does not remember the exact moment in the 1980s when he realized that he needed to learn English, but he does remember the context: a conversation with his wife, an American-born former Peace Corps volunteer.
After listening to him complain for the umpteenth time about his work, she had had enough.
The message was clear: he had to learn how to speak the language of his bosses, or she would no longer listen to him.
Then a philosophy graduate of the
National Autonomous University of Mexico
, a comparatively recent arrival in West Liberty, Iowa and a worker at meat packing company Louis Rich, Zacarias began his quest.
It’s an endeavor that has seen him move from reading the cartoons in the
to absorbing poetry by W.B. Yeats, Rumi and Garcia Lorca and novels by Nikos Kazantzakis and T.C. Boyle.
It’s a journey that has taken him from the walls of the Rotary Club to City Hall, where, earlier this year, he assumed a post on the town’s City Council.
His victory over Joe Elizondo made Zacarias the third Latino in the more than 100-year history of Latinos’ being in the state’s first majority-Latino community to hold a position on the five-member body.
And, at base, it led him to develop, and act on, a gradually refined self-concept as a bridge between the Latino and Anglo cultures in his adopted home and in the country in which he now holds citizenship.
“We can build one community out of two communities,” he said, Zacarias, a sturdy 56-year-old with an open face who took a break from hanging drywall in his garage to talk on his front porch. He moves back and forth easily from English to Spanish as he speaks.
There is ground to bridge.
By many standards, West Liberty has made substantial progress in integrating the two major groups.
Latino-owned restaurants like
are familiar gathering points for white and Latino community members, who eat next to each other without incident. The same is true for
, a family-run business whose aisles are stocked with Mexican goods.
The school system’s
, the state’s first, has retained a significant number of students from both groups.
The anti-Mexican insults that Zacarias used to hear have dwindled significantly, and his election was in a contest in which two Latinos ran against each other- a sign of the community’s political maturation.
Yet Zacarias believes there is a long way to go.
He believes that many whites would like to see the Latinos become “Americanized” and shed their Mexican roots.
He also thinks the Latino community needs to shift its values.
Defining one’s worth by the size of the new red truck one purchases or the amount of money one spends on a daughter’s quinceañera is an attitude that would be better replaced by deciding to spend the money on a community college, Zacarias said.
Many Latinos do not believe in or practice volunteerism. Not doing so decreases their visibility in the town and impairs the ability of other people like him to serve in positions of public authority.
While there are a number of businesses that contributed to the high school calendar’s sports schedule, few, if any, are Hispanic-owned.
Troubles exist within the community, too, he said.
Among the top: While the entry of many women into the work place has contributed to their empowerment and feeling that they have more of a voice, it also has led to an increase in domestic violence and a splintering of what he called the “so called famous family unity,” according to Zacarias.
But if there is hope for the future, and Zacarias does indeed believe there is, it lies in the town’s children, especially those who attend the dual language program.
These children, he said, grow up not just learning each other’s language, but each other’s culture.
Their horizons, he hopes, will be broader and wider than their parents.
And their ties to the town will make them want to contribute to the community that nurtured them.
Zacarias also hopes that his service will help advance his vision of weaving a single town out of the place where, more than a century after the first Mexicans arrived to work on the railroads, two largely separate communities still exist.
“I’ll open the door and hope that others walk through,” he said.
