Creating Theater. (literally).

In the following excerpt, Roby explains his entry into the Salvadoran art-scene.
*************************
There I met Roberto Huezo, Roberto Galicia, Magda Aguilar, David Escobar Galindo, Bobby Murray, and people who—Carlos de Sola, and people who became extremely important in the fact that they were all people who were looking to do something in Salvador, but from a Salvadoran standpoint. I mean, Walter Beneke had started this entire dynamic of young people, young idealists, people working in a totally idealist way towards bettering education and bettering social conditions in Salvador. He offered me a job as—he said, “You’re going to—” Didn’t ask. He said, “You’re going to create a theater department at a new National Arts Center which I’m founding as of last—it’s been working for six months but doesn’t work. I need somebody to run it.” I had never done any teaching.

(How old were you at this point?)

Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Magda Aguilar, who was sixty-five at the time, was the woman who was organizing all of this, and she of course was an extraordinary woman with extraordinary connections and just an extraordinary know-how of Salvador. We started this National Arts Center, which is mythical today. That’s all they talk about. There’s a big article coming out in the papers tomorrow where we’ve been interviewed for the past couple weeks because it was the first time that artistic education was being given at a secondary level, intense artistic education and over a long period of time. This was the bachillerato en artes, which was a three-year program in the educational reform of the time.

(When you say artists wanted to approach—or when you were saying about Huezo and all these different artists that wanted to do things from a Salvadoran perspective, in a Salvadoran way, can you tell me what that is exactly?)

In other words, let’s not copy models. Let’s invent our own thing. My friendship with Roberto Huezo was probably one of the most important factors in my rediscovering—discovering Salvador, really. I mean, I had known Salvador all my life, but only on the glossy side. I didn’t know the other side of Salvador. With Roberto Huezo I went, so to speak, through the mirror and really got involved in this mass of people that I didn’t know existed. Before that nothing existed outside of Escalón, San Benito, and the Deportivo , you know. That’s what life was basically about. We had lived this very sheltered life. And then I discovered this whole new world which was fascinating to me.

(It was fascinating, it was exhilarating?)

Absolutely exhilarating. Like, you know, I never heard of the Indian uprising of 1932. And here we were, we were going to find the roots of the Nahuatl culture. We actually had teachers come in and teach you Nahuatl and all this sort of idealistic rot which doesn’t work, because you don’t—I mean, we left with this idea that the—oh, you can only be twenty-three to do that. (laughs) The conquest burnt bridges. So we were gonna go back where these bridges were burnt and rebuild these bridges that were burnt, which was a completely inane historical way of doing things, right? But that’s what we were doing at the time.


(So here you are, exploring a new Salvador, working at this National Arts Center, but are you living with your family? Are you living at home?)

Yeah. I am for a year. And then of course (pause) of course I wanted to move out. And then I got married for the first time, got married to Elisa Archer, who is a painter today. We got married in—I forget the year. Didn’t last very long. We were married for eleven months. And so of course I moved out of my parents’ house when I got married. After we divorced—Elisa was from an extremely Catholic family. They weren’t so thrilled about the marriage, and neither were my parents. And as my sister remarked, they’re the only wedding pictures where the bride and groom, instead of facing each other, they’re back to back. (laughs) So there was something obviously symbolic in that. She was working with me as an actress at the time. I was very much in love with her. But the marriage lasted a year. We were both extremely young and very, very immature. After that, I shared houses and apartments with different friends who were working with me at the time, mainly one artist who was also very important to me, Pedro Portillo, who worked with me at the National Arts Center and was also—still today he’s considered one of the major authorities on pre-Columbian vase painting. It just generally moved around. It’s funny, because I never left the glossy Salvador that I knew. I sort of—I never lived, like, alternate lifestyles. The glossy Salvador and the earthy, rooty Salvador: I never separated them. I mixed them inasmuch as they could mix. I mean, I never left my friends from childhood. I actually tended more to bring my new friends to meet my old friends and vice versa, and when it worked, it worked. When it didn’t—like I said, I’m very adaptable. (chuckles)

(Politically, how did that shape you?)

Oh, well that’s a whole other story! Politically, politically.

(Maybe before you go into how that shaped you, maybe you can just briefly describe the political environment in which you were surrounded as a child, or just if there were political conversations that took place, if that was a topic that was discussed.)

Not really, not really. The big gash in the Salvadoran psyche is the 1932 Indian uprising, right? And I’ve found friends now who say that their grandparents had photographs of the ones who rose up being—you know, them standing like trophies over their dead bodies. These were postcards, not photographs. They were postcards made at the time. This is all part of a memory that has been completely obliterated in Salvador. I’ve been trying to find some of these postcards, because I’ve seen them. But they were lost during the war. I know they were postcards, because I was shocked when I saw them, and I must have seen them in the early ‘70s. In the early ‘70s this awakening was done, because I think it’s the event that really is the profound trauma in Salvador today still, the Indian uprising of 1932. It’s never been talked about. Other than from one side saying that it was the other side that did it, it’s never been really analyzed. Was it an Indian uprising? Was it a communist plot? Was it a mounted thing in order to take land away from other people? Even our foremost historian, Pedro Escalante will not venture a flat answer. Is there a flat answer? I don’t know.

Be that as it may, it is THE event of the twentieth century which molded people’s minds and people’s politics. My father arrived in 1928, and the Indian uprising happened in 1932. My father’s version of it was that the dictator at the time, who was Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, saved the country because it was—the communists had gotten the peasants drunk and told them to go out and kill all the landowners. This was the version that I got as a child. This is a version I never repeated when I was politically savvy in the ‘70s, because of course this was the version of the right. But in the ‘90s, all of a sudden, there’s been a new way of looking at history, and it’s this dictator who was—he was a dictator, there’s absolutely no doubt about it. He was a dictator. He ran Salvador with an iron fist for twelve years. I mean, he had his own son shot at one point. He was a very blood—how do you say that, not bloodthirsty?

Blood-oriented dictator, but he did found the central bank, which is something that’s coming out now. He did—there’s a whole new light on Martínez. He did completely—what’s the word I’m looking for? dismantle the—my father used to tell me that when he got here—my father talked to me when he was much older, that’s when he told me these things—that when he got to Salvador, los peones, peasants on the farms were paid in money that was only valid in the farm, so they could only buy at the general store of the farm, which of course the owner would stock with things that he would put exorbitant prices on and he would pay them horrible wages and then on top of that charge them double for whatever goods they needed. Martínez eliminated that completely by creating the central bank, so he really did enormous social things in that sense.

(We were talking about the way you were raised.)

Right. So you learn about these things. I wasn’t conscious that I was living in a military dictatorship that went from 1932 to 1979 until 1980. (laughs) There was a military dictatorship from 1932 to 1979, but I became aware of that after the coup in 1979. That’s when we all became aware of it, except for the people who were militant on the left. But basically, that’s how we were brought up, in this—in Lala-Land. I don’t know if that—

(But did it work for the Jewish community, that type of—?)

Absolutely, absolutely, for the Jewish community it worked. The Jewish community here was and is—no, was, I don’t think that applies to it any more—was a community that boomed in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s with the arrival of a lot of Jews from Europe. They got here in an atmosphere that welcomed them very much, did not embrace them, but did not ostracize them, as opposed to the Arab community. And the reason, I suspect, and this is my opinion, it’s not historically-based, but I suspect the reason the Jews here were not discriminated against is because the oligarchy of Salvador was completely oriented towards France and Germany culture-wise, and the Jews that were coming here were French and German Jews. So in other words, the fact that they spoke French and German, even if they did not have a very high educational level, which some did, but most did not, gave them a sort of stamp of approval. I mean, they spoke the language of the gods, as it were, so they could be part of Olympus. It’s completely different in Costa Rica, where most of the Jews who went to Costa Rica were Polish and Russian and were terribly discriminated against. I’m sure their education level was not lower. It’s just that Europe being Europe, Europe being what it is, that’s what counted. What counted was the language and the culture. It’s just like any vulgar American can come down here and do a lot better just because he speaks American. (chuckles)

(It’s true. In 1979 you were here still?)

Yes. I was back. Actually, I directed the theater school from 1969 to 1975, and in 1974 I went on a tour of Europe with an Argentinean company that was working with me here, six Argentinean actors who were working with me at the school. Our last stop was Geneva, and that’s where I met Naara, my wife, and fell madly in love with her at first sight, discovered incredibly, to my surprise, that she was Jewish, and so did she about me. And then six months later Naara came—this was ’74—with me to Salvador. We got married and she came with me to Salvador. She was nineteen at the time.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.