Raising Salvadoran-Americans.

Three young children in El Salvador? An agrarian reform? What about the Civil War? Paul discusses these issues below.
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(So your three children are born here. They go to school here. Was it ever a concern to you that they weren’t in the States, that there were having such a different childhood?)

Actually, I was very happy that they were here. Because a lot of the values that I disliked in the States, such as the overimportance given to tests in schools in the States, the dependence on having things as opposed to development of the mind, and the quality of the education was always first in my thoughts. Because the education the kids were getting here was far superior to what was being given in the public schools at that same time in the States. I was from New York originally, and the New York public school system was excellent. But given even that, the quality and the level of education at the American school was superior. If there were any children with special needs here in Salvador, they were not pushed to the side because of the number of children that had to be taken care of. The number of kids in the classroom was very good. The teacher-student ratio was excellent. Our kids weren’t numbers. And they weren’t taking care of our kids any different than they were anybody else’s kids. It was just a very nice, personal, caring and—I thought it was a big plus coming to the American school here.

(Did you speak English with your kids?)

We spoke English most of the time at home. We might go into Spanglish occasionally. They got their Spanish, which is much better than mine, from school and from our cook. That’s where they spoke most of their Spanish.

(So what happened fifteen years after you arrived to make you have to leave the country?)

There was agrarian reform put into place here. The farm was sold to the government and I no longer had anything to keep me here. I didn’t have a job. I needed to earn a living. I had three children, and I realized that I had not worked in what I was trained to do for fifteen years in the States. And I imagined things had changed more than a little bit, and I guessed that it would take me a good three months to find a job. And having three kids and having to find where to live, the States is kind of big. My first impulse was to go back to New York, where I knew people. But then I began to think, where would it be more effective to go back? And I started doing some research at the consulate. In those days you go could into the consulate and use the library. So I found that the three places that had the best economic opportunities, the best growth pattern at that point were Denver, Colorado, Houston, Texas, and Dallas, Texas. That was in 1978.

And since Ruth’s sister was living in Dallas, Texas and we knew some people because Ruth had gone to SMU, which is in Dallas, we thought we would try there first. She came up—Ruth came up with Lisa to look for a house, spent about a week or so and came back with a house that she liked and she asked me to go up and take a look at it and if I liked it, to go ahead and put a deposit on it. She liked it because it had certain characteristics that we look for. It had all the bedrooms on one side that could be locked, still thinking of our life here in Salvador. It also had some tropical plants and it had a banana tree growing in the back yard.

So I came up and looked at it and it also was about six blocks away from where her sister Susie was living. So I thought, “This looks as good as any.” And we didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. So we put a deposit on that house. And while I was up there, during that brief, four-five day visit, thanks to a friend of Susie’s, I was able to have an interview arranged with the owner of an advertising agency in Dallas, ostensibly to see what was going on in advertising in that day and age, just to get some orientation. He promised me that he only had a half hour, but he’d give me a half hour free. I wound up speaking to him for close to two hours, and when I walked out he offered me the job of production manager of the agency. I said, “I’m really overwhelmed, didn’t expect a job offer from this. But I am committed at least for three more months in Salvador, because we’re closing up our affairs there, and I’m committed to my current boss.” I said, “If you’ll allow me to call him tonight and answer you tomorrow—” ‘cause he needed my—this advertising agency, he needed me at the beginning of the month, which was August 1978, and that was about three weeks away, and I couldn’t commit to it until I spoke to Ruth’s dad. And when I spoke with him and told him what the problem was, he said, “You’re relieved of any responsibility. If you need to be there on the 1st of August, be there.” And so it was.

That left poor Ruth to close the house down, this house, and to make any arrangements that needed to be made to bring the kids up here. She came August 18th with the three kids to our new home in Dallas. And during that time, I had started working. I had purchased the beds and had them installed in the bedrooms. We didn’t have a dining room table yet. We didn’t have a dinette table. We were eating off cardboard boxes. I was waiting for Ruth to come to pick out what she wanted. That’s how we started our adventure. We ate on suitcases for the first few days, (laughs) but we did it together. And we managed.

(You mentioned the agrarian reform, but the war was also really—the civil war had begun at that point.)

Right. And one of the things we did discuss was that we have three young kids. Our oldest then, Lisa, was eleven or twelve, and we had the two younger ones that were seven and five, respectively. And I told Ruth that, “If we want to stick around and see if we can find something to do here, that’s great. But we have three kids that we have a responsibility to be around for and to raise, and I think we’re better off going to the States.” So we decided to go to the States, at least until things calmed down, and we stayed fifteen years. No, I’m sorry, we stayed from ’78 until right now that we started spending more time here.

(So your kids, how did they adjust to the transition?)

They cried for about a year. They left everything. They left life as they knew it behind in Salvador. It was a tough time for them. They made a miraculous adjustment. Salvador’s still their home, and they consider it such. When they come back to this house and spend time here with us, you can see their minds reverting back to when they were kids here. And now they’re bringing their kids here. And the cook that we had, who’s not really the cook, she’s a member of the family at this point, she began with us when our oldest, Lisa, was just an infant, and she’s still here. She raised all of our kids. She lost fifteen pounds after we left. She never stopped letting us know that we took her kids away from her. She feels very maternal towards them. And it still moves me a lot when I think about it.

(Amazing. So you moved to Dallas. What did you miss the most from Salvador when you moved?)

I missed the people. From the first day that I was here, the people as they are always made me feel at home here. There wasn’t a day that I felt as a stranger here, not a day. The Salvadoran is a very different person, a very friendly person, from people in the States. We have many friends in the States, and it takes a while to have them warm up to you. But in Salvador, it’s immediate. People wear their emotions on their sleeves. They can’t do enough for you. Friendship means something much different here in Salvador. Friendship in the States in many cases means acquaintance, while here friendship has a much deeper meaning.

(OK. Tell me—now, when the land was being sold, was forcibly sold, did Don Chepe really want to sell the hacienda?)

If the agrarian reform had never happened, I’m sure the property would still be in the hands of the family. There were too many emotional ties to that land that this family could never have thought of selling it. It was a very emotional thing. Ruth grew up on the farm. Almost before she learned to walk, she was getting up at 4 or 5 in the morning and out with the cowboys on horseback, helping round up the cattle. It’s in her blood. Her sisters, I’m sure, feel the same way. Our kids—we recently went back, this year, and our kids, from the moment they got into the car to leave this house and go towards the farm, they were in tears, and that goes for my son and my two daughters. The fellow who was head of the dairy, he appointed himself as our guide. He was just—he just stepped down from being the mayor of the little town next to the farm. But he insisted on taking us around Talcualhuya. People there still remembered Ruth, remembered our kids, remembered me, and they came out. The tears were flowing on all sides. Hugs, tears, it was just a wonderful—a draining, but a very wonderful day.

(And is it still a working farm?)

No—parts of it. It’s not the same property it used to be. It was sectioned off as a cooperative, and it was given as parcels. Unfortunately, they gave them their piece of land with a mortgage. Very few of them understood what a mortgage was and the obligations that come with it, so they didn’t keep up with their payments. Some of them perhaps knew how to pay for their farm and keep it going, but others didn’t know that they had to keep planting corn and use the profits from the corn or whatever they wanted to plant to keep that property. So they lost it. And it was given back to whatever bank was holding the letters, and other people came in and bought those letters. So the property is in parcels. There are many owners of that property now. Now a large company’s been buying parts of it up, and they’re planting vegetables for export.

(I have sort of a more general question about you growing up in the States, especially in the urban United States, and coming here and seeing the abject poverty of El Salvador, yet the life of the middle class and the upper middle class and the upper class is totally different. Was that hard to adjust to at first?)

It’s always hard to adjust to. I don’t know that I’ve ever adjusted to it. Since coming here, I’ve recognized that for the lower class to build itself up, it needs jobs. I’ve never seen a more industrious group of people as the Salvadorans were when I first came here. Unfortunately now, since there has not been jobs for them, the best have figured out how to leave and find the jobs where they are, which is in the States. Many have entered as illegal aliens. I really don’t know how many countries there are that can say that a quarter of its population is living in another country, and most of them illegally. If I can get a little political now, the same US government that complains about people illegally coming into the States is forgetting the fact that by forcing agrarian reform on the agro-industrials of El Salvador, the farmers had no place to work. The property that we had, that produced five thousand bottles of milk a day and sent this top-quality milk to the capital city, within a year’s time, all the dairy cattle that we had was either eaten, stolen, or sold for some other use. That property doesn’t produce a drop of milk today. The property that was producing raw sugar from its own sugar and had its own sugar mill, had its sugar mill work only two weeks after the sale of the farm, and never worked again. And when you go to that property today, the only sign that there was ever a sugar mill there are some of the concrete bases that are still there from the heavy machinery that we had. And you have to look for them because they’re so overgrown with the weeds that grow around it. It’s very sad to see. And that’s just our property. Multiply that by the number of properties that went to agrarian reform. Just take the number of people that used to have employment from us, and think about where they’re finding employment today. No provision was made for this, so what can the US government say about these people coming to the States? Either they should help finance new industry here, or they should repair their immigration law. I’m not the one to tell them what to do, but one or the other has to be done, or maybe a little bit of both, just in the spirit of fairness.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.