Held Hostage by History

By Sandy M. Fernandez
Sunday, January 29, 2006

Her parents rarely talked about the war that forced her family to leave Nicaragua. She had to track down an old news photo to understand why

I am not exactly sure when my mother first told me about the photo. But I know when I decided to find it: May 2004, after a painful fight with my parents during dinner at a downtown restaurant.

About a month before, I had taken my boyfriend, a straightforward Nebraskan, for his first visit to my family's home country of Nicaragua. I spent the first half of my childhood there--initially in Jinotepe, the highland town where my dad grew up, and then in Managua, the sprawling capital. My family left in 1979, packing just a few suitcases before fleeing Nicaragua's civil war. The country is both where I come from and who I am. I needed Rob, who was becoming important in my life, to experience it with me. So we rented a Toyota Tercel, weaving from gorgeous, volcanic-sand beaches on the Pacific coast to inland cities still pockmarked with bullet holes from the revolution. 

After Rob and I came back, I wrote a travel piece about the trip for the Post. I mentioned my parents in the story, and so, to give the facts an extra vetting, I asked them to read the piece. I knew something was wrong when the three of us got all the way to dessert, and they still had not mentioned it.

Finally, my mother folded her hands on the table and said, "Now, I think we should discuss your article."

What followed wasn't pretty. My parents didn't have an issue with the personal information I'd included. Instead, they honed in on a two-sentence recap of the civil war and its aftermath: My description of how the Marxist Sandinista rebels brought down the corrupt government of President Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled Nicaragua for over four decades. A U.S. embargo, economic deprivation, and about a dozen years of fighting with the "contras," or counter-revolutionaries, followed.

I grew up in a strongly anti-Sandinista household, and then as an adult chose to live and work among people who, if they were old enough,sported "U.S. Out of Central America" stickers on their backpacks. In the travel piece, I thought I had successfully avoided pandering to or insulting either side. Apparently, I was wrong.

We had lots of friends in the government, my mother said tensely, so when you say the government was corrupt, you're saying our friends were corrupt. And the thing you wrote about how, post-revolution, the U.S. embargo had been an attempt to oust the Sandinistas -- totally wrong, said my father. "It was cliché," he said. "I stopped reading."

I felt completely blindsided. Suddenly, my parents--people who, if staunchly conservative, were also clear-eyed and logical--seemed to have morphed into Somocista zealots. I knew both of them had worked for the Somoza government--my mother for the Department of the Interior, my father mostly for the Central Bank--and I certainly hadn't missed the "Support the Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters" bumper sticker that decorated our car in the early 80s. But this--the emotion, the antipathy, over a breezy travel article--this felt outsized, crazy. And it felt personal, as though they were fending off an attack that I hadn't known I was making.

At a loss, I tried negotiating. What if I just used the word corrupt to describe the Somoza family, instead of the government? Wasn't that ok? Wasn't Somoza corrupt?

Lots of governments are corrupt, my father snapped back. True, I said, but that's not what I was asking.

"OK, yes, it was corrupt," he spit out dismissively.

The discussion went on like this for a while, them arguing with me, and me amazed and bewildered, not understanding why they were so angry at me. Then, suddenly, my father was crying, his voice breaking. "We had friends who were killed, just for being in the government," he said, pressing his hands together and bringing them up to his face. Across the table from him, my mother's eyes began filling too.

Suddenly, I couldn't wait to get out of there. I felt cringingly awful to have caused my parents pain--breaking the cardinal rule of immigrant daughterhood--but somehow even worse that there was nothing I could do to make it better. They weren't hearing me.

Over the next few days, the argument hovered in my mind. I repeated it to Rob; I called friends and told them about it; I found myself flashing back to it in the shower and at work. One exchange, in particular, kept coming back to me.

"We lived through the war," my mother had said a couple of times.

"Mom," I said, "I was there, too. I lived through it, too."

"But you were little. We lived through it..."

I hadn't really heard the end of my mom's point. To me, the war and my family's emigration might as well be a scar across my flesh. They'd cost me everything I'd counted on as a kid: my friends, my first language, my country, my sense of the world as benevolent and secure. All that was replaced with a life in which I was an outsider, struggling to learn how to act, what to say, how to be. That experience--the sudden poverty, the stress, the constant ache of loss, and, most of all, the sense of being alone, bobbing in a huge sea--defines me to this day, often in ways I wish weren't so. And yet to my mother, it seemed the war was not something that had happened to me.

Back at the restaurant, my father had said that maybe the article had been a good thing in that it would start us talking about the war. It was something we had never really done. Between my parents and I, the war had never been a topic, it had been a looming emotion--a dangerous cloud that we kept from storming by ignoring it. My parents had lost everything coming to the United States, and, over the years, I had internalized their aversion to dwelling on what had been lost. It was too painful; they were too busy; they wanted to move on. Even after the Sandinistas were voted out in the elections of 1990, and many of their friends started filing paperwork to regain property lost during the war, my family resisted. We weren't going back, my father said, so there was no point.

And, to tell the truth, I had never done much to find out about the war on my own. The few times I'd picked up an article or a book, I'd been turned off by the picture they painted of people like those in my family--middle class or wealthy, who had opposed the revolution and left the country when it happened. The heartless aristocrats I read about, who defended their privilege tooth and nail before swanning off to Miami with stolen millions, didn't jibe at all with the reality I'd experienced--the powdered milk we drank because we couldn't afford anything else, our struggle to rebuild.

I wanted to re-engage with my parents, but I didn't want to find myself helpless again, feeling guilty, ignorant and somehow aggrieved. What I wanted was something that would bring emotion and fact together, something that would give me a touchstone for understanding my family's tortured history.

I'd begin, I decided, by finding the news photograph of my mother taken on August 23, 1978, during one of the most audacious moments of the Nicaraguan civil war. The day before, about a dozen Sandinistas rebels had defied popular wisdom about the invincibility of Somoza's army by taking over the huge downtown building known as the Palacio Nacional, or National Palace, which housed the country's legislature and several ministries. In doing so, they'd taken roughly 1,500 people hostage. My mother, a 31-year-old secretary, had been one of them.

A Chilean friend once told me, apropos of immigrant life, that most of what you learn about your family, you learn from other people. This is true--if you have other people around, and if you're inclined to ask questions.

In my case, I relied on my childhood memories, which are rich, plentiful, detailed. I remember the neighborhood kids I played with, my toys, the lush, over-ripe smell of the air. My memories of the war, though, are few and flickering. Unrest that had been smoldering for years caught fire in 1978, when Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the editor of the national newspaper "La Prensa" and a frequent Somoza critic, was assassinated. Riots erupted. A national strike was called to try to oust of Somoza. Yet from this tense period, I only recall a few moments: the school-wide memorial service for a teacher accidentally killed in a firefight; my third grade class learning evacuation drills in case our school was attacked; soldiers carrying automatic weapons. All are oddly bleached of emotion--I remember them, but I don't feel them.

I don't think I knew my mother had been a hostage at the National Palace, or even that such an event had taken place, until I was already in my thirties. I remember her popping the story on me as an answer to a question--something innocuous like when she'd started meditating or getting into yoga.

It was when I was a hostage at the National Palace, she replied. I was sure I was going to die--that was what changed me.

I remember being shocked, You never told me about this!

And her being distracted, vague. Really? I thought you knew.

No! No, I didn't!

It was probably the first time in my life that I had chastised my mother for failing to share family history with me, but it didn't go any further. The unwritten rules in my house were always very clear: My parents could bring up the war, but not the kids. Any questions could lead us somewhere none of us wanted to go.

Her anecdote gave a possible context to one of the free-floating images in my brain, though: A short reel of her, drawn and serious in a white-and-black striped maternity gown, being walked to my parents' bedroom in our old house in Managua. At the time of the hostage-taking, she would have been six months pregnant with my younger brother.

In next few years, my mother would, now and then, drop other details. Once she mentioned that the day she was released from the National Palace, a news photographer had taken a picture of her. She didn't know about it until her boss showed her the newspaper afterwards. It was a close-up of her face, she said, and the caption was something like 'Pregnant woman getting water from the Red Cross.' It was an American or European newspaper. Foreign. Anyway, she said, she couldn't really remember. She didn't like to.

My family left Nicaragua the following summer, in 1979. I was the first to go. Chuck and Puddy Hamlin, an American couple who had befriended my family after moving into our Managua neighborhood, came to my parents and told them they were leaving. Chuck's company had decided to pull him out. Did my parents want to send me out of the country with them, at least until the fighting died down?

Until that moment, my parents say, they hadn't realized how bad things were getting. I left believing I was going to Key West, where the Hamlins were from, for a short summertime vacation. In my one suitcase: my teddy bear and a t-shirt Puddy had had signed by all my classmates at Managua's American-Nicaraguan School.

A month later, my mother joined us in Key West, bringing along my baby brother and my paternal grandmother. By the middle of July, my father was in the United States. He'd gone on a work trip to Guatemala, then flown to Miami to see my mother. They were at a friend's house packed with uncertain Nicaraguans, on July 17, 1979, the day Somoza fled the country. Two days later, the Sandinistas rolled into Managua.

That day, the 19th, was my ninth birthday. With my parents hours away, I spent that birthday sunnily skating around a roller rink in Key West with the Hamlin kids, Robin and Sherman, not knowing how much my life had just changed.

After Somoza's flight, my father gained re-admittance to Cornell University, where he had started, but never finished, his Ph.D. We spent four months in Ithaca, New York, while my father and mother--he writing, she typing--toiled furiously on the dissertation that would enable him to work as an economist in the United States. A few months later, he was offered a job in Washington.

I was aware, even then, that, by comparison with many other kids in my position, I was lucky. I'd learned English in school, so I didn't have to fight past a language barrier. My father had found a job, and we'd already managed to crawl back into the middle class--unlike some people my parents knew, who were working in pizza joints and such.

Still, those early years were some of the worst in my life. Back home, I had been the queen bee in a neighborhood of boys. I'd played with them, fought with them, terrorized the new kids and generally felt right with my place in the world. But in the States, I found bewildering rules and unexpected fault lines that could betray me at any moment. On my first day at school in Ithaca, I noticed an exotic animal on the playground and delightedly screamed, "Squirrel!" only to have dozens of unimpressed faces turn to look at me. When we moved to Rockville, I became the only Hispanic kid at Fallsmead Elementary School to help belt out West Side Story's "America" for the spring pageant. ("I like to be in America!/O.K. by me in America!") Worse, I found it impossible to relate to the ribbon-wearing girls in my fourth-grade class, who made fun of my clothes, my hair, the paper bag lunches I packed myself every morning.

In the swift, brutal arithmetic of immigrant kids everywhere, I quickly figured out the basic tenets of my new existence: 1) Terrible things could happen anytime and 2) I was on my own. Weird Nicaraguan-ness--in dress, in lunch food, anywhere, wouldn't help me. The only way to stay safe was to keep my head down and blend in with the crowd. When the jocular son of one of my parents' friends landed in my class, I watched him move silent and alone around the room and avoided him studiously. It would be years--college, really--until I felt any other way.

Whatever the war in Nicaragua may mean to me, for most people in the United States these days, it is a distant memory if it is one at all.

In an archive at the Post, photos from the conflict are bundled into four thick, crinkled manila folders, still marked up with wax pencil where the editors cropped them in the '70s and early '80s. Opening up the folders gave me a strange twinge of recognition. There were the olive-green uniforms, the distinctly Nicaraguan faces, the devastation, death and ruin. Among those of the Palace take-over: a group of Red Cross workers waving a white flag, a handicapped woman being led out, a wounded guerilla on a stretcher, still holding his weapon. Most famous of all, there was the picture taken after Somoza capitulated, freeing about 50 political prisoners and providing the rebels with $500,000 dollars and safe passage out of the country. It was of "Comandante Zero" -- Eden Pastora, who led the raid -- triumphantly waving his gun above his head beforeboarding a plane.

I was amazed too, when I read contemporary articles about those days. The dates and facts cited were often wrong. One story concerned Dora Maria Tellez Arguello, who, as "Comandante Two," served under Pastora in the raid. In 2004, she was invited to teach a class on third-world politics and ethics at Harvard Divinity School. When the U.S. State Department denied her a visa for having participated in "terrorist" activities, controversy erupted.

"We never made attacks against civilians, not in the history of Sandinismo," the Chicago Tribune quoted her as saying. She called being at the Palace "a great honor," adding that, "No one was hurt, not one hostage."

Of course, that's not true. Most of those taken hostage at the Palace were civilians, and the day my mother was released, La Prensa reported five people dead. Fourteen others were reported wounded.

It's as if the war has started melting away, its facts becoming blurred. In a way, this feels like the days when my family first came to the United States. The revolution was on the news then, but not everyone was paying attention.

I remember going to a pizza restaurant on Rockville Pike with my family soon after we arrived in the area, in 1980. The hostess, a husky, cheerful blonde, told us it would be a few minutes until we could be seated. "Where y'all from?" she asked.

"Nicaragua," answered my Dad jauntily.

"Wow," she said slowly. "I don't even know where that is."

I got used to giving a description--it's in Central America, a few countries below Mexico. But as the 80s went on, and Ronald Reagan made Central America his last stand against Communism, I started dreading being asked where I was from . Suddenly, the follow-up questions--When did you leave? Why did you leave? Which side were you on?--always seemed to come with the implication that my family had done something wrong. At the same time, I overheard snatches of dinnertable conversation about people in Nicaragua being jailed or killed. My grandmother was reported to her neighborhood committee for having friends over, her tires punctured; my grandfather risked a beating trying to recoup a few belongings from our abandoned house. Even for our friends who had joined the Sandinistas, like my godfather, things were tough: The country was suffering terrible shortages of food and basic necessities.

For my parents, I realize now, the American perception of what was going on in Nicaragua must have been even worse. My father is an extremely law-abiding, cautious person: If he has 12 items going through a 10-items or less grocery line, he'll make me go through the line and claim two. He only crosses at a crosswalk, ever. Until the revolution, he had led a successful middle-class life--he went to school on scholarship, got a good job at the Central Bank, worked his way up. He was shocked when he first came to Washington and discovered that because he'd worked for the Somoza government, many people -- even those he knew -- wouldn't hire him.

For me, the problem was social, not professional. I felt my family had suffered a tragedy--I resented being fingered as the bad guy on top of it all. So when asked which side we'd been on, I'd stress that my family had been on both sides--my college-aged cousin Mario had died fighting for the Sandinistas in Jinotepe. His body was never found. My godfather, a member of the Sandinista government , would stay with us when he came to Washington.

AndI'd lie. I realized this recently when I dropped an email to my high school boyfriend, Alex, asking him what he remembered me saying about Nicaragua while we were dating.

"I remember you talking a good bit about your family's experience," he wrote back. "You would get mightily upset at anyone who suggested that the U.S. not assist the Contras. You would also get upset if anyone suggested that the Sandinistas were a just and proper regime. I remember you telling me the story of when you escaped from Managua. The Sandinistas were looking specifically for you since you were a U.S. citizen."

I don't recognize the right-wing teenager that Alex describes. Clearly, I was parroting the views I'd heard at home. Now, as my parents have noted, my grown-up politics are far more progressive. My first magazine job, to my parents' quiet chagrin, was at feminist Ms. (At least I'm not my cousin, who works for a Democratic congressman.) I can't imagine, now, denying the legitimacy of the Sandinista government. I can't imagine arguing for the Contras as a moral right.

But I see something deeper in the story he recalls of my "escape" from Managua, which was completely fake. I think I wanted to give Alex, the first boy I ever loved, a reason for all the pain he sensed at my house. To explain why I owned this pain. Lacking any solid facts, I invented some.

The few clues I had about my mother's picture meant I would have to cast a very wide net. It would have been snapped either August 23 or 24 and printed in a foreign newspaper--something major enough to end up in Managua. But I'd looked through reams--The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Independent, the Guardian--and found nothing.

One Saturday in late October, I headed to the Periodicals Room at the Library of Congress to search again. In an issue of La Prensa, I had read a story about how the hostage-taking had been a front-page story in Spain, so I wanted to check out their microfilm of El Pais.

And there, in the August 25, 1978 issue, was my mother. The picture wasn't what I'd imagined. In my mind, it had been front page, huge and tightly focused on her. In reality, it was a playing card-sized square on page two. She is in profile, wearing the black-and-white striped maternity dress I remember, and standing in line behind another mother-to-be. The caption reads, "Pregnant women after being freed." Both are drinking glasses of water. Nearby, watching over the line, stands a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Is he police? National Guard? On the blurry, scratched-up microfilm, it looked like Mom is holding her cup up to her mouth with both hands, like a child, and something about the loose gather of hair at the nape of her neck and her feet-together, stomach-forward stance made her look so vulnerable to me.

Amid the whir of the machines in the dark back corner of the Library of Congress' periodicals room, I said, "Oh my God," and realized that I had actually stopped expecting to find this picture.

A few days later, I took the Xeroxed copy of the page with me to my parents' house in Potomac. I wanted to see if showing it to my mother would make her more amenable to talking. But once again, my parents' response surprised me "That's not the right picture," my mother said. "It was a " -- she made a tight frame around her face with her fingers -- "a close-up, just of my face, like this, and I was drinking water."

She was describing exactly what I had imagined. Had she put that thought in my head? I did a few more searches afterward, but was never able to find the picture she described. And in the end, I had what I'd wanted -- finding the photo in El Pais already felt like a miracle.

A couple weeks later, I sat down to interview my parents yet again. It was my brother's birthday; yet he and my mother had somehow miscommunicated and we wouldn't be seeing him that day. My mom was prickly, disturbed.

"What is it I need to say?" she snapped at me, sitting down on the white couch in their living room.

"I want to talk about what happened at the National Palace," I said. And for the first time, we did.

My mother told me she was at her desk when shots and screaming broke out in the hallway around noon. A dozen or so guerillas had entered the building from doors in the East and West wings, disguised in army cadet uniforms. My mother's boss, Antonio Mora, the Minister of the Interior, was at a meeting, so she and the other secretaries scrambled into a small ante-room and barred the door. They stayed there until a hand jangled the knob and a voice ordered them to come out.

"They said if we didn't, they would throw a grenade in," she says. "So we came out, like this, hands up. And to have your hands up like that--that's really a feeling."

The group of hostages was lined up in two rows in Mora's office--the first in front of the windows, to serve as a human shield in case of a counter-attack, and the other further back. My mom was next to one of the young guerillas who was guarding them.

"I was angry," she says. "I kept asking him, What did they want? What were their demands? Because I knew that if they were asking that Somoza step down, we were dead. That wasn't going to happen."

Finally, a co-worker who was holding her hand gave it a gentle squeeze. Please be quiet. And she was.

The real targets of the take-over, the members of the Congress, were being held in their assembly hall. The guerillas were threatening to start executing them unless demands were met. NegotiationPass with Somoza had already begun. My father, who reported in to the president during the takeover, says Somoza's plan was always negotiation--never confrontation.

My mother stood in Mora's office for hours, contemplating what would happen. Managua is on an unstable geological fault line--the same one that had caused the country's disastrous earthquake in 1972, which razed the downtown and killed two of my mother's sisters. By coincidence, at seven o'clock that night, a strong tremor shook building. To my mother, this seemed a sign.

"I was sure I was going to die, but I came to peace with it," she says. "I thought, if I died, well, the baby would die with me. Your father, he would remarry. The only thing that really nagged at me was leaving you--you would have to grow up without me."

Finally, in the middle of the night, the secretaries were moved from their spot to an interior hallway. For my mother, this was the worst moment.

"That day, a young lieutenant had come to see the Minister," she says. "But [he] was running behind," she says. "I kept his schedule, I knew that there was a chance he wouldn't have time to meet. I could have told the lieutenant to leave, to reschedule for another day. But I thought I'd be able to fit him in. I told him to take a seat and wait. So he was there when the Sandinistas came."

When he heard the fighting, the lieutenant ran into the hallway and was shot. His body lay in the hall until shortly before the secretaries were brought to that very spot.

"There was so much blood," my mother says. "So much blood."

And she begins to cry, huge sobs, ripping out of her for a routine decision she'd made 30 years earlier.

My mother's memory was that she was held for two nights, but the record shows it was only one. The next day, the Sandinistas released approximately 300 people, mostly children and those with health issues, including pregnant women. Someone gave my mother a ride to Somoza's bunker, she says, where she found my father. Stoic until then, she finally broke down.

Neither she or my father remembers where I was all this time. For that, I had to ask Puddy Hamlin. They had come to collect me "for a sleep-over", she says, as soon as they heard what had happened at the Palace. They took me home the next day when they heard my mother had been released. Apparently, I never knew what was happening.

After hearing my mother's story, I checked it against the record. What she described was all in La Prensa. The earthquake, the move from the office to the hallway and, most importantly, the young soldier. The newpaper even records the secretaries' keening grief when they saw the blood.

I still had some questions I wanted my parents to answer. At the end of November, I called them again to try to get time for another interview. They were going out of town, and, on the night I'd planned for us to get together, had committed to dinner with some old Nicaraguan friends. Did I want to come along? my mother asked. I agreed.

We went to a French restaurant in Georgetown. When their friends arrived, they exclaimed over me and asked about my recent engagement to Rob.

Seeing my parents with them that night was seeing my parents released. They had a quickness, a lightness, I hadn't seen in months. And I could feel how much this other couple cared for me because I was my parents' daughter. It came to me then that these were four people who had survived things I couldn't even imagine, and had still been able to pick themselves up and rebuild, to the point where 25 years later they could find themselves poking fun at each other in a Georgetown restaurant.

At the end of the night, my mother asked if I wanted to go home with them, so I could ask my questions. I turned her down. I'd lost any further desire to drag her or my father into the past. Cast against what they'd endured, my petty resentments about having them recognize my side of the war, my suffering, seemed self-centered, more suited to the child I'd been than the adult I've become. The biggest gift I could give them was to let it go.

Sandy M. Fernandez is a Magazine editor.