Eddie Canales

Eddie Canales
Born	(1948-01-12)January 12, 1948
Died	July 30, 2024(2024-07-30) (aged 76)
Known for	Human rights advocacy

Eduardo Osiel Canales ((1948-01-12)January 12, 1948–(2024-07-30)July 30, 2024), known as Eddie Canales, was a human rights advocate and former union organizer who advocated for the welfare of migrants crossing the border into South Texas. He set up nearly 200 water stations along routes taken by migrants avoiding a checkpoint along U.S. Route 281, dozens of whom die each year from dehydration and temperature extremes. He also helped coordinate rescue missions, and sometimes assisted in the recovery of remains, when people's loved ones went missing in the area; Texas programs for identifying the dead are notoriously under-resourced, and migrants are sometimes buried, unidentified, in mass graves. He founded the South Texas Human Rights Center, a nonprofit intended to prevent the death and suffering of migrants on the border. He died July 30th, 2024, after a months-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Biography

Early life

Eddie Canales' parents were migrant farmworkers from the Rio Grande Valley, but he grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was bilingual, and learned to read from a young age. He worked to help to support is family as a child, shining shoes, sweeping a barbershop floor, and cleaning up a cafeteria. As a child he attended schools in South Texas, including Sam Houston Elementary School in Corpus Christi. He graduated from W. B. Ray High School in 1966 and then worked a job cleaning airplanes for Eastern Airlines while attending Del Mar College.

Union organizing and activism

By 1968 he was a student at the University of Houston, where, spurred by the United Farm Workers and the Delano grape strike, he became involved in union organizing. He joined the Mexican American Youth Organization, and campaigned for the Raza Unida Party, its offshoot, which advocated for Chicano rights. He ran for but was not elected as state representative in 1976.

After leaving the college without a degree, he helped to start Centro Aztlan, a community center in Houston where he worked with undocumented immigrants. In 1986 he moved to Denver, where he represented janitors as an organizer for the Service Employees International Union. In 1998 he became an organizer for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, intending to recruit more Hispanic immigrants into the union.

After eventually returning to Texas, he was encouraged by his friend Maria Jimenez, another immigrant rights activist, to get involved in Brooks County. He founded the South Texas Human Rights center in 2013 in response to the large and continuing number of deaths of undocumented immigrants trying to hike around a nearby border checkpoint; in 2012, 129 bodies were recovered, and about 5 times as many are estimated not to have been found. This was a significant increase from 2010, when only 22 bodies had been found.

In 2014, he and other activists pushed for the enforcement of a Texas law mandating that unidentified bodies be DNA tested, and pushed for unidentified bodies in the county cemetery to be exhumed for identification and the comfort of their families. This led to the discovery by researchers exhuming migrants from mass graves for this purpose that some had been buried in trash bags, body bags, shopping bags, or without containers. One body bag was discovered containing the bones of three separate people. 20 bodies had been identified as of 2017. The bodies were found under small markers marked with the name of the local funeral home, Funeraria del Angel Howard-Williams, which county officials in Brooks County and the neighboring Jim Hogg County stated had been paid by the county to bury the bodies of immigrants since at least 1998 and 1992 respectively.

In popular culture

• He appears in a 2020 documentary called Missing in Brooks County.

Further reading

Obituaries and tributes

• Nickas, Katie (1 August 2024). "Edward 'Eddie' Canales, Corpus Christi advocate for migrants and laborers, dies at 76". Caller Times.
• Tamez, Ana (1 August 2024). "Immigrants' rights advocate Eduardo 'Eddie' Canales dies Wednesday". KIII.

• Muro, Nanzi (7 August 2024). "Eddie Canales ¡Presente! A Longtime Human Rights Activist Has Died". People's Tribune.
• Del Bosque, Melissa (21 August 2024). "A Visionary in the Borderlands". Texas Observer.
• Pope, Pachatta (31 July 2024). "Texas migrant advocate, civil rights activist Eddie Canales dies at 76". KSAT-TV.
• "Honoring the life of Eduardo "Eddie" Canales". National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. 31 July 2024.

News coverage while living

• Del Bosque, Melissa (16 June 2014). "Tyrant's Foe: Eddie Canales Is Saving the Lives of Undocumented Immigrants". The Texas Observer.
• Hennessy-Fiske, Molly (19 July 2014). "Migrant crisis expands north from border, into arid Texas wilderness". Los Angeles Times.
• Davies, David Martin (30 December 2019). "The Dead In The Desert: Water Stations Save Lives". Texas Public Radio.
• Isacson, Adam (30 October 2020). "Preventing Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border". Washington Office on Latin America.
• Gibson, Michael (4 June 2021). "South Texas Human Rights Center calling for immigration policy changes". KIII.
• Monroe, Rachel (2 August 2022). "The Missing Migrants of South Texas". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X.
• Sanchez, Sandra (15 July 2022). "Watering stations a lifeline for migrants wandering under intense heat of South Texas". Border Report.
• Cabrera, Kristen (15 August 2023). "Life-saving water stations along migrant routes in South Texas brush go missing". Texas Standard.

Oral history

• Canales, Eddie (30 June 2015). "Oral History Interview with Eddie Canales" (Interview). Interviewed by Enriquez, Sandra; Robles, David.{{cite interview}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: interviewers list (link)