It seems that both my Dad and I
have the habit of maintaining childhood bedrooms well in to our twenties. My room in Alaska is still pasted with
National Geographic maps and jars of pennies and ski team memorobilia, and his
in a farmhouse basement in rural Kansas remains to this day a sort of time
capule form 1977, the year he got out of the Army and packed up a horse trailer
full of belongings to head North. In his
old room dusty Louis L’Amour novels spill off the shelf, a vintage 1977 Lord of
The Rings calendar dons the wall (“From way before it was cool,” he says). A pair of cracked leather work boots are still ready
to slip on. It’s the room I always end
up staying in when I visit Grandma’s house.
She’s been gone for six years now, but the house remains empty and is
still hers as far as I can tell.
Uncle David passed away a few months ago and my family and I
traveled down for the service. I stayed
in my dad’s old room like always, where in the corner there is an old desk stuffed
with manila folders labeled with non-sequiters like “Taegu, Korea” and “Ft.
Benning” and “Parasitology” and “Equestrian Anatomy.” Manila folders that tell
the story of what I know of his earlier years before Alaska, veterinary school
followed by five years of military service.
For whatever reason I’d never opened and read the contents of these
folders, but for somehow on this visit I felt it was time. Most of it was banal- reciepts and memos and
prescriptions- but eventually I struck gold.
Here I will share one particular nugget, from thick folder labeled
“Panama” where he was stationed for a year and a half in the Army.
It was a yellowed script in Spanish with crooked
typeset, a copy of which you can see with this link: (Denuncia de Chiapas c. 1975). Reading through the old paper my eyes widened as the dust cleared from the Español gears of my brain.
Here are a few excerpts from my translation:
Without
the strength of labor from the peasants and the workers, the wealthy (the supposed owners of the world) are no
more than miserable worms incapable of producing
anything, nor even feeding their repugnant selves because they are parasites who live at the expense of the
exploited worker.
And:
The blood of our fallen comrades fertilizes
the people’s struggle!
And:
He who does not fight for his rights
deserves to be a slave!
Et cetera. What was
this thing, a handbill from a Fidel Castro rally? There were no similar papers in the folder,
no context provided. What was the story
here? I brought the paper upstairs to
interrogate my dad, busily carving one of his many miniature wooden chickens at the kitchen
table.
“Oh wow,” he said when I unfolded it for him. “I remember
exactly where that came from.” The paper
was not from Panama, nor Cuba (never been)- but Mexico. Apparently when he received his new duty post
in Panama in 1975 he decided to drive there from Kansas, and over a few weeks
drove South in an old Chevy El Camino through Mexico and Central America.
One afternoon on the road just South of Oaxaca, an agitated
crowd manning a roadblock at a crossroads out in the countryside stopped
him. It was a scene I myself had seen
unfold a half-dozen of times during my own travels in South America last
year. While a crowd of young men waving
signs and burning old tires in the middle of the street to protest whatever is
the cause at hand is not necessarily a daily
sight in Latin America, it has far more precedent than anywhere you’d visit in the
U.S.A. Burning tires are hardly even a last resort to get attention, protests are generally peaceful even as the air is fouled with black tar.
Cpt. Meyer pulled up behind an idling bus and rolled down
the window. “I waited there behind the
bus and watched one of the roadblock guys up ahead shouting back and forth with
the driver. They waved their arms around
and got all excited for a minute. I had
just spent six months in Army language school learning Spanish, so I could
understand some of what they were
saying- but I did my best to play dumb,” he said. “All I could tell really is that I’d be
waiting here for a while.”
An indeterminate period of waiting passed. The sun blazed and the engines idled. The longer he waited the more worried he
became. At one point he watched several
of the men get out buckets of red paint and go about applying a wide, dripping
red stripe encircling the bus in front of him.
Right then he got a little more worried.
If this were some kind of protest rally he didn’t know what they’d think
about Americans, particularly a military officer traveling solo and
unarmed. “I figured if I got out of
there with no more than a red stripe around my car I’d be happy.”
The newly striped bus eventually rolled off. He pulled up in the El Camino and exchanged a
few formalities with the men. Soon they
were making pronouncements in flowery Marxist rhetoric, odes to fallen comrades
and the like. He continued to play dumb
and do his best to be a clueless tourist.
He couldn’t understand what it was they wanted to convert him to. After a few minutes they gave up on bringing
the American to their cause and waved him on through with no paint and no harm
done. They handed him the document that
I would find years later in a dusty desk drawer, and he was free.
Later on I translated the rest of the document, which I’ve
included here below. (I’ve also scanned
the original and included a link to the .pdf file). It is a grandiloquent work of fiery
accusation and rhetoric and was rather challenging to translate. My dad had no idea at the time, but the men
at roadblock were protesting a massive lay-off by a “local” lumber
company. In summary, the document claims
that when the workers had earlier petitioned for fair wages, the company
responded by firing everyone involved with the petition. It accuses local politicians of being in bed
with American corporations profiting handsomely while leaving the Mexican
laborers to live on starvation wages, and claims that they have been repressed
and attacked by local military leaders under the company’s thumb. They were on strike because there is nothing
else they could do.
This handbill I found, this random page of historical
flotsam that washed up to me, is a fascinating piece of primary documentation
of ongoing history. The most striking
thing about it to me is the flowery and revolutionary language. It written in a style that would be hard for
most to take seriously today in all but the most extreme crowds. The vocabulary of protest today has likely
changed; however the issues have not. While
Latin America is not necessarily the poorest region of the world overall in
terms of per capita GDPs, it is the region with the highest levels of economic
inequality. More so than in many societies,
in Latin America the rich are very rich and the poor are very poor- with less
of a middle class than might be found even in less developed economies.
I miss my friends and my time in South America dearly, and my
Spanish is decomposing bit by bit. I
hope to take on more projects like this in the future to hold on to what I
can. Here is a link again to the .pdf, my
attempt at a translation below:
TO THE GENERAL POPULACE:
We bring to your awareness the
following complaint:
Two years ago, in the state of
Chiapas in the city of Comitan de Dominguez, several companies in the lumber
industry fired a large number of workers for the simple act of demanding better
living conditions, accusing them of possessing bad elements and plans to
revolt. Clearly this massive lay-off was
to serve the interests of the “local” businessmen, who are no more than shadow puppets
of American capital managers and rely on the governor of Chiapas (Dr. Manuel
Velasco Suarez), who is their primary shareholder, to protect these
exploitators.
At the root of a lack of a solution
for these workers is the combative example of the despotic owners and rats of
the P.R.I. government towards the revolutionary struggle. Though the PRI fancies itself democratic, it
is the direct cause of the misery, exploitation, and hunger of our country
(primarily in the poor classes).
And so, the situation has reached a
critical point where the workers, tired of being treated poorly, provided a
miserable salary, and living always in hunger in midst of the misery and
ignorance sown by the masters; have decided to fight to overcome or die in the
effort. To date, they have been on
strike 75 days without a resolution, which includes the signature upon a
collective work contract, reintegration of dismissed comrades, and recognition
of their independent syndicate, “Dr. Belisario Dominguez.” Additionally, they have been the object of
repression by the military and also attacked by governmental leaders who send
their subordinates with money- by means of threats.
This situation has provoked the
peasants, the workers, and the students conscious of the social reality in
which we live- to provide definitive support to these exploited comrades who
are demanding their rights.
And
consequently it is for this, that we ask for the support of all those who feel
themselves to be sons of a social class under the yoke of the wealthy (the
Bourgeois). We invite them to come
together and demand a solution to the problem for our brothers-of-class in the
state of Chiapas. We have begun to wake
up and demand that which is due. Without
the strength of labor from the peasants and the workers, the wealthy (the
supposed owners of the world) are no more than miserable worms incapable of
producing anything nor even feeding their repugnant selves because they are
parasites who live at the expense of the exploited worker.
BROTHERS, LET US ORGANIZE AND
SUPPORT THE STRUGGLE FOR OUR LIBERATION FROM THE YOKE OF THE EXPLOITER!
LET US MAINTAIN FIRM THE STRUGGLE
BEGUN BY THE WORKERS OF COMITAN, CHIAPAS!
TOGETHER WE WILL OVERCOME! ONWARD TO VICTORY!
HE WHO DOES NOT FIGHT FOR HIS
RIGHTS DESERVES TO BE A SLAVE!
WHILE THE P.R.I./CAPITALISTS GOVERN
WE WILL CONTINUE UNDER THE YOKE OF EXPLOITATION!
ON WITH THE STRUGGLE FOR A
GOVERNMENT WITHOUT SOCIAL CLASSES!
THE BLOOD OF FALLEN COMRADES
FERTILIZES THE PEOPLES STRUGGLE!
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