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the Memorial Concert
- “Dedicado a la Abuela Jean”


“Una Canción Para mi Madre”



 
           It would be a Scottish tune with a salsa  back beat — all bagpipes and cuatros, Highlander ice and Caribbean fire, Celtic pragmatism and Boriqua passion....

           This is a song for my mother, daughter of a schoolteacher and a Unitarian preacher.  Abuela Jean, independentista.

            A committed pacifist from her early 20s, my mother married a radical Jewish social activist and conscientious objector, Abraham Zwickel, who served time in prison in the best Thoreau tradition for refusal to cooperate with the military.  Mother was a member of the Harlem Ashram, an inter-racial, pacifist Christian commune when they met on a march protesting Jim Crow laws in 1943.  The founders of the Ashram were Ralph Templin and Jay Holmes Smith, two Methodist ministers expelled from India for their pro-Gandhi activities.  When the great Puerto Rican nationalist patriot, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, under “house arrest” in Columbus Hospital in New York City, heard of the Ashram, his followers invited members to meet Don Pedro.  His response to the question of Indian independence was, “India is Britain’s problem – Puerto Rico is your’s!”  Thus began over fifty years of my folks’ involvement in the Puerto Rican independence movement.

           On April 19, 1999 David Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian living on the small island of Vieques, off the southern Puerto Rican coast, was accidentally killed when a live Navy bomb fell on him.  The Viequens’ response was something they themselves, much less the U.S. Navy, would have scarce imagined until it actually happened.  Few of them would have consider themselves to be pacifists, yet they recognized the futility of violent resistance against the might of the U.S. military.  Puerto Rican passion notwithstanding, from what corner might this movement have been nurtured?

            My mother packed a lot of power in that diminutive frame of hers.  A cultured, well educated Middlebury College grad with a degree from the Sorbonne, and an accomplished pianist, her vocation as a schoolteacher was really just a sideline to her true calling.  She was well-traveled, once having bicycled across Europe, staying at youth hostels in centuries-old castles, and barely escaping Germany by train in 1939 when Hitler was closing its borders!  Yet she and my father lived their lives in voluntary simplicity, dedicated to the pursuit of peace and social justice.

             Quiet and unassuming, they rubbed shoulders with the best of them.  In her post-college years Mother would arrange readings for the great Canadian pacifist poet, Wilson MacDonald when he would come to New York City.  Jay Dinshaw, founder and president of the American Vegan Society, and Wilson Riles (Sr.), former California State Superintendent of Schools, were house guests in our Southern Californian home.  Up, nearly, to her death in 1981, whenever the woman who called herself Peace Pilgrim blew into our town, her radio and television interviews and church and college appearances were arranged for by my mother.

             Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, once invited my folks to come and march with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma.  Among her papers at Marquette University is a letter to my folks, dated 1969.  And in a near-brush with pop celebrity, my folks also turned down an invitation to a party with Woody Guthrie as a guest, in Topanga Canyon where we were living at the time.  

            At a public meeting my father once asked Richard Nixon, how he, as a Quaker, could justify his staunch militarism.  (Nixon mumbled something about “different kinds of Quakers.”)  My folks were embraced by Joan Baez at peace rallies.  César Chávez became a vegetarian under their influence, and my mother would make fresh vegetable and fruit juices for him when he was fasting.  Former U.S. Representative, Congressman Ronald Dellums, author of a “Transfer of Powers” bill on behalf of Puerto Rico, wrote an introduction to Jean’s book, “Voices For Independence”; actor, Ed Asner wrote a complimentary blurb for its cover.

             My parents never sought celebrity, nor were they ones to capitalize on their many friends who were very public figures, who all recognized the sincerity and strength of my folks’ beliefs and their great integrity.  Mother and Father’s mission, if you will, was to live their lives in such a way as to demonstrate the power of pacifism, non-violence and civil disobedience.  This is what they brought to the island nation of Puerto Rico and its Isla Nena, Vieques.

             One day they realized that, after devoting so many years to the Puerto Rican cause, they had never actually been there!  They remedied that soon enough, getting to know the many people who are at the forefront of the independence movement, including the prime movers of the nonviolent Vieques uprising.  In the 1970s, over a period of eight years or so, my folks would stay in Puerto Rico, getting to know it and its people, learning its politics and economics.  My mother would interview individuals on the political and social issues of the day and publish in national and international peace and justice magazines.

             One such article resulted in a $5,000 grant from a peace group in Germany to a “land rescue” community called Villa Sin Miedo (Village Without Fear) for property up in the of Puerto Rican highlands after the U.S. army burned the original settlement to the ground.  Along the way, sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), my mother appeared before the United Nations Committee on Decolonization. As the only Anglo speaking on behalf of the Puerto Rican people, she was the one person quoted by name in the New York Times the next day.  (Harumpf!)

             So much for background. Now we get to the meat of the story.

             For years my mother had been beating her head against a brick wall, trying to get the international peace and social justice community interested in Puerto Rico, to little avail.  Finally, her harping paid off.  She managed to get the attention of Matt Mayer of the War Resisters League (WRL) and John Lindsay-Poland of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR’s) Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean.  A conference in Northern California resulted, which my mother and I attended.  A few years later, Puerto Rico’s status having finally become a major issue, an international delegation to study the effects of militarization on Puerto Rico and Vieques, the first of several annual sojourns, was organized by the WRL and the FOR.

             On the way to Vieques one sunny day, John Lindsay-Poland so much as admitted that, had it not been for my mother’s persistence, that Delegation would have never come about and here’s the chorus of the Song.

             That evening there was a huge town meeting with all the movers and shakers of the resistance present, and I believe that there had to have been a feeling of empowerment on the part of the people of Vieques.  Here, after all, were pacifist peace activists from all over the United States, plus folks from Panama, the Philippines and Okinawa, acknowledging the struggle of the Puerto Rican people, and, perhaps even more importantly, listening to them.

             It took a tremendous amount of courage and will to rise up, a year and a half later, against the might of the U.S. Navy.  Might a measure of that have come from that town hall meeting?  I cannot say, but I believe that Ismael Guadalupe, Carlos Zenón and Bob Rabin would admit as much.  Who knows?  Of course, her son would think that.  This is just my biased, unsubstantiated opinion, but I believe my mother’s hand to have been in that uprising.

             My mother tells the story of Zenón’s going fishing one day.  Anchoring his vessel in front of the Guided Missile Destroyer, USS Dewey, he was told to move, that the Navy had an exercise to conduct.  Well, Carlos had his fishing to do so the Navy would just have to wait. Which is exactly what happened.

             Few are aware of my mother’s existence, save a small number among the New York, Chicago and San Francisco Puerto Rican communities, among them the famed poet and independentista Piri Thomas; the acclaimed Nationalist patriot, Alejandrina Torres, who was among the prisoners of conscience my folks would visit at the Federal facility in Pleasanton; and the “Vieques Three” – Rabin, Zenón & Guadalupe.

             None took to the streets upon her passing.  But she is a monument to the indomitability of the human spirit in pursuit of peace and social justice.  When the roll is called, she will be hailed as a mother of Puerto Rican independence and those who know will call, in the Latin American tradition of recognizing and honoring those who are absent, yet present in spirit, ¡Presente! Y que ¡viva Borinquen libre!