branch off of the shed but grabbed the power line instead to steady his balance. He had been electrocuted by the power line.

“No te preocupes,” I said weakly, over and over again. “Yo Llamar 911.”

I tried to communicate with him in the minimal broken Spanish I knew. I stood there, looking up at him, telling him stories and trying to help him stay awake. He was so lethargic, barely responding to anything I said to him. I wanted to hold his hand and rub his shoulder to comfort him, but I was selfishly afraid I would get shocked too. Even to this day, it is a regret I hold somewhere deep in my bones.

When the ambulance finally got there, they tried to rush me away from the scene, but I fought as hard as I could. Orlando wasn’t conscious at this point, but I know he would have tried to fight going to the ED if he could have. His parents were terrified of getting deported. I begged them to let me ride in the ambulance with him, but they wouldn’t budge. Somehow, at some point, a local news van pulled up and tried to interview me.

“This must have been terrifying to watch,” a news anchor said to me, holding a large microphone to my face. “Walk us through what happened when you saw him.”

I ran away and sat on my porch, crying with my head in my hands at the fact that I couldn’t hold his hand during the scariest moment in his life. I bawled my eyes out, so much so that my eyes swelled up like giant puffy balloons and they were so red that I could have sworn every last blood vessel had burst. But I waited right there on the porch for hours so I could tell his parents as soon as they came home. When I finally saw a car drop them off, I ran as quickly as I could.

“Orlando está en hospital,” I blurted out. “Quick! Verlo!”

I can picture the color draining from their faces vividly, as if it happened just minutes ago instead of two decades ago now. They were frozen in a third space that only exists in moments of sheer horror. At some point, adrenaline allowed their muscles to move again, and they got back in the car that had dropped them off and left the neighborhood.

On that day, Monday, December 16th, 2005, I saw the Aguilars for the last time. The immigration services enforcement officers weren’t allowed in the hospital, but his story made headlines. I saw his beautiful face for the last time on our kitchen TV, hooked up to a breathing machine. Although his eyes were closed and his face looked swollen, he was still as perfect as ever. But the immigration people must have found his family somehow and investigated their citizenship, an act so horrendous my brain couldn’t comprehend it. At 13 years old, I watched the city that the Aguilars helped rebuild from the ground up turn them away without as much as a thank-you.

It is December of 2025 now. Two whole decades have passed since the day I still consider to be the worst of my whole life. I am in New York for an immigration law conference, and I have decided to visit Lady Liberty, maybe partly because I was persuaded by a very eager tour guide, because she doesn’t do much for me. And then I see it, the famous message. The one I’m well aware of but have never seen in person.

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

And I cry. I cry as I looked out at the Hudson, wondering if a man named Orlando Aguilar is still out there somewhere. His smile and laugh are as vivid to me as they ever were. Encased in a tangerine glow. Joyful as a street musician in Jackson Square.

And then I wipe my tears and prepare to head back to the conference. Where the spirits of the Orlandos and Aguilars are kept alive. Where we, perhaps naively, work to figure out how to make Lady Liberty's message a reality someday.

But first, I hold a moment of silence. For all of the immigrants who helped rebuild my beloved city. Thank you. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart. I won't stop fighting for you. This I promise.