A birth certificate from the Texas State Board of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics —Form 52b-G163-827-50m — occupied me during the three-day drive from Minnesota to Laredo. Online, I’d found other church and government documents handwritten in German, Danish, and Spanish that also predated the routine use of typewriters and were, as a result, often nearly illegible. But this birth certificate was completed in English in a clear, spacious cursive hand. The standard info documented by the government in 1928 — parents’ names, their ages (20 and 25) and birthplaces (“Tex”), their color (“White”) and occupations (“Dairyman” and “Home”), and even whether or not the birth was legitimate (it was)—was as legible as Orion on a clear winter night, yet one handwritten detail locating this birth in Laredo puzzled me.
It was that kind of night last month, just two days before Christmas, when I read that Joan Didion had died. She’s one of those writers who provoked me to try and whose directness, specificity, and unanticipated insights have kept me trying for more than thirty years. “The impulse to write things down,” she declares in an essay in Slouching towards Bethlehem, “is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.” It’s that compulsion, that predilection she nurtured to the last — driving sentences to their often difficult but seemingly inevitable meanings and conclusions. And though she lived well into her eighth decade, I mourn the abrupt abbreviation of both her sentences and her life, particularly now when we need her insight and the stark honesty of her voice.
In the past several weeks in federal courts around the country, violent seditionists have faced, though in far different ways, their own compulsions and the resulting sentences raining down on them. Devlyn Thompson pled guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon, wrote a letter of apology to the officer he struck with a baton, and was sentenced to 46 months in prison. Robert Palmer of Florida pled guilty and faced four years in federal prison but after his day in court, claimed on his website that he had acted in self-defense; his sentence was then lengthened to 63 months. Jacob Anthony Chansley, the horned and furred rioter who insisted on organic food while jailed, faces 41 months in prison for obstructing an official proceeding. And Richard Barnett, 61, who made himself at home in Nancy Pelosi’s office, has yet to be sentenced, but if found guilty of all charges, he faces over seven years in prison. One year after the assault on the Capitol, over 725 people have been arrested, many of whom will face trial or reach plea agreements in 2022. However, this is but a fraction of the 2,000-plus rioters who violently entered the building and who deserve not only severe penalties for their actions but also vigorous judicial reprimands for their hatred, willful ignorance, denials of personal responsibility, and witless trust in those who spew rumors, wild theories, and bald-faced lies.
This sort of disinformation and propaganda, which Didion coolly eviscerates in Salvador and Political Fictions, has infested the country for decades. Selectively abbreviated or coerced “facts” have been and continue to be used to control people and maintain power, such as the trumped-up accusations during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s campaign to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. in the Sixties, the vindictive prosecution of the Central Park Five in 1989, the “big lie” about the 2020 presidential election, false and hyperbolic claims about vaccines, and the recent whiplash use of the term “critical race theory” to censor the teaching of American history. Similar tactics were used against the American Indian Movement, or AIM, founded by Clyde Bellecourt and others in Minneapolis in 1968. When Bellecourt died earlier this month, news reports recalled the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee by AIM members and Oglala Lakota activists in 1973. Two years later, when conditions on the poverty-stricken Pine Ridge reservation of southwestern South Dakota hadn’t improved, an armed confrontation with the FBI resulted in the death of two federal agents.
Wounded Knee, SD, Aug. 1993
This led to the government coercing, fabricating, and withholding evidence in order to convict AIM member Leonard Peltier of murder and imprison him for two life sentences. Despite several official admissions in later years that Peltier had been wrongly convicted and that the government “did not know who shot the agents,” there has been no subsequent adjudication, no commutation, no abbreviation of his sentence. And so, incarcerated for decades in federal prisons in Leavenworth, KS, and Terre Haute, IN, and Lewisburg, PA, Leonard Peltier has suffered beatings, isolation, illness, and incompetent and/or withheld medical care. Still, he endures. He’s now 77 and held in a federal penitentiary in Florida, hundreds of miles from his birthplace on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, a dozen frigid snow-swept miles from the Canadian border.
Last month when I escaped the front end of this Minnesota winter by spending several weeks in Laredo, I carried the birth certificate of my daughter Mary’s maternal great grandma Jova Alvarez to the Webb County Heritage Foundation and to the offices of both the city and Catholic cemeteries. According to the form, Jova was born in 1928 in Laredo on “S. Franco St.” At first, I thought that the writer put the “co” above the rest of the name because of the lack of space on the form and the large cursive handwriting. But since there is no street named South Franco on a 1930 map of Laredo and no one at the Heritage Foundation knew of a street by that name, I suspected that whoever completed the form had simply resorted to an abbreviation: maybe “S. Franco” stood for “S. Francisco” or, more likely, “San Francisco” a street that did exist in 1930.
Laredo City Cemetery, Dec. 2021
A few days later, while trying to transcribe several handwritten marriage and baptism records from Guanajuato, I found that as far back as the late 1700s priests and civil registry agents in Mexico also used abbreviations to shorten Maria to Ma, Jose to Je, San Juan to Sn Juan, nombre to nombe, primero to 1o, and Francisco Maria to Franco Ma. It finally made sense. The 1928 birth certificate’s abbreviation for San Francisco was not a local anomaly or one official’s predilection but a long-accepted practice.
The corner of San Francisco and Iturbide just north of Jova Alvares’s birthplace, Laredo, TX
I’m back in Minnesota now where the frigid sun sets early and rises late. I spend most days watching finches and nuthatches on the bird feeder outside the kitchen window, running the snow-drifted roads outside of Walnut Grove, sifting through more handwritten records as I try to make sense of our families’ lives and histories, and gauging the cold abbreviated reality infesting this sundogged January. And though, while in Laredo, I found the location but not the house where Jova was born on “S. Franco,” understanding what’s missing and why — whether omitted in the interest of concision, lost to the passage of time, or maliciously concealed to deceive or manipulate — should provoke in all of us, as in Didion, Peltier, and Bellecourt, an unrelenting determination to find the truth.
I enjoyed reading this article. I too believe in the precision of words.