Love politics
Love politics emanate from a place of desire. Love politics is a relationship based political practice through which culture and change emerge in the life of community. In my own family, love politics informs every decision made on behalf of each child. I am the product of such political activity.
Herminia Pinto, my grandmother, left an arranged marriage after giving birth to three boys. She escaped to the northern coast of Honduras where economic capital of the country was and still is. She was illiterate and was able to make a living by selling food on the streets of the town of La Lima, Cortés. There, she met my grandfather Carlos Ernesto Mayorga, a migrant worker from Nicaragua. They had a slew of children together. My grandfather refused to give his last name to any of the girls my grandmother birthed while with him. The impact across generations has been that many of us bear one or the other last name. My grandfather, I am told, cheated on my grandmother with her best friend and went off to have a whole other family. He was an alcoholic and died of cirrhosis. Perhaps he fit the definition of what it meant to be a man, but my family experienced his efforts at manliness as violence. In the end, he was neither father nor man, but rather a harbinger of chaos and neglect.
Eventually, two of my grandmother’s children found her when they were older. One of them, Napoleón Pinto, settled in La Lima and supported my grandmother as she struggled to raise her children alone. My uncle Napo became a father figure for his siblings, in particular the girls, whom he protected and sent to school. I am told that he would say to them that he did not want them to depend on any men to be able to make a living, that he wanted each woman in our family to be independent. This was a rare and contrary political stance in any Western culture in the 50s when my aunts and uncles were children. My uncle Napo’s investment in the girls in his own family was motivated by love, not by the need to control the women in our family or to fit any particular cultural pattern about what it meant to be a Honduran man. He died tragically in 1974 in a way that is highly suggestive of foul play. He left behind his own slew of children in and out of wedlock, as well as a cadre of women prepared to face an increasingly uncertain future in Honduras and here in the United States. My grandmother died in 1986. She is entombed along with uncle Napo in the cemetery in La Lima. They sowed seeds for times they could not have even imagined. I sit here today, on a POC land cooperative in Durham, North Carolina, at the peak of a journey that has taken me places they most likely would have loathed and that nevertheless have been necessary for my own survival here.
I was two years old when my uncle Napo died. Thirteen when my grandma made the same journey. I don’t really know about how much they loved me. And yet, who I am today is the direct result of their actions for children who came before me and who in turn brought me into this world and took care of me. I was born, according to my mother, as a result of rape probably on New Year’s eve in 1971. My father, a man who used to be called Manuel Morales, an avowed and vetted communist trained in Russia to provide leadership to the Honduran community movement, had not extended his concern for the proletariat to my mother’s well being. After the event, my mother did not know she was pregnant.
My auntie went to the doctor’s with her to make sure she was alright because it had been a while since she bled. The doctor discovered that my mother’s hymen was intact and that she was also pregnant. My family’s response was to protect my mother by sending her to Santa Rosa de Copán, a remote and bucolic mountain town on the Western state of Copán in Honduras. My auntie Tata was doing a practicum at the Hospital Occidental and so it made sense to have my mother live with her during the duration of her pregnancy with me. When my mother arrived in Santa Rosa and went to the doctor’s, word spread that she was still a virgin. Soon, a group of nuns apparently came around and would spend time with her waiting for my birth. I both cringe and laugh at the fact that nuns waited anxiously for the virgin birth of a queer, anti-capitalist, poet organizer intellectual. Surely, they would have to revisit their belief system if in fact it was God’s will that I should be born in the same demeanor as their Jesus, but with better accommodations.
My mother is the youngest of Herminia and Carlos’ children. The protectiveness that her siblings gave her throughout her childhood and adolescence was transferred to me. My mother’s pregnancy enveloped the family in a sense of joy and expectation. This means that there are many stories about that time that I hear at every family gathering even now, close to forty five years later. I have been told, for example, that my mother was an athlete and despite being pregnant with me, she walked and ran throughout her entire pregnancy. My aunties tell me that she also went through profound character changes that in time were momentary. For example, my mother was never particularly interested in intellectual matters, but my aunts say she read voraciously while pregnant. She also apparently developed quite a love for watching the stars and was particularly fixated with the constellation of Cassiopeia.
When I was born, I had moles that delineated that constellation on my face. My auntie marveled at this. My mother, on the other hand, would not have me and did not bond with me. Instead, I was handed from person to person, Tata and her best friend Yolanda and the nuns. My auntie Dee, flew down from the United States and spent three months with me. I was born jaundiced and bald. I was a strange sight to see for folks who are used to red newborn babies with blue spots and who are born with full mohawks. And yet, I was loved into being in the best way possible under the circumstances. For my jaundice, I was wrapped in tobacco leaves during the first three months of my life. My head was anointed with oil daily and I was held outdoors for the sun to give me warmth and perhaps a little color. I was colicky and overall frustrated by my condition as an infant and so the women who loved me into being dealt with my fussiness and saw me emerge as a white haired oddity that eventually began to look classically Central American.
La Lima, Cortés and the Chamelecón River
Love politics also made themselves evident in my family’s relationships to their communities. I was told by my aunties that during the general strike of 1954 that brought to a halt the operations of the Standard Fruit Company and the Tela Railroad Company, my uncle Napo was part of the strike, my grandmother cooked for the strikers even through the hurricane that swelled up the Chamelecón River into the low adjacent banana plantation areas. My auntie Nena stood in the strike lines. I was told that my grandma cooked in waist deep water so she could provide free food during the most difficult and miserable time of that six month strike. Herminia emptied the barn where she kept her cooking provisions and gave it all away for free. At the end of the flood, she was broke and had no provisions.
The community replenished her barn shortly afterwards and she was made whole again. More importantly, there were bonds of deep appreciation and love that were strong forty years later throughout most of my childhood and that manifested themselves into a packed funeral home at the time of her passing. The community was able to get the Americans to provide housing, health care, vacation time, weekends, and schools for the banana plantation workers. Soon after, the unions sold themselves out to the Americans and lost their own connection to the very people they represented. Soon they added on to the pile of disappointments in organizations and systems the Honduran people carry as part of the bundle of stories that define us as a people. What endured were the sacrifices and the love forged by the women immersed in the flood waters of the Chamelecón.
