Magdalena's Stories
Grant Holub-Moorman
Magdalena Gomez and I first met in the greenhouses behind Dubuque Rescue Mission. Baby wrapped tightly against her hip in a rebozo striped with red, blue, and black, she planted seeds in trays and recounted her history.
At New Hope farm, I listened to more of Magdalena’s stories, this time of her own childhood, as she and her sister-in-law Elena patted out tortillas by hand and prepared lunch for the work day.
Papas
por Magdalena
Casi toda la semilla,
mi mamá le gusta sembrar todo.
Adora mucha la semilla…
Ella nos llevaba todos
así de niños,
nos enseña de
de hacer hoyos
para poner las papas
como sembrarlo
ella hace los hoyos
grandes (brazos hace un círculo)
y luego
más grande así (extiende los brazos)
largo
y luego le ponemos
papas papas papas así
Y luego, este,
otro le tira, este,
tierra encima la semilla
Es algo bonito, porque
nos divertíamos junto con mi mamá
para sembrarlo todos
yo, con mis hermanitos, mis hermanitas, todos.
Y…
muy feliz.
Potatoes
by Magdalena
Pretty much every sort of seed,
my mama liked growing it all.
She loves it…
She took us all
as children,
she teaches us
to make the holes
for the potatoes
how to plant them
she digs the holes
big ones (arms form a circle)
and then
big like (arms extending)
long
And then, we put
potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, just like that
And then, right,
someone else chucks, right,
soil on top
It’s a nice thing, because
we had fun together with my mama
planting it all,
me, with my little brothers, my little sisters, all together.
And…
very happy.
When conversing in Spanish, I often find it difficult to describe events I remember in English. Etched in my mother tongue, it is an act of double translation to remember, rewrite mentally, and then enunciate family lore and formative memories. Magdalena did not learn Spanish until she was 19 years old and already living in the United States.
Her mother tongue is Ixil, a Mayan language. During Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, the nation’s indigenous Mayan population faced genocide from paramilitary and government security forces that were trained, funded, and armed by the U.S. In total, 140,000 to 200,000 people were killed, 83% of those killed were Maya. A 1992 CIA cable confirmed their knowledge of genocidal violence: “several villages have been burned to the ground.” The report continued, “The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is [pro-guerrilla] has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and noncombatants alike.”
Magdalena grew up in the final years of the war, which formally ended in 1996. She remembers hearing family stories of hiding in caves during military raids.
The civil war is just the latest tragedy in a long series of imperial violence. The United States began propping up dictatorships in Guatemala beginning in 1890, encouraging government theft of communal indigenous land. Biodiverse, subsistence farming was replaced with massive plantations of cash crops like coffee and fruit. By 1950, United Fruit Company, now the ubiquitous banana brand Chiquita, was the largest landowner in Guatemala. After a brief revolutionary period of land redistribution and pro-union politics, a CIA-plotted 1954 coup d’état returned the nation to the pro-business military regime. With their land stolen and abused by foreign corporations, small farmers rose up in guerilla warfare, leading to the three decades of civil war.
As Magdalena translated memory, I observed in her eyes the mismatched machinery seeking contact between Spanish and Ixil vernacular. Arms moving in precise, sweeping gestures, she traced the geography of her birthplace in the hills of Northern Guatemala. Magdalena is indigenous and a migrant. Of a land and exiled from it. Her culture survived extermination, but remains unhealed from decades of land theft and violence. The U.S. government has not issued any reparations to the families of victims and continues training and funding authoritarian regimes worldwide. Like rural indigenous people everywhere, Ixil young people face the impossible decision to maintain ancestral farming on broken land or migrate and often leave family behind. Magdalena made that decision as a teenager. Her brother-in-law Davíd came to the U.S. when he was 15.
Magdalena described her relationship with her deceased mother to two of us – Miriam and me. Shimmering smiles burgeoned beyond words. Borders and 60-hour workweeks kept her from visiting, from attending the funeral.
There is a frontier I was afraid to cross into, manacled by the trained distance of masculinity, whiteness, and journalism. When Magdalena began to cry, I filmed. But Miriam did not hesitate, she walked into the frame and held Magdalena’s head against her chest.
This is an excerpt from a longer piece that Grant Holub-Moorman wrote in response to an AgArts residency he completed on New Hope Farm near Dubuque, IA. He worked with Miriam Alarcón Avila (photographer) and Marion Edwards (videographer).
Holub-Moorman’s entire piece (in English and Spanish) can be read on the AgArts website: https://www.agarts.org/reflections-a-residency-in-the-driftless-by-grant-holub-moorman/
Grant Holub-Moorman collects and produces oral histories with the Museum of Durham History, Los Campesinos Ecólogicos de la Sierra Madre de Chiapas, and other institutions. For this work, he received the audience choice award at the Southern Oral History Program’s annual Sonic South competition for his piece "She Knows: Race and Reproductive Justice in NC."
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Please enjoy the work of my colleagues in the Iowa Writers Collaborative.
Thank you to Magdalena and to Grant Holub-Moorman for sharing Magdalena's poem, stories, and the history of her land and people. Thank you Mary for providing this place for important emerging voices.
This perspective is so important to understand reasons people leave their homes to take a dangerous journey to an unknown future.