As I walked into the Starbucks in Wilde Lake Village Center, I thought about how I didn’t have a clear picture of what Leslie Salgado looked like. I was meeting her, the chair of Howard County Friends of Latin American (FoLA), a local advocacy group at 1:00 p.m. Oh, the joys of “Campaign Brain,” as Colleen and I have come to call the phenomenon of being overwhelmed by all there is to do in campaign season. Sure, it was the day after the election, but my head was still spinning, readers!
We managed to meet up, of course. But still–I could have been better-prepared, though Leslie was so easygoing and comforting, you’d never know anything was slightly amiss. We had been texting about our meeting place. I looked up and noticed a woman with a relaxed body-language and dark red hair come in the door. It was her. We embraced, and I apologized profusely for my lateness. She wouldn’t hear of it!
I liked Leslie right off the bat. She has a gentle and kind energy, and a twinkle in her eye that makes you feel at ease immediately. She ordered hot cocoa at the counter and we sat down to talk. I asked her what the organization’s mission was, and she produced a yellow brochure folded in thirds from her bag. As she spoke, she indicated with an elegant hand where on the paper’s middle panel it said “Mission Statement: Friends of Latin America promotes awareness, activism, and social responsibility in the United States for more just relationships with Latin America.” It sees this goal to fruition by educational programs, networking initiatives, and raising funds to support progressive grassroots efforts.
To read all about FoLA, click here or go to one of its meetings on the last Monday of each month at 7:30 p.m. To find out more about those get-togethers email Leslie at cuba_is_hope@comcast.net. In the meantime, read below all about the enlightening couple of hours Leslie and I spent together.
“When I came to the United States from Ecudaor,” Leslie told me of her arrival here to finish her last year of high school, glancing out the window onto Cross Fox Lane, “having been raised Catholic, I asked myself why God would allow people in my home country to have so little, while people here had so much.” It was a crisis of faith for her, but she didn’t let it demoralize her.
Related: See what Liz Bobo told Colleen in her interview with her.
Dark Roast, Bright Future
I excused myself just then to fetch my and Leslie’s drinks from the counter. I hurried back and settled into my seat so she could continue.
When Leslie came to the U.S., she’d intended to go back to Ecuador after her education through the graduate level at the University of Maryland at College Park. She wanted to bring some of the advanced technologies she saw here to Ecuador. Life happened, as they say. She met her North American husband. She also saw that it wasn’t a lack of technology that was hurting Ecuador, it was an inherently unjust world order.
“The capitalist system is designed in such a way that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, while the middle class is eradicated,” she said. I had to interrupt her to applaud her willingness to speak out on the fundamentally debased system we’re all living in the modern world. The dirty little secret pink elephant in the room in the United States is that until the system changes, all of our responses to the harm and suffering, as Leslie put it, all around us are band-aids. When I noted that her Catholic upbringing probably influenced her deeply merciful outlook on life, she had a moving response.
“There’s no doubt the Catholic Church does a great deal of good, as my very religious mother did,” she said. “But religion doesn’t teach you to ask why,” she said. Her acknowledgement of what’s right and what’s wrong was so lovely that I didn’t need to think about talking less during an interview. I just didn’t.
After a pause in our repartee, I said that while charity’s a part of justice, it doesn’t end there. Part of me was asking for her guidance in understanding this concept. When I said that justice asks how can we prevent suffering and not simply react to it, she nodded yes.
Another formative event in Leslie’s life was the Vietnam War. She said she remembered seeing a man on the news carrying his young daughter in his arms after a napalm attack.
“I asked myself as his daughter came to pieces in his arms, ‘Who would do that?,'” she said, her voice rising with pain. “After all, I believe empathy is basic. And in order to justify cruelty, first people dehumanize others.” Even though Colleen and I already have a passionate belief in, as Liz Bobo taught us, a politics informed by kindness, my jaw went slack with horror then. It showed with such stark clarity that that’s exactly what Trump and his supporters are doing by vilifying “immigrants.” Whether they know it or not, painting others with a scapegoat brush is the first step in unspeakable acts of all sorts. This is no alarmist slippery slope, I thought. It’s happening.
Later I thought of the opening scene of the memoir Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas. In it, the author finds an opposum drowning in a pool in her backyard, struggling and fighting to stay alive. She kills it, not out of mercy but because the dying animal is an inconvenience. The U.S.’s policies with respect to people south of our geopolitical border is, at its heart, cold and soulless too. It’s an inability to acknowledge the rights of others, the hallmark of antisocial behavior. It’s sociopathy on a grand scale.
Leslie’s a civil engineer by education and training, and the same focus on robust physical infrastructure of that field led Leslie to begin FoLA. Inspired by our shared anti-Capitalist fervor, I asked her what FoLa would do if it had unlimited funds.
“Well, it’s not about money, really,” she said tilting her head to the side and smiling at me with even more warmth in her dark brown eyes than before. “We don’t have a lot of money in the bank. We raise funds for each event that we do,” she said. This woman not only gets it, I thought, she lives it. FoLA’s events are really about networking, Leslie added.
I noted how excited I was about the victories of Democratic politicians all over the country the night before, November 6th. Leslie said she understood why I, her husband, and many others felt elated at the defeat those wins gave to Trumpism.
“I don’t have the same faith in party politics,” she said. “Both parties support the Capitalist system and the imposition of their style of democracy all over the world.” Leslie said this with such a gentle calmness, as she does most things. Again, I had no anxious rejoinder. I just let it be.
Back at RoCo’s (mine and Colleen’s) RV, I called one of the great friends we’ve met this year, Gabriel Moreno. I wanted to talk to him about all Leslie and I had discussed.
“Groups like FoLA are necessary in our community because all minorities need representation to make sure that we’re all treated equal,” Moreno, a Senior Attorney at Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) told me. “When there’s a lack of representation, a group of people could be negatively affected or even completely forgotten within a system, whether it’s a school or the local implementation of policies.”
Quote Quota
Leslie’s a big fan of wise and witty quotes, as I learned during our too-brief chat that was just the first of many, I hoped. One of the people she suggested I talk to about her, FoLA, and HoCo social justice action was Marina Adler, a professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I emailed Marina, and she replied in a way that summed up my initial thoughts on Leslie well.
“As an activist, she combines compassion for those who are less privileged with an enormous energy to educate and engage the community in social change,” Marina told me. She noted that Leslie has a colorful personality, and I thought about how the hue I thought of when Leslie first came into the Starbucks was golden. She’s lit from within, it seems.
Marina’s professorship and Leslie’s advanced education, I thought when I reflected on my chat with the latter, made it plain as day why both loved pithy quotes. They’re crisp, clean ways of making points. In Marina’s email signature, for example, I read this quote by anarchist, political activist, and writer, Emma Goldman. It’s one I hadn’t thought of in many years: “The most violent element in society is ignorance.” We traditionally think of violence as physical, interpersonal, and quick, I thought upon reading this after so long. Sure–but it can also be mental, transglobal, and longitudinal.
Leslie’s elegant poise is not just about physical comeliness, I thought as she regaled me with anecdotes about FoLA’s work in the county. It’s a dignified individuality, one that has a strong sense of self and acknowledges the right of others to have the same.
Many of Leslie’s favorite quotes are by Noam Chomsky. In a book we both love and that we discussed that day, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, the former notes that the kind of volatile, raucous “debate” that’s becoming de riguer in the Trump Era is a key characteristic of the kind of societal sociopathy I mentioned above.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum,” Chomsky and Herman write in that book. One book Leslie and I didn’t get to talk about was Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E.P. Seligman. The research that Seligman based his self-help classic on found that when people experience trauma over and over, again and again, they lose hope. Eventually they stop believing they can change. But in one of hopeful paradoxes of the mammalian experience, they won’t normally end their own lives to stop the suffering. The human will to live means there’s always hope for change, at least under optimistic circumstances.
Tragedy and Triumph
One FoLA’s website, there’s a picture of revolutionary Nelson Mandela with one arm around late Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Mandela’s raising an arm in victory and Castro’s looking ahead with a relaxed warmth. The photo made me think about how the puerile petulance of Trump and his followers is such a stark contrast to Leslie’s moral elegance. It’s no coincidence, I also thought and remarked to Colleen, that these amazing HoCo-ans are some of the friends so far that we share in common with Leslie: a scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, Thais Moreira; marketing expert and Dem political activist Deeba Jafri; HoCo Dem political legend Liz Bobo; and the tireless and incomparable local activist Carole Fisher. When we say it like that, in fact, it makes us pretty proud that these stellar human beings call us friends.
“I wish you’d been able to join us,” Leslie said of an event that she’d invited me to a couple weeks prior to our Starbucks rendezvous. RoCo had been pretty disappointed that we had missed it, but it just hadn’t been possible in the chaotic final weeks of the 2018 gubernatorial election season. It made me all the happier, though, that I was getting to talk to Leslie that day.
Leslie told me that FoLA’s been known by various names over the last thirty-odd years of activism in Howard County. It started as Howard County Friends of Central America in the 1980’s in opposition to US military intervention in Central America.
“We settled on ‘Friends of Latin America’ because what is a friend?” she asked me, smiling. “It’s someone who reaches out a hand to you,” she said. I imagined a hand lifting another up to equal footing rather than pushing it down in subjugation or even patting it in condescending paternalism.
Marina Adler noted in her email to me about Leslie that she’s one of the strongest women she knows. I got that sense too. Leslie’s an ovarian-cancer survivor, and her moral vision must be, I thought, one of the reasons she’d triumphed over illness. I don’t mean that to say that good people don’t get breast cancer, despite how that sounds. I just mean in Leslie’s case, her prizing of herself probably contributed to her outlasting what doctor and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee called The Emperor of All Maladies–cancer.
Farewell Not Forever
Leslie and I said goodbye, and I told her I’d hoped to get a first draft of this profile of her done in the next couple days, As always, I said I’d send it to her immediately for her feedback. We could, I continued, then work on subsequent drafts.
“I don’t need to see it,” she said, smiling. She trusted me to fashion a good product out of the raw materials she’d given me. Also, she added, she’d be gone for a few weeks soon. I thought about how much I hoped she’d like my article on her. I didn’t want this in a desperate way, though, I thought as I drove home. Leslie has a way about her that makes you feel a promise in yourself free of the peril of hopelessness. I felt like I could create a good product about her because of her.
As the Urdu language poet Shakeel Badayuni wrote and a Pakistani friend of RoCo’s told us: “Tehri mehfi mein aazmankar hum bhi dekhenge.” It means, “In the presence of the beloved, I’ll take my chances and see what transpires.” That’s what a lovingly safe relationship does, and it’s how Leslie’s made me feel. I felt very lucky that Leslie’d triumphed over cancer and that I’d get to know her.
Also: We got a chance to talk to our hero, Sen. Guy Guzzone (D-13).
Thanks for reading! Check back with us here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.