[photo provided by Dan Onorato, edited by Rick Champion]
Water for La Villita
by Dan Onorato
“Señor Daniel, last year our little son died from dysentery. Three years ago we lost a little daughter in the same way. My cousin’s family, they lost one too.” Sra. Madrigal’s eyes reflected a longing sadness but her voice conveyed her losses with detached resignation. Death, we learned early on, was a frequent fact of life, especially among the poor. For three weeks we had visited every home in La Villita to determine what project we should focus on. We went in pairs to each household, to help each other with our fumbling Spanish. Ed and I sat in two of the family’s four home made wooden chairs Sra. Madrigal had offered us when we entered. It was nearly five on an overcast afternoon, but the room had no windows and the only light came from a lantern hung in a corner from the low ceiling rafter. Four children, from three to eight, sat on the hard dirt floor looking at us, the gringos from California. Their faces, like their mother’s, glowed a golden brown in the lantern light, and their eyes stayed fixed on us as their mother talked. Their older sister, maybe twelve, and their mother sat on the other two chairs facing us in the small room. The family’s mud brick house had another room that served as a kitchen and sleeping quarters, and under the same roof but open to the hillside in back was a pen for the pigs. There was no bathroom and no latrine out back.
“Señora, where do you get your drinking water?” Ed asked.
“Down at the bottom of the hill. From the water ditch.”
La Villita was about a kilometer outside of Apaseo el Grande where we Amigos lived, the 10 boys together in a rented house that served as a community center during the day for English and sewing classes, the 11 girls each with a different family. On both sides of La Villita’s wide cobbled stone street that rose toward the small white church at the top of the hill were houses. Most were made of grey mud brick and thatch roof like the Madrigal’s house. A few at the bottom of the hill were larger and newer. Made of durable red brick, with windows, and painted in bright colors, they belonged to families whose father or sons went north to the United States to work in the fields and sent or brought money home. Some had been braceros, but now that that program had ended, most crossed the border without papers, depending on a long established network of coyotes who overcharged the migrants to get them across the border. The men who remained in La Villita worked for twelve pesos a day (one dollar) as field hands. Sra. Madrigal’s husband was a ranch hand for a wealthy hacienda owner a few kilometers away. The señora told us he didn’t get home till near nightfall.
Daily we passed the three-foot wide ditch Sra. Madrigal and her neighbors told us about. It carried rain water but also agricultural runoff. It was muddy usually, and one day when I scooped up a cup of it to inspect it, I saw small creatures, probably mosquito larvae, swimming in it. If people drank this water without boiling it enough, no wonder the children were so commonly sick with stomach cramps and diarrhea. And with little understanding of preventive health measures and little money to pay for help at the hospital or with medicine, no wonder so many infants died. But the ditch was the nearest source of water, and every day we saw boys as young as ten years old trudging up the hill carrying water from it in two rectangular five-gallon tins that hung from each end of a wooden yoke they balanced across their shoulders.
One day early in the summer feeling sorry for a young boy making his way up the hill with his load of water, I offered to help. Only then, when I tried to imitate the way he’d carried the yoke did I realize not only how heavy the water was but also how difficult it was to keep the tins from swaying back and forth and losing water. Under the shifting weight I climbed the hill very slowly, sometimes almost staggering, and the yoke dug painfully into my spine. I regretted making the offer but I was too embarrassed to stop. Women sweeping the cobblestones in front of their houses as I passed gazed amused at the novelty of a rich gringo carrying water buckets. Near the top of the hill, where the boy’s house was, I put the load down and decided I’d evaluate more carefully the next time I got an urge to be helpful.
All the inquiry teams were reporting the same need Ed and I heard: the people of La Villita needed a source of clean drinking water, the closer to their homes the better. They talked with us frankly because they were so thankful to the women’s project the year before in 1963. It was one of the two projects Amigos Anonymous had in Mexico in its first year. The other was in the state of Michoacán, in Jesús del Monte in the mountains outside of Morelia. Some of the women in Apaseo’s first project were trained teachers, so when the village people explained their children had no school, the Amigas decided to set one up. They persuaded the Señor Cura, the pastor of Apaseo’s main parish, to let them use a building he owned on the top of the hill near the church. With the help of people from La Villita, the Amigas cleaned up the building, created two classrooms, and painted the new school. They also trained two young women from Apaseo to teach the children, Viví Frías and Rosalía Cabrera. Sra. Madrigal’s children attended the school, so she had faith in our group. If we could organize a school, we could bring water to the community.
Two of our project members were a married couple who spoke better Spanish than most of us. Mary Baca had grown up speaking Portuguese so Spanish came easy to her. Arturo was from New Mexico, a descendent of Cabeza de Vaca, one of the state’s first Spanish settlers, so his first language was Spanish. Art was also blind, which, along with his personality, added a unique charisma to his presence. When he tapped his way into our first La Villita community meeting outside the church, Mary at his side guiding him, and when he opened the meeting in fluent Spanish, “Bienvenidos, hermanos, amigos . . .” (Welcome, brothers and sisters, friends . . .), the people quickly warmed to him. Art’s smile was genuine and radiant, and his energetic enthusiasm captivated their attention. He and we were not like the candidates for public offices who came to them during their campaigns and made promises they never fulfilled. We had nothing to gain from the help we offered. And with the school running, we had a track record.
Art was a natural storyteller, a master of inflected emphasis and dramatic pause. Language for him was a treasure, each phrase and clause a generous surprise. He shared an anecdote from his youth in New Mexico when the people in his community worked together to stop a property developer from building on land considered sacred by some of the local native people. The community succeeded, Art concluded the story, by working together. If the people of La Villita wanted a water system, and if they were willing to work with the Amigos who were there to help, they would get clean water and their children would be healthier. Art then explained that Jaime, one of our members, had checked with his father about pipe for the project. Jaime’s family had a large plumbing company in Los Angeles, and his father was willing to donate the pipe we’d need to connect to the water main on the outskirts of Apaseo and go up the hill to right below the white church. There’d be one set of spigots at the bottom of the hill and another at the top. The villagers’ interest deepened as Art laid out the vision.
“But we have to work together,” Art emphasized. “Juntos, sí se puede!” (Together, yes, it can be done). Juntos, sí se puede! Listos, amigos?
“Sí, Don Arturo! Sí! Sí! Juntos, sí se puede!” Their wives had probably already told them about the project and urged them to get involved, but Art’s energy and immediate rapport with them clinched their commitment.
We spent the next week persuading influential leaders in Apaseo to prevail on the city officials to approve our project. We couldn’t start tearing up one of the main streets out of Apaseo toward the ranchos east of town without the city’s OK. Nacho Estrella and his American-born wife Coletta were our Mexican liaisons with Apaseo, so we went to them for advice. Nacho suggested the town leaders we needed to contact and how best to convince them. With the help of Nacho’s father, Margarita Oliveros, and others, we secured the necessary approval. Meanwhile we borrowed pickaxes and shovels from some of the town’s farmers with whose families our Amigas lived, while Art and a few others organized the work schedule of the men from La Villita. It was set up so that everyone could help but no one would miss his paid work more than one or two days a week.
The following week we started digging at the foot of La Villita’s hill. We’d complete the ditch from there to the top of the hill, then work on the long flat segment from Apaseo to the bottom of La Villita. We’d return to California in late August, so we’d have to complete the project in six weeks. The ditch had to be 18 inches wide and three feet deep. Each morning we started between 9:00 and 9:30 and worked till 1:00. After comida we continued from 4:00 till 6:30 or 7:00. When it rained, which it often did in the afternoon, we had to cut our work time. Progress was slow. The cobblestones were hard to remove. They’d been in place over fifty years and were wedged in as though fastened by cement. Below them the soil was alternately muddy or hard clay, depending on whether it had rained much.
The La Villita men didn’t seem to mind the hard work. They excavated, dug, and shoveled slowly but steadily, and talked and joked a lot as they worked. In contrast, we worked in spurts of energy that left us exhausted every ten minutes. Also, we weren’t used to the heat, and two hours into our digging our bandanas were wringing with sweat. Our Mexican co-workers laughed playfully at the way we worked, and they shared funny stories we only half understood, but we knew when to laugh because they’d laugh first. After the first week we had about a hundred feet of ditch behind us, lots of blisters, and a much deeper admiration for how hard our Mexican partners worked. And gradually, with our Spanish improving, we got to know the men as friends.
That’s how I met Fortino Ramos. He came often to help. He was slim but worked as hard as the bigger, more muscular men. As he worked, he listened more than talked. He seemed more serious, more reflective. Maybe that’s what drew me to him. We often worked together. He told me about his family. He had three girls attending the school the Amigas had started, and wondered if the oldest would be able to continue in secondary school the next year. He didn’t make enough to pay for the books. It didn’t matter to him they were girls. Girls had as much to gain from school as boys, and he wanted them to get as much education as they could. He felt guilty he might not be able to help them.
One day after three weeks working together he invited me to his house. He served me a Fanta soda, which I was sure he’d bought for the occasion. His house was made of mud brick like most of the others in La Villita, but it had a cement floor. “I used to work in California, near Fresno,” he explained, “picking peaches, apricots, and grapes. But now with the children I don’t want to leave.” His wife was holding an infant in her arms. “This is our latest, José Martín,” Fortino said proudly, smiling. “He was born two weeks ago.” His wife lifted her attention from the baby to look at her husband, her face, like his, glowing. “Yes,” Fortino added, “we finally had a boy!”
Near the end of our conversation an hour later, as I was starting to say my goodbyes, Fortino stopped me. “Daniel, I’ve talked with your compadre Jesús Torres. I respect him a lot. He confirmed what I’ve observed.” Fortino was looking directly into my eyes. “You’re a good person. I like you. My wife and I would like you to be José Martín’s padrino.” For a moment I didn’t know how to respond. Fortino’s invitation came as a complete surprise. A part of me felt humbled, a part of me felt flattered. I knew what it meant. Just two weeks earlier Jesús and his wife Alicia had stood with me and Laura Baxter at their second son’s baptism. They had asked Laura and me to be Daniel’s godparents. That meant I would be their compadre, a “father with” Jesús and Alicia to Daniel. If they died or for whatever reason were unable to parent Daniel, his care would be my responsibility and Laura’s. But it also meant we were considered part of their family.
“Fortino, yes, I will be José Martín’s Godfather. I feel deeply honored.”
Throughout that summer Laura lived with Jesús and Alicia, and by some wondrous stroke of Providence I was assigned to eat comida with them. The food itself was simple, but though we often had meat, I learned to love rice and beans. Jesús always brought Cordobés to the table with him. Jesús loved dogs, and daily his sleek black furred Doberman Pinscher sat quietly at his side on the floor, patiently awaiting the treats Jesús gave him at the end of each meal. With his loud, echoing bark, Cordobés was the family’s night watchman. But he was also Jesús’s frequent companion on walks to the Caja Popular located in the office space of the parroquia facing the town’s plaza.
Jesús’s main paid work was delivering soda and beer to stores throughout the area surrounding Apaseo, not Pepsi or Coke but Mexican-made brands called Barrilitos and Jarritos. Jesús also had a small business out of his house fixing wristwatches and alarm clocks. But his heart lay in the Caja Popular, which he started in Apaseo. It was part of a recently established national network of credit unions whose main clients were people of meager means. Jesús embraced its vision: teach people to save, so that when they needed a loan for a small business or a home or their children’s education, they’d have the credit history and record of reliability to get one. The traditional banks served those who had means; the credit union aimed at helping the poor and lower class. Jesús himself came from humble roots, and he never forgot them.
He talked politics often. The long endemic corruption of the ruling PRI party was a frequent topic, but then Jesús was a lifelong Panista, active in his PAN party’s efforts to expose PRI lies and gain power. What bothered him most were the empty promises and the outright disregard of the needs of the poor. He could not rest quiet in the face of the scandalous chasm between the rich and the poor. One day, referring to the people in La Villita and nearby ranchos, Jesús said to me, “Daniel, there are the poor, and then there are those who live in misery. Some of those people suffer in misery.” His compassion for the disadvantaged and his passion for social justice stirred me. I was a seminarian studying to be a Catholic priest. I’d been inspired by Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement that opened up soup kitchens and houses of hospitality for the poor, and by Pope John XXIII’s example of simplicity and openness, and his defining his papal authority not in terms of power but service to others. I wanted to follow in their footsteps, and in Jesús’s kind and generous spirit I found both a another model and a fellow traveler.
Alicia’s attention at that time was mainly on her family, though she also ran a small shoe store. Jerardo, her first child, was three, a very handsome, observant child. But he was cross-eyed, and as a result reserved. A simple operation and glasses had fixed my brother Frank’s eye problem, but Jesús and Alicia didn’t have the money to correct Jerardo’s. Two weeks after my arrival, Alicia gave birth to Daniel, who became my ahijado (Godson) in early July. Jerardo was slender but not Daniel. Because of Daniel’s fat cheeks, Jesús called him “mantecón” (chubby, literally, “lardo”). At first, taking this literally and not understanding Mexican culture well, this nickname struck me as negative, but I gradually realized it was an expression of endearment. In directly acknowledging this aspect of his son, Jesús was accepting it as part of his son wholeheartedly and with affection. That affection, honesty, and lack of any pretense was what I felt most when I was with Jesús and Alicia. And I loved Jerardo and Daniel. As the weeks passed I felt the bond between me and my compadres and their two children deepen. I looked forward to my two hours with them each day, to our conversations and the mere pleasure of being together, whether we talked or not. There are people you feel close to and who you sense share the same affection for you, but little is said about these feelings. You sense in their eyes what they feel and you feel it in your heart. Words are unnecessary. They aren’t sufficient. They’re superfluous. The heart sees clearly what matters, and its language is deeper than words. And in that mysterious truth of the heart are born the deepest friendships. That’s what I grew to feel for Jesús and Alicia, especially for Jesús.
By mid August the work on the ditch for the water pipe was nearly complete when we got the shocking news: the Mexican customs officials wouldn’t let the pipe pass across the border. We make plastic pipe in Mexico, they said. We don’t want you North Americans undermining our own domestic business enterprises. We hadn’t anticipated this obstacle. We’d focused all our attention on organizing the people of La Villita to work with us to get the ditch ready. But now there was no pipe. We asked Nacho and other leaders with influence to contact the customs officials. Jaime’s father wrote a notarized letter explaining he was not exporting pipe to Mexico for profit but merely donating this amount of pipe only for this one project in La Villita, near Apaseo el Grande in the state of Guanajuato. We waited nervously. When the ditch was finished, we still hadn’t heard a response. We were told Mexican bureaucracy was labyrinthin and slow, and now we confronted that reality.
It was hard to face the people of La Villita with what had happened. More than a kilometer’s length of ditch lay open without pipe for all to see. Seven weeks of hard work, the mounting excitement and anticipation, kids from La Villita coming up to us and asking, “When are we getting the water?—everything came to a halt. A week later we had to return home. The girls on our project had taught some English and some preventive health classes and had carried out a large vaccination program. And some of the boys had implemented the girls’ health programs by building some latrines to reduce the spread of infectious disease. But the main project we’d dedicated ourselves to was now a scar in the road out of Apaseo to La Villita. Our friends in Apaseo told us not to give up hope. The pipe might still come, and when it did the people could complete the project. That was our parting message to the people of La Villita at our final meeting together. Before I left the gathering, I gave Fortino an abrazo and little José Martín a gentle kiss.
The girls and some of the guys went home by bus. Those of us guys who’d come in pickup trucks readied ourselves to return in them. Before we took off, my last goodbyes were to Jesús and Alicia, Jerardo and Danielito. Jesús was last. When I approached him, he handed me a little gift—a gold chain with a St. Christopher medallion.
“Wear it, Daniel. Remember us.”
After a long, tight abrazo, we looked at each other. His eyes damp, he smiled with affection. “I hope we see you again next year, Daniel. God bless you.”
My voice caught in my throat. I placed my hand on the medal that hung near my heart. Words finally came. “Gracias, Jesús. God bless you. Until next year.”
Three months later I got a short note from Jesús. The pipe still hadn’t arrived, and the ditch remained a long, gaping hole. The next summer when I returned with Amigos to Apaseo again, this time as project leader, the ditch was filled in, but the cobblestones hadn’t been put back in place. But then, six months after we returned to the U.S., over a year and a half after we’d left the project unfinished, Jesús wrote with some surprising news. Fr. Jerónimo Cabrera, whom I’d worked closely with and whom I gotten to know well since I ate comida with his family during my second summer in Apaseo, had pressured his brother, a prominent PRI politician in the state government in Guanajuato, to get the state water authorities to complete what we Amigos had started. The pressure worked, and La Villita now had clean water. Not just to two sets of spigots at the bottom and top of the hill, but to a faucet in each home.
Stories, it seems, are never quite over. What looks like an ending gets transformed in ways we little expect. So it was for me in Mexico. I know it was the same for many others in Amigos Anonymous. Each summer ended. Our projects, finished or not, were over. We came home. But we had made some friends for life, and our hearts and minds were not the same. Our comfortable lives had been shaken by our direct involvement with poverty and another culture. We felt with deeper compassion. We saw and could understand with a wider vision. Our sojourn in Mexico—through experiences like bringing water to La Villita—had stamped us with an indelible will to do what we could to help create a better world.
–Dan Onorato
by Dan Onorato
“Señor Daniel, last year our little son died from dysentery. Three years ago we lost a little daughter in the same way. My cousin’s family, they lost one too.” Sra. Madrigal’s eyes reflected a longing sadness but her voice conveyed her losses with detached resignation. Death, we learned early on, was a frequent fact of life, especially among the poor. For three weeks we had visited every home in La Villita to determine what project we should focus on. We went in pairs to each household, to help each other with our fumbling Spanish. Ed and I sat in two of the family’s four home made wooden chairs Sra. Madrigal had offered us when we entered. It was nearly five on an overcast afternoon, but the room had no windows and the only light came from a lantern hung in a corner from the low ceiling rafter. Four children, from three to eight, sat on the hard dirt floor looking at us, the gringos from California. Their faces, like their mother’s, glowed a golden brown in the lantern light, and their eyes stayed fixed on us as their mother talked. Their older sister, maybe twelve, and their mother sat on the other two chairs facing us in the small room. The family’s mud brick house had another room that served as a kitchen and sleeping quarters, and under the same roof but open to the hillside in back was a pen for the pigs. There was no bathroom and no latrine out back.
“Señora, where do you get your drinking water?” Ed asked.
“Down at the bottom of the hill. From the water ditch.”
La Villita was about a kilometer outside of Apaseo el Grande where we Amigos lived, the 10 boys together in a rented house that served as a community center during the day for English and sewing classes, the 11 girls each with a different family. On both sides of La Villita’s wide cobbled stone street that rose toward the small white church at the top of the hill were houses. Most were made of grey mud brick and thatch roof like the Madrigal’s house. A few at the bottom of the hill were larger and newer. Made of durable red brick, with windows, and painted in bright colors, they belonged to families whose father or sons went north to the United States to work in the fields and sent or brought money home. Some had been braceros, but now that that program had ended, most crossed the border without papers, depending on a long established network of coyotes who overcharged the migrants to get them across the border. The men who remained in La Villita worked for twelve pesos a day (one dollar) as field hands. Sra. Madrigal’s husband was a ranch hand for a wealthy hacienda owner a few kilometers away. The señora told us he didn’t get home till near nightfall.
Daily we passed the three-foot wide ditch Sra. Madrigal and her neighbors told us about. It carried rain water but also agricultural runoff. It was muddy usually, and one day when I scooped up a cup of it to inspect it, I saw small creatures, probably mosquito larvae, swimming in it. If people drank this water without boiling it enough, no wonder the children were so commonly sick with stomach cramps and diarrhea. And with little understanding of preventive health measures and little money to pay for help at the hospital or with medicine, no wonder so many infants died. But the ditch was the nearest source of water, and every day we saw boys as young as ten years old trudging up the hill carrying water from it in two rectangular five-gallon tins that hung from each end of a wooden yoke they balanced across their shoulders.
One day early in the summer feeling sorry for a young boy making his way up the hill with his load of water, I offered to help. Only then, when I tried to imitate the way he’d carried the yoke did I realize not only how heavy the water was but also how difficult it was to keep the tins from swaying back and forth and losing water. Under the shifting weight I climbed the hill very slowly, sometimes almost staggering, and the yoke dug painfully into my spine. I regretted making the offer but I was too embarrassed to stop. Women sweeping the cobblestones in front of their houses as I passed gazed amused at the novelty of a rich gringo carrying water buckets. Near the top of the hill, where the boy’s house was, I put the load down and decided I’d evaluate more carefully the next time I got an urge to be helpful.
All the inquiry teams were reporting the same need Ed and I heard: the people of La Villita needed a source of clean drinking water, the closer to their homes the better. They talked with us frankly because they were so thankful to the women’s project the year before in 1963. It was one of the two projects Amigos Anonymous had in Mexico in its first year. The other was in the state of Michoacán, in Jesús del Monte in the mountains outside of Morelia. Some of the women in Apaseo’s first project were trained teachers, so when the village people explained their children had no school, the Amigas decided to set one up. They persuaded the Señor Cura, the pastor of Apaseo’s main parish, to let them use a building he owned on the top of the hill near the church. With the help of people from La Villita, the Amigas cleaned up the building, created two classrooms, and painted the new school. They also trained two young women from Apaseo to teach the children, Viví Frías and Rosalía Cabrera. Sra. Madrigal’s children attended the school, so she had faith in our group. If we could organize a school, we could bring water to the community.
Two of our project members were a married couple who spoke better Spanish than most of us. Mary Baca had grown up speaking Portuguese so Spanish came easy to her. Arturo was from New Mexico, a descendent of Cabeza de Vaca, one of the state’s first Spanish settlers, so his first language was Spanish. Art was also blind, which, along with his personality, added a unique charisma to his presence. When he tapped his way into our first La Villita community meeting outside the church, Mary at his side guiding him, and when he opened the meeting in fluent Spanish, “Bienvenidos, hermanos, amigos . . .” (Welcome, brothers and sisters, friends . . .), the people quickly warmed to him. Art’s smile was genuine and radiant, and his energetic enthusiasm captivated their attention. He and we were not like the candidates for public offices who came to them during their campaigns and made promises they never fulfilled. We had nothing to gain from the help we offered. And with the school running, we had a track record.
Art was a natural storyteller, a master of inflected emphasis and dramatic pause. Language for him was a treasure, each phrase and clause a generous surprise. He shared an anecdote from his youth in New Mexico when the people in his community worked together to stop a property developer from building on land considered sacred by some of the local native people. The community succeeded, Art concluded the story, by working together. If the people of La Villita wanted a water system, and if they were willing to work with the Amigos who were there to help, they would get clean water and their children would be healthier. Art then explained that Jaime, one of our members, had checked with his father about pipe for the project. Jaime’s family had a large plumbing company in Los Angeles, and his father was willing to donate the pipe we’d need to connect to the water main on the outskirts of Apaseo and go up the hill to right below the white church. There’d be one set of spigots at the bottom of the hill and another at the top. The villagers’ interest deepened as Art laid out the vision.
“But we have to work together,” Art emphasized. “Juntos, sí se puede!” (Together, yes, it can be done). Juntos, sí se puede! Listos, amigos?
“Sí, Don Arturo! Sí! Sí! Juntos, sí se puede!” Their wives had probably already told them about the project and urged them to get involved, but Art’s energy and immediate rapport with them clinched their commitment.
We spent the next week persuading influential leaders in Apaseo to prevail on the city officials to approve our project. We couldn’t start tearing up one of the main streets out of Apaseo toward the ranchos east of town without the city’s OK. Nacho Estrella and his American-born wife Coletta were our Mexican liaisons with Apaseo, so we went to them for advice. Nacho suggested the town leaders we needed to contact and how best to convince them. With the help of Nacho’s father, Margarita Oliveros, and others, we secured the necessary approval. Meanwhile we borrowed pickaxes and shovels from some of the town’s farmers with whose families our Amigas lived, while Art and a few others organized the work schedule of the men from La Villita. It was set up so that everyone could help but no one would miss his paid work more than one or two days a week.
The following week we started digging at the foot of La Villita’s hill. We’d complete the ditch from there to the top of the hill, then work on the long flat segment from Apaseo to the bottom of La Villita. We’d return to California in late August, so we’d have to complete the project in six weeks. The ditch had to be 18 inches wide and three feet deep. Each morning we started between 9:00 and 9:30 and worked till 1:00. After comida we continued from 4:00 till 6:30 or 7:00. When it rained, which it often did in the afternoon, we had to cut our work time. Progress was slow. The cobblestones were hard to remove. They’d been in place over fifty years and were wedged in as though fastened by cement. Below them the soil was alternately muddy or hard clay, depending on whether it had rained much.
The La Villita men didn’t seem to mind the hard work. They excavated, dug, and shoveled slowly but steadily, and talked and joked a lot as they worked. In contrast, we worked in spurts of energy that left us exhausted every ten minutes. Also, we weren’t used to the heat, and two hours into our digging our bandanas were wringing with sweat. Our Mexican co-workers laughed playfully at the way we worked, and they shared funny stories we only half understood, but we knew when to laugh because they’d laugh first. After the first week we had about a hundred feet of ditch behind us, lots of blisters, and a much deeper admiration for how hard our Mexican partners worked. And gradually, with our Spanish improving, we got to know the men as friends.
That’s how I met Fortino Ramos. He came often to help. He was slim but worked as hard as the bigger, more muscular men. As he worked, he listened more than talked. He seemed more serious, more reflective. Maybe that’s what drew me to him. We often worked together. He told me about his family. He had three girls attending the school the Amigas had started, and wondered if the oldest would be able to continue in secondary school the next year. He didn’t make enough to pay for the books. It didn’t matter to him they were girls. Girls had as much to gain from school as boys, and he wanted them to get as much education as they could. He felt guilty he might not be able to help them.
One day after three weeks working together he invited me to his house. He served me a Fanta soda, which I was sure he’d bought for the occasion. His house was made of mud brick like most of the others in La Villita, but it had a cement floor. “I used to work in California, near Fresno,” he explained, “picking peaches, apricots, and grapes. But now with the children I don’t want to leave.” His wife was holding an infant in her arms. “This is our latest, José Martín,” Fortino said proudly, smiling. “He was born two weeks ago.” His wife lifted her attention from the baby to look at her husband, her face, like his, glowing. “Yes,” Fortino added, “we finally had a boy!”
Near the end of our conversation an hour later, as I was starting to say my goodbyes, Fortino stopped me. “Daniel, I’ve talked with your compadre Jesús Torres. I respect him a lot. He confirmed what I’ve observed.” Fortino was looking directly into my eyes. “You’re a good person. I like you. My wife and I would like you to be José Martín’s padrino.” For a moment I didn’t know how to respond. Fortino’s invitation came as a complete surprise. A part of me felt humbled, a part of me felt flattered. I knew what it meant. Just two weeks earlier Jesús and his wife Alicia had stood with me and Laura Baxter at their second son’s baptism. They had asked Laura and me to be Daniel’s godparents. That meant I would be their compadre, a “father with” Jesús and Alicia to Daniel. If they died or for whatever reason were unable to parent Daniel, his care would be my responsibility and Laura’s. But it also meant we were considered part of their family.
“Fortino, yes, I will be José Martín’s Godfather. I feel deeply honored.”
Throughout that summer Laura lived with Jesús and Alicia, and by some wondrous stroke of Providence I was assigned to eat comida with them. The food itself was simple, but though we often had meat, I learned to love rice and beans. Jesús always brought Cordobés to the table with him. Jesús loved dogs, and daily his sleek black furred Doberman Pinscher sat quietly at his side on the floor, patiently awaiting the treats Jesús gave him at the end of each meal. With his loud, echoing bark, Cordobés was the family’s night watchman. But he was also Jesús’s frequent companion on walks to the Caja Popular located in the office space of the parroquia facing the town’s plaza.
Jesús’s main paid work was delivering soda and beer to stores throughout the area surrounding Apaseo, not Pepsi or Coke but Mexican-made brands called Barrilitos and Jarritos. Jesús also had a small business out of his house fixing wristwatches and alarm clocks. But his heart lay in the Caja Popular, which he started in Apaseo. It was part of a recently established national network of credit unions whose main clients were people of meager means. Jesús embraced its vision: teach people to save, so that when they needed a loan for a small business or a home or their children’s education, they’d have the credit history and record of reliability to get one. The traditional banks served those who had means; the credit union aimed at helping the poor and lower class. Jesús himself came from humble roots, and he never forgot them.
He talked politics often. The long endemic corruption of the ruling PRI party was a frequent topic, but then Jesús was a lifelong Panista, active in his PAN party’s efforts to expose PRI lies and gain power. What bothered him most were the empty promises and the outright disregard of the needs of the poor. He could not rest quiet in the face of the scandalous chasm between the rich and the poor. One day, referring to the people in La Villita and nearby ranchos, Jesús said to me, “Daniel, there are the poor, and then there are those who live in misery. Some of those people suffer in misery.” His compassion for the disadvantaged and his passion for social justice stirred me. I was a seminarian studying to be a Catholic priest. I’d been inspired by Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement that opened up soup kitchens and houses of hospitality for the poor, and by Pope John XXIII’s example of simplicity and openness, and his defining his papal authority not in terms of power but service to others. I wanted to follow in their footsteps, and in Jesús’s kind and generous spirit I found both a another model and a fellow traveler.
Alicia’s attention at that time was mainly on her family, though she also ran a small shoe store. Jerardo, her first child, was three, a very handsome, observant child. But he was cross-eyed, and as a result reserved. A simple operation and glasses had fixed my brother Frank’s eye problem, but Jesús and Alicia didn’t have the money to correct Jerardo’s. Two weeks after my arrival, Alicia gave birth to Daniel, who became my ahijado (Godson) in early July. Jerardo was slender but not Daniel. Because of Daniel’s fat cheeks, Jesús called him “mantecón” (chubby, literally, “lardo”). At first, taking this literally and not understanding Mexican culture well, this nickname struck me as negative, but I gradually realized it was an expression of endearment. In directly acknowledging this aspect of his son, Jesús was accepting it as part of his son wholeheartedly and with affection. That affection, honesty, and lack of any pretense was what I felt most when I was with Jesús and Alicia. And I loved Jerardo and Daniel. As the weeks passed I felt the bond between me and my compadres and their two children deepen. I looked forward to my two hours with them each day, to our conversations and the mere pleasure of being together, whether we talked or not. There are people you feel close to and who you sense share the same affection for you, but little is said about these feelings. You sense in their eyes what they feel and you feel it in your heart. Words are unnecessary. They aren’t sufficient. They’re superfluous. The heart sees clearly what matters, and its language is deeper than words. And in that mysterious truth of the heart are born the deepest friendships. That’s what I grew to feel for Jesús and Alicia, especially for Jesús.
By mid August the work on the ditch for the water pipe was nearly complete when we got the shocking news: the Mexican customs officials wouldn’t let the pipe pass across the border. We make plastic pipe in Mexico, they said. We don’t want you North Americans undermining our own domestic business enterprises. We hadn’t anticipated this obstacle. We’d focused all our attention on organizing the people of La Villita to work with us to get the ditch ready. But now there was no pipe. We asked Nacho and other leaders with influence to contact the customs officials. Jaime’s father wrote a notarized letter explaining he was not exporting pipe to Mexico for profit but merely donating this amount of pipe only for this one project in La Villita, near Apaseo el Grande in the state of Guanajuato. We waited nervously. When the ditch was finished, we still hadn’t heard a response. We were told Mexican bureaucracy was labyrinthin and slow, and now we confronted that reality.
It was hard to face the people of La Villita with what had happened. More than a kilometer’s length of ditch lay open without pipe for all to see. Seven weeks of hard work, the mounting excitement and anticipation, kids from La Villita coming up to us and asking, “When are we getting the water?—everything came to a halt. A week later we had to return home. The girls on our project had taught some English and some preventive health classes and had carried out a large vaccination program. And some of the boys had implemented the girls’ health programs by building some latrines to reduce the spread of infectious disease. But the main project we’d dedicated ourselves to was now a scar in the road out of Apaseo to La Villita. Our friends in Apaseo told us not to give up hope. The pipe might still come, and when it did the people could complete the project. That was our parting message to the people of La Villita at our final meeting together. Before I left the gathering, I gave Fortino an abrazo and little José Martín a gentle kiss.
The girls and some of the guys went home by bus. Those of us guys who’d come in pickup trucks readied ourselves to return in them. Before we took off, my last goodbyes were to Jesús and Alicia, Jerardo and Danielito. Jesús was last. When I approached him, he handed me a little gift—a gold chain with a St. Christopher medallion.
“Wear it, Daniel. Remember us.”
After a long, tight abrazo, we looked at each other. His eyes damp, he smiled with affection. “I hope we see you again next year, Daniel. God bless you.”
My voice caught in my throat. I placed my hand on the medal that hung near my heart. Words finally came. “Gracias, Jesús. God bless you. Until next year.”
Three months later I got a short note from Jesús. The pipe still hadn’t arrived, and the ditch remained a long, gaping hole. The next summer when I returned with Amigos to Apaseo again, this time as project leader, the ditch was filled in, but the cobblestones hadn’t been put back in place. But then, six months after we returned to the U.S., over a year and a half after we’d left the project unfinished, Jesús wrote with some surprising news. Fr. Jerónimo Cabrera, whom I’d worked closely with and whom I gotten to know well since I ate comida with his family during my second summer in Apaseo, had pressured his brother, a prominent PRI politician in the state government in Guanajuato, to get the state water authorities to complete what we Amigos had started. The pressure worked, and La Villita now had clean water. Not just to two sets of spigots at the bottom and top of the hill, but to a faucet in each home.
Stories, it seems, are never quite over. What looks like an ending gets transformed in ways we little expect. So it was for me in Mexico. I know it was the same for many others in Amigos Anonymous. Each summer ended. Our projects, finished or not, were over. We came home. But we had made some friends for life, and our hearts and minds were not the same. Our comfortable lives had been shaken by our direct involvement with poverty and another culture. We felt with deeper compassion. We saw and could understand with a wider vision. Our sojourn in Mexico—through experiences like bringing water to La Villita—had stamped us with an indelible will to do what we could to help create a better world.
–Dan Onorato