Listening well is an important skill, but so is listening
patiently. Recently I learned that listening with patience, keeping your ears
open to certain questions pays off, even after a lifetime and Niagara style waterfall full the twists and turns of a family’s journey.
Listening with patience we can sometimes hear about
something that answers questions we can hardly ask ourselves out loud.
Our family of five children lost Adolfo, Jr., our dad, on the
day I turned three. He had gone to earn some overtime on a Sunday when an
accident on the job took his life. Dad worked at the smelter in Douglas Arizona,
processing copper from the nearby mine in the town of Bisbee, one of Arizona’s
many copper mines.
I had a lot of questions. Whenever the family talked about him I
listened carefully to learn about my Dad. I had a few memories of my own of
him. Even today, 62 years later, I
remember seeing him turn on the sidewalk coming home from work, watching him through our front screen
door. He always handed me a candy from his lunchbox. He was 6 feet tall and
broad shouldered. I remember him once swiftly picking me up from the ground when
I fell off the swing set he had welded for me in the back yard. I remember feeling
immediately comforted in his arms.
Getting information about my Dad was not easy. Momma had her
own problems. Their relationship had been difficult. Opposites attract, but
it’s also true that opposites clash, and those two clashed in awful ways
about money, women, just radically different life philosophies. So Momma was
not a good person to talk to about him for her own many reasons about the past,
but also the pressing problems of the present.
My four siblings were also just doing their best to get along without
Dad and live their lives. I kept my ears open as I grew up but I didn’t hear
much about him, so like a fading signal to a distant radio station, the times
we talked about him grew less frequent. We all changed the channel to our
present lives and the busy tumble of growing up.
In grade school I felt ashamed to not have a living dad. Kids in my class wondered how exactly did our
family get along without a father? How was my mother able to stay at home without a husband who went to work every day like their dads did? We had sold our
home in Arizona and used the money to build a house in Laredo where we moved so
Momma could have more support from family and her old girlhood friends. I didn’t know how to answer my curious classmates, but I also knew that they didn’t see how Momma could
stretch a dollar.
She was frugal because she had to be with the social security
check she received every month and the small check she received from the
Arizona Worker’s Compensation Fund. Not more than a few hundred all together.
She drove across to Nuevo Laredo to buy our meats, produce, groceries. The boys
got their haircuts in Mexico.
I kept listening and once in a while in the morning Momma
woke up so happy because she had dreamed about him. Tu Papá. But those times
were rare. Strings of months would pass without a mention of my father. And in
that way the years passed. The decades
passed. The distant radio signal was
hardly noticeable.
In my thirties, I found an unexpected clue about my
father in an exhibit at the Institute of Texan Cultures on the Borderlands and
the town of Zapata. My Dad’s family
settled Zapata when Texas was still Mexico. People I met at the exhibit claimed
they had taken in my Dad when he was just a toddler after his mother
had died. Some answers, and consequently more questions. How had my father been
handed from family to family growing up?
More questions surfaced. At the 50th anniversary
of the end of World War Two I was commissioned by the local PBS station to
produce a documentary about San Antonio during the war. Naturally I looked at
my own family and the war. Before he left Arizona for the war, my uncle, also
named Adolfo, contacted his sister, Momma, and Dad encouraging them to leave
South Texas with their newborn son to come live in Arizona at his home and use his car and
start to work in the smelter for union wages. I still wondered, why had my Dad not enlisted in the war? Was he a coward? Did he avoid
joining the war effort? I could have asked my mother or my siblings, but if the
answer was that he had been afraid to enlist, I didn’t want to know, so I didn’t
ask.
My ideas about him were so shaky. My siblings remembered years of their
own experiences with him, listening to him whistle and sing, his giant hugs and
his 6 day a week schedule of hard work, but what I seemed to cherry pick from
what I overheard about my father were the fights about money, the women. I
didn’t want to know if he side-stepped serving his country. I didn’t want to
hear more bad news about him.
Then, just this year, 62 years after his death, with the
help of Elda, my sister, my listening patiently suddenly pays off.
One of the family stories my sister is writing in her memoir
about her life is about the many strikes for better pay and benefits that my
father took part in at the smelter where he worked in Arizona.
My sister recalls the tension in the family when my father
announced he was going on strike with the union. My mother knew we’d be short
on money and she argued with him to not go on strike. Strikes were a gamble. He
knew some strikes you win, and some you lose. There had been some epic losses
within recent memory for workers who went on strike at Phelps Dodge where he worked. Staging
a strike was a dangerous gamble.
But, always Dad would answer Momma's protests saying that he had to go on
strike. He had to back up his brothers. My sister, just a little girl herself, says she over
heard this and wondered who were the brothers my Dad had in Arizona? Weren’t his brothers back in Texas?
Despite the gamble he was taking and Momma’s reluctance, Adolfo joined the
strikers every time the union staged a walk-out.
Here is where the patient listening pays off. Where the
distant radio signal about my Dad all these decades later gets louder and stronger.
In a documentary my
sister saw, she learned about the Bisbee Deportation, now a 100 year old
tragedy. It happened some 30 years before my Dad’s participation in strikes at his
employer.
In the Bisbee Deporation, the striking miners—More than 1200
of them, all immigrants, Germans, Irish, Polish and mostly Mexican were rounded
up at the crack of dawn in their homes, gathered onto the Bisbee baseball field
where they were held with a machine gun aimed at them. They were then herded at
gunpoint into railroad cattle cars. Sixteen
hours later the workers were unloaded 230 miles away in the New Mexico desert.
There is where they were dumped and prohibited from ever again returning to
Bisbee.
Each time my Dad and his brothers went on strike what had
happened to the strikers in the so called Bisbee Deportation had to have been front
and center of all the worker's minds. They all knew about
what had happened in the Bisbee Deportation, and yet they had the courage to go forward despite their fears and strike for better pay and benefits.
My sister read me what she had written about the strike and I immediately
went to ITunes to download and view the documentary, Bisbee ‘17. My immediate reaction
was shock, but slowly I noticed that something in the territory of my memory had shifted.
It was like sand dunes blowing away and uncovering a trait about my father
I’d never considered:
His courage in joining his ‘brothers’ and going out on
strike. Against the will of his wife. Facing the possibility of losing his job,
or maybe more, like the workers in the Bisbee Deportation. And with the
shifting of the sands, my father was revealed as someone I was proud of. That
feeling opened up something else.
Knowing about Dad’s courage going on strike
despite the company’s history, prepared me to ask that question that I had been too scared to ask before. The question about my dad not enlisting for WWII. I
called up one of my friends, a former Vietnam pilot and now a history buff who
knows a lot about World War Two. I now felt I could handle whatever I was about
to find out. I had learned something important, and nothing I would learn would change that. I
asked my friend if he could tell me why my Dad hadn’t served in the war?
My friend asked me, “Did your dad have any children during
the war?” I answered, ”Two at the start and two more just after the war.”
“Well, the fact he had children and he also worked at the
smelter which produced copper for ammunition, both are the reasons your dad
didn’t go to the war.”
It was like receiving a wonderful gift hearing those words.
I was speechless. I then put two and two together. I remembered that my uncle Adolfo was a bachelor when he
had enlisted and helped our family to move from Texas to Arizona. He returned after
the war with a Purple Heart to work at the smelter alongside my father, marry my Aunt Eva
and have a family of nine kids, the same number of children in the family he was born into.
I was rewarded for listening patiently. I next remembered how Enrique
Solis, a professor of mine and I, exchanged notes ten years ago about how his father
in El Paso worked the same job with the same employer as my father had in
Arizona. As I continued
listening, I remembered the checks we received each month from the Arizona
Worker’s Compensation Fund that helped support our family. He explained because Texas is a right to work state, where strikes are
illegal, if his dad had were to have died on the job like mine had, his family
would never have received monthly assistance from the state’s worker’s
compensation fund because there is no such thing in Texas. Those benefits are
not available to Texas workers. My dad and his ‘brothers’ going on strike in
Arizona had helped to win those worker rights and protections for workers in that
state. Protections that followed us even when our family moved back to Texas.
My dad’s courage in going on strike, unbeknown to him, would
help feed, house and educate his whole family for decades after his death. This
includes Momma’s education, who for years attended evening Adult Basic
Education classes to learn English, History and Math that were part of the
Great Society legislation of LBJ’s presidency.
Listening and waiting gave me information I’ve wanted to
know about my father for all my life. I learned our Dad’s courage and hard work
provided for his family after his life ended.
62 years after his death, I’m glad that I kept listening and I'm so grateful for my sister's writing her memoir. Now my
understanding of my father is deeper and to my amazement, something I’m proud
of and thankful for. I see the results
of his courage and hard work in the lives of my Momma, myself, each of my siblings and now
in the lives of my nieces, nephews and their children.
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