Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 224
As I recount with more detail in Freedom Fighters (Chapter 2), we opened up for
business just at the time the pro-communist forces were staging a comeback in Bolivia.
Circumstances demanded that we take a high profile in the face of threats and
unfriendly authorities. In this case volunteerism went beyond just helping a community
improvement project succeed. It also meant standing firm for my beliefs and being
prepared to take the heat. I believe this last demand closed the circle of total dedication
to a volunteer’s effort. My payoff was to have the best possible school for my children,
but in the process many other causes were served and the community was definitely
improved.
My volunteering efforts while still in Bolivia also brought me in contact with other
activities. This was the height of the Cold War and all political action was cast under that
struggle. The local ideologue chieftains excelled at using ordinary citizens as
instruments of their power plays. But, as my following example reveals, the
confrontation among groups of society in Third World countries during the days of the
Soviet Union was not always rooted in ideological principles. Often the communist
neighborhood leaders attached such designation to their names because their bosses
told them that is what they were. In fact, many of them just wanted a solution to their
problems.
Such was the case with a group of settlers who had bought, or were given by their labor
unions, lots uphill from my Dad’s Aranjuez property at the northern edge of the valley.
When my Dad bought his land in 1942, he also bought surface water rights from the
mountain creek source and use of the conveyance canal built by my maternal great
grandfather. On certain days of the month, he had rights to a specified number of hours
of flow. I remember, even as a young child, when we walked up with him along the
canal all the way to the mountain springs where the intake works had been built to
ensure that no one was scalping any part of the precious flow.
As these settlers began to proliferate in the early 1960s, they named their area Moscow
Village to signify their adherence to communist ways. It was not rare to see hammer
and sickle flags hanging on door thresholds. The graffiti was outright anti-capitalist and
anti-American. At one point, the leaders simply stopped letting water flow past their
village. I had recently returned after five years of absence studying in the United States
and all this change was hard for me to believe. In consultation with my father, I
contacted the leader of the community and began to know him, as he began to know
me. He was a polite but poorly educated man of quick intellect. Although he responded
to political leaders above him, he really wasn’t a bully or dogmatic about principle.
In time we learned to cooperate with each other. My Dad and I realized that even
though we had legal rights, the heavily politicized existing courts would not enforce
them. In practice, the settlers were upstream from us, they were many and the small
canal went through their streets and backyards. Instead of bitter confrontations, we
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