The Possible Dream

CONTENIDO

The Possible Dream

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE“GARROTILLO” AND OTHER WORLDS

CHAPTER TWOTHE DEATH THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

CHAPTER THREEWAVES OF MIGRATION

CHAPTER FOURA BRAVE KID

CHAPTER FIVE MY EARLY TRAVELS

CHAPTER SIXA NEW STAGE IN SAN SALVADOR

CHAPTER SEVENBLOOD ON THE LANDSCAPE

CHAPTER EIGHT CRAZY LOVE

CHAPTER NINEAN ADVENTURE INTO THE UNKNOWNCHAPTER TENI’LL NEVER BE BROKEN

CHAPTER ELEVENI RETURN TO THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITIES

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CHAPTER TWELVE NOW THE WORLD IS MINE

CHAPTER THIRTEENKATHY, MY WIFE, PARTNER, AND FRIEND

CHAPTER FOURTEENMY FIRST BUSINESS IS BORN

CHAPTER FIFTEENTHE AMERICAN DREAM: I WAS RICH!

CHAPTER SIXTEENTHE GODFATHER OF CHALATENANGO

CHAPTER SEVENTEENA DIRTY CONSPIRACY

CHAPTER EIGHTEENDOWN BUT NOT OUT

CHAPTER NINETEENA GIFT FROM GOD

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Due to the delicate nature of some of the events narrated in this book, the names of several people have been changed.

The Possible Dream

PROLOGUE

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I first met José Ramón Barahona almost a decade ago. At that time he was already the undisputed leader of the Salvadoran community in Washington, D.C. Over time I’ve gotten to know him better, not only as a businessman, but also as a family man and a human being, who at age sixty is still full of projects and dreams. I’ve been able to share countless enriching experiences with him and have discussed his ideas about the economic and social development of our beloved El Salvador in great detail. I take this chance to acknowledge how much I’ve learned from his philosophy of life, his values, and his principles.

My first real personal contact with José was at a distinctly intimate and family occasion in early autumn 1997, when along with Kathy, his wife, and their children Alicia and David; he had a housewarming party at his new home in Great Falls, Virginia. My first impression was that his mentality, his way of life, and even his way of expressing himself, made him seem more American than Salvadoran. I thought that while he probably still felt close to El Salvador, he was disconnected from the present-day economic, social and political life of our country.

When you read this book you’ll realize that my first impression was completely mistaken. No doubt the distance and his almost thirty-year absence from his beloved land made him appear removed from our country. What I didn’t know then was that he keeps himself entirely abreast of everything that happens in El Salvador, from which he never lost contact. Furthermore, in the past few years I believe that we have recovered him permanently. Day by day, José is

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more and more one of us. A Salvadoran before all... and proud of being Salvadoran.

Today the “Chief,” as his admirers affectionately call him, is one of my best friends. Writing this prologue to the story of his life, in a book that means so much to him and that I’m sure will change our vision of the American Dream, is a true privilege.

What I love about this book is its purity, honesty, and sincerity. José tells it all. This isn’t one of those books written to polish someone’s image and do public relations. Although his story has all the words, images, achievements and people that have combined to form a life of triumphs, this biography is not free of it’s share of vicissitudes. This book, which was written with great conviction and absolute transparency, tells his story just as we, his friends, knew it before this book was published.

In the words of a great novelist, José writes about what he has lived and lives what he has written. We must be grateful to him for his bravery in telling us about his dreams and how he realized them. Whether in Washington, D.C., San Salvador, San José, Costa Rica or in his beloved Chalatenango, José shows us in this book that he has known how to win all the battles immigrants face. He is an example and role model for our communities in the United States, their leaders and their organizations.

José’s story also gives hope to all the young people of El Salvador. In his mind José delineates that success is attained by hard work, honesty and discipline; by a willingness to sacrifice one’s self to the fullest, to achieve one’s desires, dreams and aspirations.

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Finally that success is realized through preparation and education. His story proves that fate won’t stand in the way of those who have these pre-requisites.

A short time ago I had the chance to pause and reflect on his life while looking at the awards, medals, citations, honors, photographs and paintings on display in his brand-new, elegantly appointed office in Herndon, Virginia.

I was struck by two things: the Medal of Freedom awarded by the United States Senate, an honor he shares with Margaret Thatcher, Charlton Heston and President Ronald Reagan, among others; and a recent newspaper article that calls him “the Godfather of Chalatenango” because of the social and humanitarian work he’s done in the north of the country. At that moment I understood that, in addition to being a Salvadoran, José is a man with a universal dimension, who transcends borders, races, languages, religions, and economic and social conditions.

He is a man of the countryside in his simple and natural manner, but is also a visionary and a global businessman.

My hope is that this book will contribute to him, being recognized as such in the history of El Salvador, and that our future generations will benefit from his legacy.

René León

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INTRODUCTION

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Carmen Hernández de Barahona woke up at dawn with her first labor pains. It was August 12, 1944. She was thirty-five years old with dark skin, a robust complexion, and a frank expression. Her husband, Raúl Barahona, barely two years older than his wife, dressed himself quickly, put on his hat, grabbed his machete, and took a pot of black coffee sweetened with cinnamon that his daughter, Lucía, had prepared for him on the hearth to drink on the road. He headed uphill to search for Miss Juliana, the midwife. Rain had fallen all night and the star-filled sky seemed recently washed. The air was suffused with a strong aroma of lime grass, jasmine, and forget-me-nots.

On the road, Raúl prayed to God and Saint Teresa for all to turn out well. It was Carmen’s eighth childbirth, and this made him all the more concerned. But Miss Juliana lived nearby and would soon be with her. He quickly passed by the cobia tree in front of Don Justo Martínez’s farm, where the flames of candles, already lit, could be seen. He followed the stone wall that surrounded Don Chepe Rodríguez’s property, passed the ravine, and arrived at Miss Juliana’s farm. Raúl was surprised to find the midwife already waiting for him with a towel on her head, worn in the style of a mantilla, with a bag containing the things she would need to attend the birth.

-“Good morning, Miss Juliana... how did you know it would be Carmen’s turn today?”-“It’s not the first time, you know. I’m an old hand at this and my heart told me last night that Carmen was going to give birth today. Let’s go quick.”-“Yes, let’s go”-, Raúl added to end the conversation.

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When they arrived at the house they found Carmen wrapped in blankets and drenched in sweat. Santiago, the oldest of their children, was at her side wiping her forehead with a warm cloth. Lucía was warming some food in the kitchen and the youngest children were wandering around the house, frightened. Miss Juliana headed immediately to the big bed made from petate and rope, and took out a small metal box, scissors, rags in various colors, alcohol, ointments and pomades in small bottles of various shapes. Lucía brought her some hot water. Carmen started breathing more rapidly. Pain etched itself on her face.

Raúl took off his hat and stepped into the hallway. He sat on a wooden bench that he had built himself and began to think. It was still dark outside. He clearly remembered the afternoon when, as a teenager, his father, a Spanish citizen of Basque origin, took him to Chalatenango and bought him his first hat. That afternoon he told his son that he was convinced someone destined for great things would descend from his blood. Back then, Raúl didn’t understand what his father meant. But on that summer dawn, with the roosters already crowing and the morning birds announcing the imminent sunrise, he was convinced that his father’s words were referring to Carmen’s eighth childbirth.

He also remembered the night several years before, at the wake for Marina Zelaya, when Miss Juliana, with a cigar in her mouth and a cup of black coffee in her hand, had told him as she looked off into the distance, “Look, Raúl, I know what I’m talking about, this house is going to be washed away by the waters.”

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At that time the village of Santa Teresa was a handful of small houses scattered between the Gualeza River and the majestic Lempa River. Its true name was Potrerillos, but its inhabitants always preferred to call it by the name of its patron saint. It was officially named Santa Teresa around 1971, by legislative decree.

The people of the town were simple, united, and happy. Most of them farmed their own small parcels of land. On Sundays they would go to the market in the village of Potonico or in the city of Chalatenango. They sold corn, sorghum, beans and rice, and they bought leather straps for sandals, whetting stones, handles for sickles and machetes, rennet, hairpins, dulce de laja, rose water, Bristol almanacs and sugar loaves.

When someone in the village was married, everyone gathered to build the newlyweds’ house. On October 14, Saint Teresa’s Day, everyone went to Mass to listen to Father Antonio’s sermon. On this special occasion, the priest traveled by mule from the town of Los Ranchos. Those who didn’t fit inside the simple church with a single bell tower (which had been built by the parishioners themselves) stood outside and listened to the Mass with a devout attitude and a contrite expression.

After Mass horse races were held, called “de cinta” or ribbon races, in which young horsemen, full of skill and daring, competed for prize ribbons as they tried to win a kiss from the girls who were competing to be Queen of the feast day. These beautiful girls were adorned in only a poplin dress, a sash that crossed their chest and back, a flower in their hair and their God-given graces.

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A few would sneak downhill to Toño García’s house by the river to drink guaro, a kind of corn moonshine, with tender jocotillo fruit, salt and lime. At night, armed with guitars, maracas, conga drums and guitarrón, the virtuoso violinist Lupe Guandique and his band of musicians livened up the festive dance in the one-room schoolhouse.

Raúl saw the first light of day with its tenuous rose color and purple streaks in the corner of the sky. The air carried the aroma of coffee, beans and tortillas from his neighbors’ kitchens. From a distance came the shouts of campesinos as they drove their herds to pasture. The darkness was slowly overtaken by the light and daybreak came. At exactly six o’clock Carmen let out her last cry of labor and a boy with immense dark eyes fell into the hands of the midwife, who skillfully cut the umbilical cord and lay the newborn face-up to clean him. The infant didn’t cry but rather rested peacefully and looked with open, already lively eyes at the beams supporting the ceiling of the house.

-“The baby’s born, but this damned kid doesn’t even cry”-, the midwife announced to Raúl.

He entered the house, clasped his wife by the hand, and looked at his eighth child with tenderness. Drenched in sweat, Carmen smiled while she caressed the baby’s forehead. A half hour after his birth, the baby began to cry. He cried for twenty-five minutes, then latched on to Carmen’s breast and fell asleep.

The Barahonas’ house stood next to the path that led to the Gualeza River. Seen from a hillside, the house seemed like an enormous cow lying down in a field. The roof was made of dark tiles, the adobe walls

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were whitewashed and there was a dirt floor. It was surrounded by three patios with hammocks hanging from rustic beams. There were pots with flowers of all different types and an old ox cart was parked next to the room where the corn was stored.

Inside the house other hammocks served as living room furniture for sitting down and talking. The dining room was an old wooden table. There were trunks for storing clothes, and on a table next to a wood-burning stove, there were pitchers and pots on top of yaguales, or cloth wound in a spiral that women used to carry loads on their head. Two screens made from wooden slats and cloth separated the three humble bedrooms from the rest of the house. Raúl and Carmen slept in one bedroom, and the children were distributed between the other two and the hammocks. Hanging from the center beam was the classic guide to natural medicine, Bristol’s Almanac, and a horseshoe. On one of the walls there was an image of Saint Teresa.

Carmen always kept the dirt floor clean and tightly packed with water and a broom made out of dried branches. There were flowerpots made from old jars and plenty of pots. Surrounding the house was a rather large expanse of land where there were pens for the cows, a Zebu bull, and other beasts of burden. Pigs wallowed in the mud in a small pigsty. Raúl had planted cornfields and orange, mango, banana, avocado, lime, cashew and almond trees. There were also guayabos, conacastes, tamarinds and timber-yielding trees.

Miss Juliana was already over seventy years old. She was a small woman with indigenous features and a happy, talkative personality. Besides being a midwife, she was also a well-known fortune-teller. She knew

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about the lives and business of all the people who lived in Santa Teresa. Ever since the violent upheavals of 1932 in the western part of the country, when thousands died in a rebellion against the government, she was given to making prophecies at wakes and baptisms warning that Santa Teresa would disappear in a flood, and that all Chalatenango would rise up in hatred, brother against brother.

When the newborn was fast asleep next to his

mother, the midwife approached Raúl and asked:

-“What name are you going to give to the child?”-“José, like my father, and Ramón... José Ramón. Carmen and I already decided that if it was a boy, that’s the name we’d give him.”

From an early age, Ramón was very curious. He was dark and thin. Two enormous brown eyes stood out on his small chiseled face. On his fifth birthday, his father took him for the first time to the Lempa River to fish. Raúl taught him how to swim and use a fishing net. That first encounter with the majestic river would be one of the best memories of his life.

One of his biggest thrills as a child was to go to Potonico or Chalatenango on Sundays. Raúl and his two sons, Santiago and Ramón, woke up very early in the morning and ate a breakfast of beans, curdled cheese, tortillas fresh from the comal, and hot coffee. Then they saddled their rides: the black horse with a white star in front and the brown mule. Raúl and Ramón rode the horse, with Ramón sitting in front on the pommel as best he could. Santiago rode on the mule. They traveled slowly, climbing up and down the sierra.

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After a trip of almost four hours, they arrived early in the morning in Chalatenango. They left their mounts in Don Loncho Hernández’s corral. For three centavos, Don Loncho looked after the animals and gave them a handful of hay. After attending Mass and doing errands, Raúl took the boys to the dry goods store run by Don Jacobo the Turk to buy some clothes for them. After that, they drank fruit shakes at Doña Armida Solórzano’s stand.

By mid-afternoon they returned to Santa Teresa beneath an immensely blue sky on paths that meandered through green fields redolent of ripe fruit, wildflowers, fresh grass and clean air. They were happy. The thin, curious boy dreamed that one day he would outgrow those landscapes just as he would outgrow the clothes that Don Jacobo sold them.

That was Ramón’s dream, but at times reality is harsh and adverse, as if circumstance conspired against happiness, or destiny plotted brutally against our hopes.

This book tells the story of José Ramón Barahona, a fighter who never gave up, despite the many blows he experienced from his earliest childhood, when because of the death of his father, he and his family suffered the most abject poverty. This is the life journey of that dream-filled child, the hard-working boy, the risk-taking and triumphant man, as he himself tells it, thanks to his extraordinary memory and to the many anecdotes he has stored away.

In short, this is the inspiring tale of a humble Salvadoran campesino that rose from his precarious

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status as an illegal immigrant in the United States to reach the American Dream. It is the story of a man who left his small village barefoot, his pockets empty, with only a single change of clothes and a suitcase full of dreams, first passing through San Salvador, where he enjoyed the affection and protection of a respected Salvadoran family, and then climbing the ladder of business success in the world’s greatest economic power.

I met José Ramón Barahona in Washington D.C., where my work as strategic communications adviser had taken me. He is, without a doubt, the most important reference point for the prosperous Salvadoran community that lives in the capital of the United States. His business successes are well-known, as is his genuine concern for Salvadorans who arrive in that country with only the tools born from their dreams and their enormous capacity for work. Many of them found jobs and stability with the help of a man who, just like them, came to make his dream come true.

What first impressed me about José Ramón Barahona were his innate wisdom and his extraordinary simplicity. Around the same time we met, I had a conversation with Manuel Meléndez, the president of the company I work for, about the phenomenon of the massive immigration of Salvadorans to the United States. We had been watching a news report about the feared Mara Salvatrucha, the Salvadoran gang described by some news outlets in the United States as the first transnational crime organization. The images of those violent gang members have unfortunately stained a community that for the most part is composed of hard-working, enterprising people, of whom José

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Ramón Barahona is a stellar example. The idea of writing this book emerged from that conversation.

The epic achievements of José Ramón Barahona prove that there are no short cuts or magic formulas to help us realize our dreams. They show that it is only possible by a combination of intelligence, honor, effort, discipline, perseverance, and absolute clarity of purpose. But these pages contain more: the bitter taste of homesickness, the solidarity of humble compatriots in the cold of the north, the incessant desire to arrive at, or rather, to return one day to the promised land: El Salvador, this intense, irascible and loving piece of land that has been, is and will be our sustenance forever.

The purpose of this narrative is to serve as an inspiration and encouragement to future generations, and to provide an example to those who wish to achieve success and triumph over their natural boundaries or limitations as individuals.