Around about this time, our whole family – Gloria, five year-old Ricky, baby Billy and me – went to my brother-in-law, Manuel’s wedding in Tlacolula.  That was a party!  I saw the communal culture that beats like a second heart in the breasts of the Zapotec.  The event lasted for three days.  Hundreds of townspeople were involved in one way or another.  My sons and I watched the slaughter of a cow.

We saw the spiral notebook that contained all the Guelaguetza notations.  Guelaguetza is a tradition of communal financing of major events.  Each family keeps a record of the gifts which they had brought to other families’ fiestas.  If our family had contributed 5 kilos of corn, two turkeys, or ten cases of beer, that family would check their own notebook and respond with an equal gift – even if the ‘debt’ was from many years ago.  Each day had special ceremonies and late-night dancing to Jarabe and traditional brass bands.

One custom requires relatives of the groom to deliver a turkey to the home of the bride.  Tlacolula is known for agave cactus and the production of Mezcal.   Drinking bouts are part of the custom on visits to the home of the bride.  Always feisty and ready for combat, Gloria wore a special scarf where she would spit her shots unnoticed.  She got a little tipsy and began alerting us to similar tricks being played by the bride’s family.

Now that I am done with alcohol and have been mostly free of it for 25 years, I wish I could better influence the sons and grandsons of Tlacolula.  Some of them are locked in a death grip with the poison.  One day in the Tlacolula mercado, I saw the sad sight of a little boy wheeling his drunken father home in a wheel-barrow.

One of the women I met at the fiesta was the mother of Audencio Hernandez.  Lenchin, as he was known, had been an activist working hand in hand with my brother-in-law, Manuel.  One day at the town’s Tribuna Libre, a traditional day of speech-making, he had spoken: “People of Tlacolula, wake up!  The town politicians of the Institutional Revolutionary Party are stealing us blind.  They receive cattle and goods from the central government and just keep it all for themselves.”  For his bravery and honesty, he was lured to a remote area by a pretty girl.  He was tortured and murdered by henchmen of the PRI strongman and his tongue was cut out.

My activism was re-awakened.  I started a committee led by Tlacolulense living in Chicago.  We planned an evening of free speech against violent repression in southern Mexico.   These were the early days of the Party for Revolutionary Democracy (PRD).  But for a stolen election, their candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, would have won the presidency.

We joined forces with local PRD activists and sponsored our own Tribuna Libre.  We produced a broad-sheet that detailed examples of violent repression of democratic initiatives in southern Mexico.  In addition to the case of Lenchin, we highlighted the case of Angel Butron’s uncle.  An elected town president, the uncle was killed by agents of a cacique in Nochistlan, a town in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca.  The Butrons attended the same church as Gloria.  Angel did mechanical work on our car in his garage.

Thanks to the help of my brother-in-law, Tino, and his compadre, Leon Martinez, we managed to get the word out pretty well.  Leon is a Spanish-language radio personality in Chicago.  We arranged with some Oaxacan artists for a “sand painting” which memorialized the martyrs.  We sponsored a visit to Chicago by David Lopez who gave in-depth accounting of the situation in his embattled Zapotec hometown.  Salvadoran activists brought a large photo of Archbishop Romero.

As with many of the memorable moments of my life, I still feel a touch of embarrassment with a final twist to our successful evening.   For some reason, Leon’s nephew passed the microphone to me thinking that I could do a better job of live translation of David’s speech.  Unable to keep up with his rapid delivery, I ended up just making up my own speeches in English each time David paused.

The next time I was in Tlacolula, a local activist bragged to me that people in Chicago had held an event for them.  “I helped with that event,” I told him.  Not sure if he believed me.