Epilogue
What happened in Dario Martinez was not what I initially set out to find. I found no neat, happy, or idealized ending to a neighborhood's quest to build its own institutions and perhaps create its own system of governance. The seed from which in September 1987 I thought this might grow, the collective building of a schoolyard fence, did not in fact symbolize anything larger than just what it intended to enclose.
Their own school is what people wanted and their own school is all they fought for and finally achieved. Not a broad-based community organization, not a political party, not even a smoothly functioning Parent-Teacher Association. Just a decent, nearby place to send their children for an education, so that parents would not have to bury another Ricarda Huayapan drowned on her long walk to class.
But I was not the only outsider curious about what in Dario Martinez might grow, or explode, from a mounting impatience with the existing order. For one reason or another, and I could never clarify this despite many efforts, UPREZ arranged for Daniel to move into the neighborhood to begin recruiting and organizing on its behalf. And for a time, UPREZ was able to shed its outsider's clothes and be seen as part of the neighborhood.
But Daniel moved to Dario Martinez too late to use the fight for the school as a recruiting device for UPREZ. By then the school. was already up and functioning. It already had a PTA, an energetic principal living in the community, and a motivated group of young teachers. And without school-age children of his own, Daniel lacked even a purely personal reason to get involved. School matters were thus to remain pretty much out of his hands.
Outsiders of a decidedly different political persuasion also took note of Dario Martinez and the Valle de Chalco's many other colonias. Alarm bells had sounded in PR! headquarters not long after its setback there in the 1988 presidential elections. Hence the near bottomless pork barrel of PRI's National Program of Solidarity, and hence Catarino's job with the neighborhood's Self-Help Council. As Daniel said, "PRI doesn't reward friends anymore, it just buys off enemies."
The fact that both UPREZ and PR! used Dario Martinez as a kind of laboratory in which to experiment with- call it what you will- community mobilization, political consciousness raising, or personal co-optation, did not seem to influence the neighborhood's failure to develop its own truly grassroots institutions. That can be blamed on neither the right nor the left.
The one incipient organization that might have so developed, the neighborhood PTA, became stalled by its very success. It was originally created by community consensus to erect a provisionally functioning school and to pressure government authorities for a new building. With Guadalupe as its first president, it did this work energetically and single-mindedly. It was during her term that, despite the odds, the school took shape and opened its doors.
When Estela took over·from Guadalupe, a transition aided by her act as jailbird/martyr on behalf of the school, she devoted the PTA less to educational activism and more to political intrigue. Estela tried but could not block the dissident teacher's efforts to oust the principal. Complaints grew over the size and frequency of obligatory school fees. These and other disputes split parents and teachers into factions and dissolved the cooperative spirit that had prevailed under Guadalupe.
By the time Rafaela was uncontestedly elected to head the PTA, the government had already agreed to build the new school. But by then the PTA had lost most of its community support. Open meetings were poorly attended, few parents gave voluntary contributions for special school projects, and the PTA was excluded from the decision of how to dispose of the old classrooms. Its mandate to represent parents' interests had been effectively withdrawn.
Not surprisingly, the inauguration of the new school building was fraught with anti-climax. Classes first met there after the Christmas vacation in February 1990. A small schoolyard ceremony was held for students, but the principal hoped later to throw a neighborhood fiesta complete with music, food and drink, and a commemorative mass. But money, as usual, stood in the way.
Until then I had been a silent observer and quiet listener of all that happened in Dario Martinez. I had conscientiously avoided taking sides, voicing approval, or breaking confidences. I had also, diplomatically I hoped, turned down "loan" requests from several people not connected to my interviews but whom I still knew and liked.
But I did feel strongly that there should be a party, a big party. I thought, at the least, that a mariachi band, beer, soda, good food, and fancy decorations were in order to celebrate the neighborhood's first pre-fab, glass-windowed, two story concrete building. After all, this was their new school , the fruit of their hard-won victory over adversity. So during my February visit I decided finally to compromise my neutrality for what I took to be a good cause.
Because there was no longer a PTA treasurer, nor for that matter an official ledger of school accounts, I saw that making a sizable donation might compromise my position. To overcome any misunderstanding, I took advantage of one fairly well-attended PTA meeting to ask Rafaela and the principal to accept $100 to help underwrite a school fiesta. Whatever was left, I mentioned, might be used to buy classrooms supplies.
The principal said there was little time to plan such an event before my departure and instead suggested that we wait for my next visit. I insisted that the party go on as soon as possible, with or without me. Maybe, I thought, I might even recoup my impartiality in the community if in fact I were absent. That way at least the party would be an uninhibited event, not staged for some outside patron's benefit.
So all I asked of the principal was that he send me some party photographs which in retrospect I should not have waited so long to receive. They never came, and because my only contact with Dario Martinez lacking telephone and postal service- was to write Guadalupe in care of her in-laws, I decided not to investigate by mail. I would have to wait until I returned in person.
Yes, the principal told me when I arrived in November for the election, indeed a fiesta was held. And yes, everyone came and enjoyed themselves. But no, no one took pictures. When I asked others about the party, few could even remember attending. Yes, they said, there had been something or other in June on the last day of classes, but wasn't it an end-of-year ceremony as usual? Nothing special, thought most.
Perhaps it was all for the best that my gift was forgotten. Lost, misused, or spent unnoticed on school miscellany- it did not matter. Now I simply felt like all the other parents whose voluntary contributions always went unappreciated. That the community felt no special obligation to me was in fact a relief. Where the money actually went, I never bothered to find out.
My November trip was memorable for other reasons however. Unlike all the other visits, when I investigated important community events already past- such as Ricarda's drowning, Estela's jailing, or Guadalupe's showdown with the police this time they were occurring before my own eyes. Reading press accounts of the Antorchista massacre as the news unfolded, and sensing the naked fear pervading the neighborhood in its bloody aftermath, I felt suddenly anchored to what was happening there.
People who were my friends and confidants might well have died up on that hillside, killed in a dispute that figured prominently in my research, on the very day I was on my way to see them. This was not exactly a close brush with death, although certainly in Estela's case it could have been, but it did change my hold on the place. I was no longer simply an oral historian. If things heated up, I might become a kind of battlefield journalist; later I might even be called as a witness in a trial for the murder of someone I knew.
But good sense prevailed. People withdrew from the hillside, the police laid down their weapons, and Juan Martinez fled the law. The elections went on as planned and, as usual, they provided a harmless if predictable sideshow to the events they immediately followed. In Mexico, there is nothing like an obviously rigged election and a proforma protest by the opposition to calm one's nerves.
But in one sense, this election did serve as a kind of watershed event in Dario Martinez. It motivated Estela and Guadalupe actually to vote for the first time in their lives. Not that they did so however because they thought the election would finally be clean. Their skepticism about that was obvious to anyone who listened. Entering a voting booth, and thereby breaking through the invisible barrier which previously had kept them from participating in electoral politics, required much more of a psychological adjustment.
For Estela it was the need to feel she had won something, that she had chosen correctly and so in some small way could collect a prize. For her it meant going against her principles, her rhetoric, and her past as an UPREZ militant. It meant voting for PRI, the pre-ordained winner, and then, even more difficult, not talking about it. For once in her life she had to celebrate her victory in private.
For Guadalupe, her vote for PRTZ also meant a reordering of principles. All politicians were not alike, she had to convince herself. Some were better than others. Some might actually improve things. And Guadalupe's sense of duty to the neighborhood, what she always said stemmed from "necessity, pure necessity", led her even further, to work all day as a poll watcher. To ma e the connection between providing public services and guaranteeing a clean election, she certainly had to show signs of a new faith.
So this is how I left them- Estela a closet PRIista, Guadalupe a dutiful radical. Both voted in their own way, both for their own good reasons. Daniel meanwhile confirmed the direction of his previously detected emotional drift away from the neighborhood and seemed ready to move on physically as well. And Catarino- who knows?· If President Salinas's promised big party shake-out finally does reach his level of the bureaucracy, yes, he probably will survive. He is, after all, too good a ventriloquist dummy to throw away.
For three years I had been visiting Dario Martinez with such regularity that my comings and goings were no longer of much interest to anyone. Guadalupe paid little attention even to the news that this visit might be my last for a long while. I promised to share with her whatever might in the meantime emerge from our many interviews, we traded final pleasantries, and she shook my hand.
Walking down the long dirt street one last time from her house to Estela's, on my way to yet another bittersweet goodbye, I passed wall after wall of freshly whitewashed signs already starting to fade. Older signs in the crude hand of self-taught neighborhood artists, covered over by these new signs painted with the precision of an imported election campaign, were slowly becoming legible again.
"Rosa's Funerals- Special Prices for People with Few Pesos" floated up from "Decide with Your Vote! Will it be Misery or Joy?". "Stud Pig for Rent Here" reappeared under "Because the Chance for Social Peace is in Your Hands''. "World of Drugs, Street of Terror, Chalco Theater October 25" reemerged through "For a Better Life, Vote Like This".
It struck me that the entire neighborhood might be such a palimpsest of dreams and reality. But to whom belonged the dreams and to whom the reality? Outsiders would still and always come and go, bringing electricity, voting booths, and their many other promises of change. But their view of the Valle de Chalco is nothing but a point of debate, mere subject matter for the conflicting strategies, speeches, and sermons of social planners, politicians, and priests- they who come from elsewhere, who later have somewhere more to go.
The real neighborhood would continue to stand still, or at best barely to inch forward, but always on its own terms. Reality here belongs to insiders like Guadalupe and Estela, two friends bonded by ties of community and circumstance so strong that no disagreement over UPREZ, PRTZ, or the PTA can sever. For, as neighbors, they literally do share the same view. And whenever the clouds part momentarily over lxtaccihuatl, they stand side by side, looking together down their unpaved street and up upon the same snowy heights.
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