30. Victor's Family Reminiscences, Part 3

November 3, 2021

Oliver spent a lot of time with the Indian family.  He accompanied them up Mt San Jeronimo, where he participated in the rites of sun worship. Relationships between the Indios (Indians) and the Mestizos (Spanish-Mexicans).  Comparison to situation of the cocoa farmer.

Communications between Indios and Mestizos.  Indios used superstition to gain the upper hand over the Mestizos when they haggled over prices.  I mention my experience haggling in China.

Trip to the plantation by Mom and Reuben.  Eating monkey in alligator sauce prepared by Galdena.  Description of plantation.  Vulnerability of rubber trees to disease and insects.  

Victor's friendship with President Diaz, who appreciated the hard work of the American family.

Four ingredients necessary for successful development:  time, knowledge, capital, critical mass.

Jennie Lindeborg--a Swedish Cinderella, a stowaway on a potato boat.  The taxi story.  Other members of the story.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We continue with podcast number 30, the last of a three-part series about a manuscript found in my mother's basement, written by Great Uncle Vic, the last of six children, to great-grandfather Victor Olaf and great-grandmother Jenny Alida.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

When they arrived at home in San Hieronimo, Oliver told Dad just what the speaker had said, because Dad could not understand Chapotepec language, which he called Chapultepec, which is the way most American visitors pronounce it. Dad was truly shocked when he realized Oliver could understand that language as if he had been permanently adopted by the Indian family. After that trip, he was permitted to go up Mount San Geronimo with his Mexican Indian family every Saturday night, except when severe electrical storms were predicted when the sacred trip was canceled. On just a very few trips did he hear any shooting, and he could not remember anyone getting shot. But as young as he was, he thought he actually became a true sun worshiper in a very sacred Indian rite. As time moved on, he found it necessary to fight the Spanish Mexicans because they considered him an Indian, and the whole Indian tribe, possibly 1,000 to 1500, considered him to be an Indian. They welcomed him to worship with them on top of Mount San Hieronimo as a dedicated sun worshiper. He soon learned that he could handle any Spanish Mexican anywhere near his age and actually beat the tar out of him if he were challenged to a fight, much to the pleasure of his Indian family.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

At this point, this is Tom speaking. I'm thinking about how this contrasts with me as a five-year-old. I just have faint memories of lying on a carpet in kindergarten to take a nap and making candy canes with scissors and papers. I don't remember picking fights or responding to aggression. So this is really very strange to me. The marketplace in the center of town was the only place where anyone could buy any and all types of foods. The market was dominated by Spanish Mexicans, although many of the crops were raised by the Indians who were forced to sell their products to the Mexican marketers at ridiculously low prices. The Mexicans then resold the products at ridiculously high prices. For example, the biggest seller was red beans, Frijole Rouge, which funny that he uses the word rouge because that's French, which the mark uh merchants bought for five cents Mexican, cinco centavos per bushel, and always sold them at$1 to$1.25 per bushel. All the other products had similarly high markups. Mom and Ruben would go to the market and pay the top prices with no argument at all on all of the items needed to feed all seven people. That was the correct thing for all Spanish-Mexican families to do. But the Indian market buyers would haggle, trying to bargain tediously, wrangle, dispute, and harass the merchant in screaming loud voices until they succeeded in getting as much as 50%, 60%, or even 75% lower prices on everything they bought. This is Tom again. Indios lived on death's door, so it's no surprise that they would spend so much time haggling. The relationship between the Indios, the Indians, and the mestizos, Spanish and Mexicans, reminds me of the relationship between the West African cocoa farmer and the rest of the world. The West African cocoa farmer is forced to sell at ridiculously low prices. And despite the best efforts of his government at international trade meetings, the farmer is locked into being destitute. The average cocoa farmer earns about$300 per year. And despite the efforts of Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Elliot Engel back before 2000, child slavery and worst forms of child labor continue to be to dominate the chocolate industry. I am thinking that the solution that Project Hope and Fairness follows, which is to encourage the production of chocolate inside the village, is the best way out. That is, keep more of the value chain inside the village. If this path had been followed with the Indios back in the turn of the 20th century, they would not have left their charming communities and moved to the slums of Mexico City or Los Angeles. And now back to Uncle Vic. Oliver asked dad to let him do the buying of foodstuffs along with Jose, Roman, and Ernesto, which he agreed to do again over mom's and Rubens protests. So market buying became his most exciting, stimulating, fascinating, almost intoxicating, and probably the most provocative and pleasurable experience of his life in Mexico. The Indians never used God's name in vain, but they knew how to scare the living daylights out of Mexican marketeers. After 5, 10, or 15 minutes of heated debating, with the purchase price down only about 50%, then they turned on hot words, which became quite dirty, but not cursing or swearing, which was taboo for the Indians. But the Spanish were known to be the most superstitious people in the world. Most of them carried as many as 20 or even 30 good luck charms to keep bad luck away. They were called mojos, pronounced with long, long O's. If the boys told the merchants that the sun god would destroy their mojo power, they would actually quake and shake and start lowering their prices to bargain levels. When told that his children would get sick if he did not lower the price, it would be quickly lowered. But it was of absolutely no use to start the debate with those words because the marketer would simply say, go away. Only after a long and heated debate over the price would the price start to come down. Mom and Reuben watched from a distance and were ashamed. This is Tom again. My family moved to Roubaix, France in 1960. My father had arranged a one-year sabbatical to study how to separate out and purify a rat urinary protein that he had discovered. Besides him, this was a very important year for me because I learned so much about human cultures, one aspect of which was how one's attitude could shape whether one was accepted into a group. I remember my mother musing over how to bargain because that was something she wasn't used to. And yet in the open air markets of Roubei, bargaining was expected behavior. If you didn't bargain, there was something wrong with you and you were a foreigner. Forty years later, I'm on my first trip to China with a group of 26 interior decorators and four of us who were studying Chinese food as medicine. At that time, all tourist groups in China were required to visit state-run factories. We were all stuffing our suitcases with paintings and sculptures. Like everyone in the group, I needed to buy a suitcase to hold my purchases, none of which had made I mean I had made through bargaining because I just couldn't bring myself to do it. But most of the others in the group spent their spare time comparing how much they'd forced the price of a transaction down. Listening to them, I can't imagine I couldn't imagine doing it myself. So then we were walking through a square outside a temple, and there directly in front of me is a suitcase that's just about the right size. I'm admiring it, and of course, uh they want 200 renminbi. I shake my head because I'm thinking I'll go visit the temple first and then buy the suitcase. I didn't shake my head because of the price. They dropped the price to 150. I still shake my head because I want to go into the temple. They dropped the price to 125. Again, the temple. Finally, at 100 Renminbi, I decided to just ignore the temple and buy the suitcase. So I brought the price down about 50% simply by shaking my head. Back to Uncle Vic. Such tactics were below the dignity of their class. But the Indians and Oliver were just Indian mozos. So it was not undignified in their minds. And Dad was saving a lot of money in food costs. Virtually all of the Spanish Mexicans believed that the Indians had mysterious powers to destroy the powers of all their mojos. All of the Indians throughout most of Mexico were very secretly Klanish and seemed very mysterious to the Spanish. And maybe that is why they are very slow to merge with the Spanish Mexicans. But they taught Oliver a great deal about the basic principles of living, which has helped him ever since those days in Mexico, even though it lasted only one year. In June, when Rubens Catholic school closed for a couple of months, the family packed up rather a large wagon pulled by two big oxen. With the wagon packed with tents, cooking utensils, food supplies, a gun for Jose, and all the needed clothes and household supplies for a long trip. Jose drove the ox wagon. Mom and Reuben rode in a four-wheel buggy driven by Galdina, packed with a lot of reindeer and extra supplies, medicine kit, etc. Ernesto and Roman rode two burros, and Oliver rode a small but beautiful pony given to him for the trip to the plantation. He named the pony Pet, but everyone else called it Pete. That name bothered Oliver a lot, probably because the nickname had long belonged to the boys in the family. Galdina was armed with a revolver and ammunition. The so-called buggy ridden by Mom and Reuben was more like a small wagon because they could stretch out and relax in the back when they got tired. The trip to the plantation may have been about 60 or 80 kilometers, but it took a week or more to accomplish it through some very heavy and dark forests and quite a number of small streams that needed fording. The trip was weary and endless for Mom and Reuben, who seemed afraid of everything along the way. But Roman, Ernesto, and Oliver enjoyed every kilometer. One night they stopped to camp for the night, but the ox wagon failed to keep up with them, so the boys were alone with Galdina but no Jose. Galdina went to a small creek near where they stopped and caught a baby alligator, which she said was for supper. Oliver told her, do not tell Mom and Reuben what we are to eat because it would make them very sick to know what it is. She then shot a baby monkey and skinned and butchered it for a number of small, tender monkey steaks cooked in alligator fat. They were simply delicious and they enjoyed enjoyed by all who caught up with us as well as ourselves. But Mom told Galdina that she had never tasted fish that tasted like meat. Apparently she had told Mom and Reuben that she had caught some fish because she knew that they had both eaten fish and liked it. They moved on together again, on and on to the plantation where Dad, Harold, and a group of rel of natives welcomed them. They had hand built some rather nice wooden living quarters, mostly of large heavy logs, which it was hard to imagine how they moved them into position and tied them into place rather firmly and strong. Dad and Harold had the largest and nicest cabin office where mom and Ruben stayed with them. Jose, Roman, Ernesto, Galdina, and Oliver stayed in a kind of lean to building attached to the big house and office, which they liked very much. The boys had to take care of their pony and buros, but they virtually had to run the run of the plantation as long as they did not get lost. It did not go to the big and dangerous Cotzalkolcos River. The Indian workers and their wives lived in tiny individual huts scattered around the big house. Father was deeply disappointed in the rubber trees. There were just a few of them, which had to be weeded and carefully cultivated every day, day in and day out, or the native weeds would smother and kill them. Also, they were attacked by all manner of bugs, bees, birds, and innumerable pests that tended to kill the rubber trees as soon as they started to grow. In those days there was no such thing as a pest control spray. So Harold and the native workers spent much of their time just trying to protect the trees from many pests. There were months and months of hard work and very little to show for it. Just a very few of the rubber trees survived to grow against the big odds against them. Reuben joined Harold in trying to control the pests, but the other boys just ran wild and rode their animals around the plantation camp. This is Tom's comment again. During the 18 years that I have been visiting West Africa, I have made it a point to visit dozens of rubber plantations. I learned about rubber just as I learned about other crops: plantains, bananas, African yams, taro, pineapples, okra, rice, corn, peanuts, coconuts, palm tree, palm oil trees, palm wine, cassava, and coffee. The reason to understand what roles each of these crops plays in the cocoa farming economy. In Côte d'Ivoire, where the government is more laissez-faire than the socialist Ghanaian government, farmers have to roll with the international cocoa price. If there's a long-term downwards trend, cocoa farmers often tear out their trees and plant rubber trees because they're a lot easier to tend than cocoa trees, and they yield 12 months a year instead of only twice a year. It's interesting to read about how much trouble great-grandfather Victor, Victor Olaf Peterson, had with rubber, especially all the pests. The rubber plantations that I have visited were comparatively easy to maintain. I'm suspecting that in so much of West Africa, the forest is fairly well drained, and actually it's a tropical forest, not a tropical rainforest or jungle. The soil throughout most of West Africa is called laterite. It's a crumbly red soil with fairly low clay content. This means that the rubber trees would be very well drained and therefore much happier than if they were planted in jungle, which is extremely thick and complex with all sorts of plants and animals. I would imagine that converting a piece of land from jungle, which is just about the most complex environment of all, to monoculture is a lot more difficult than converting a tropical woods with just a few uh species dominating to monoculture. The plantation that Uncle Vic describes is located in the valley of the Coatsaqualcos River, meaning the topsoil is surely deep and the surrounding environment extremely lush. And now back to Uncle Vic. When Rubin's school opened again at the end of two months' stay, the younger boys went back to San Hieronimo to get educated. But they never forgot that trip to the plantation and the disappointment in the eyes and voices of everyone, both families and workers. So they were not surprised after another five or six months that they were all going back to Rock Island and the plantation was going to be closed. Dad was very friendly with Porfirio Diaz, and President Diaz did try to help the Rock Island Tropical Rubber Plantation Company as much as he could. Dad seldom came to San Hieronimo and then only to pick up mom, and the two of them would go to one of President Diaz's brilliantly formal balls, dances, and banquets. Over the period of a year, they must have been invited to and attended at least two or three such celebrations, possibly four. They would return to San Hieronimo with lots of trinkets, favors, and gifts from the famous Diaz parties. There were always very happy affairs for both of them, but only social affairs, not business affairs. However, it was very good business for mom and dad to attend the balls and dances to maintain good relations with President Diaz. He reacted very favorably toward Dad and the plantation project. In that respect, mom and dad were excellent diplomats, although mom was very critical of dad smoking big black Mexican cigars and drinking. She could not hide her feelings on those two scores and made that quite clear to all the family. But that happened on those very few times when Dad was invited to one of President Diaz's very famous and highly publicized celebrations, when there was a great deal of pomp and circumstance. Since those times, a great deal of money has been invested in the towns and cities on the seacoast near the old plantation site. But there are no rubber plantations because Mexican rubber is of such poor quality that it is of little or no value to American industry. Then, too, synthetic rubber today is very highly superior and almost cheaper than the rubber imported from the Far East. So exports of rubber from Mexico are virtually nil. And now back to Tom. At this point, it's interesting to point out three of their ingredients to successful international development. Time, knowledge, and capital. In this story, the Petersons couldn't devote sufficient time. They only spent one year at it. Also, the Petersons have zero knowledge in maintaining a rubber plantation. They're from temperate zone. They do not have background in tropical agriculture. And because of political events over which the Petersons had no control, capital dried up. Uncle Vic's explanation that the rubber was of poor quality is, I think, questionable. To get latex, you cut the trunk in a certain way and collect the sap. Poor quality might result from not processing the latex balls soon enough. And of course, that all has to do with proper management. But there's no reason for the Mexicans to not be able to manage a rubber plantation. There's a fourth factor in international development, critical mass. You can't just identify a problem, in this case, lack of industry, and throw just a little money and a few lives at it. That is one family sacrifice and the loss of capital of some faraway investors. And you can't expect a sudden and magical blooming or blossoming. A few words about rubber. Today, a little more than half of all rubber is synthetic. So the ratio of synthetic to latex rubber based rubber has not changed since uh back in the early part of the 20th century. Perhaps Mexico lost out as a world supplier because there was simply an insufficient commitment at the local, state, and federal levels. Then again, maybe it's just as well because if all the tropical forests of the world had been converted to rubber plantations, we wouldn't have forests left, and Mexico certainly wouldn't have its forests. In Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, two countries I know pretty well, the two biggest producers of cacao, these are the two biggest producers of cacao, over 90% of their forests have been cut down and planted to colonial era crops such as rubber, cacao, pineapple, oil palm, and coffee. Similar decimation has occurred in Sumatra and Java. And more recently, thanks to the abandonment of hydrogenation as a way to manufacture baking fats, the jungles of Borneo, now called Kalimantan, are being burnt and planted to monocultures such as oil palm, coffee, and cacao. The entire American baking industry, also the European baking industry, is based on palm oil, which involves the total decimation of the jungles of Borneo or Kalimantan. And now back to Uncle Vic. But that is not what bankrupted the Rock Island Tropical Plantation Company. The company was simply underfinanced by G. L. Peterson, Mr. Logman, and Mr. Greenleaf. If Dad had been as good an economist as he was a chemistry teacher, he would never have been suckered in on the dubious speculation in the business world. It must have been presented to Dad as a get rich quick proposition, but it never ever had a chance to succeed. I'm not critical of dad since any poorly paid chemistry teacher at a very small college with six hungry children and two adults had a right to seek an opportunity that appeared to offer. Lucrative remuneration. He merely bet and lost. Well, that's the uh end of the um Mexican Tropical Rubber Company adventure. And now I want to um end this podcast with a few comments about some of the players in this drama. Uh, we'll start with um some interesting facts about Victor O. Peterson. That's my great-grandfather who was um married to Jenny Alita Lindeborn. Um Victor, uh, who was the father of the Victor who wrote this manuscript, uh, this Victor O. Victor O was a devout Lutheran. He translated numerous hymns with a college classmate from Swedish into English, and some of these hymns are still in the standard Lutheran hymn book. Uh Victor O, or the man who went to uh Mexico and was a chemistry professor, was also an inventor. And one of his inventions was a doorknob that had um a lock uh in the center of it. Both Victor and Jenny were active members of the Swedish of different Swedish clubs. Uh and these clubs were established so that Lutherans um sort of intermarried and hung around together and preserved some of their culture in and around here on South Dakota, and actually peppered throughout South Dakota, Minnesota, uh, Nebraska, that whole Midwestern area. Victor was born on a farm near Stanton, Iowa in 1867, and Jenny was born in Sweden. Uh Jenny's father, Johann Lindebor, and his brother were carpenters to the king of Sweden. Her father and a lady in waiting to the queen, that is Johann and a lady in waiting to the queen, fell in love and they eloped to Norway, where the Norwegian Lutheran Church permitted commoners and aristocracy to marry. On returning to Sweden, the marriage was annulled by uh her mother because uh she didn't want a commoner commoner blood tainting their royal blood, and Johan, uh heartbroken, took off, took a boat to the United States. He never remarried. Meanwhile, Jenny was born, and after a couple of years, her mother, the one who annulled the uh no, I'm sorry, her mother, who was the one who got married in Norway, uh died of tuberculosis. So Jenny, who's the daughter of the woman who married the carpenter the king, uh, the daughter of the uh woman who was a lady in waiting, Jenny played the role of Cinderella in the household of her aunt and uncle, and got tired of that role and left for America to rejoin her father. She stowed away uh on a boat to um to Glasgow from Norway and slept in among the potatoes. Uh one night uh the boat developed a hole in the hold where she was sleeping, and she woke up to um water uh and potatoes. So um instead of uh hanging out anymore, she climbed to up to the deck and waited for the hole to be repaired. A year later, that same boat sank in the North Sea with many lives lost. I guess the hole opened up again. When Jenny arrived in New York, Jendi Lindebor, she bought a ticket to Chicago and met her father at the train station. That's Johan. It was night and it was winter. Um by the way, um the father, uh Johan, who's um, as I mentioned, was a carpenter to the king of Sweden, got a job working for the Cable Piano Company. That was a very well-known piano company in the United States, and they were based in, I believe, southern Chicago. Anyway, uh, so she met her father at the train station. It was night and it was winter. Every time the taxi passed in front of a house, it rose up and then fell down. So this is like in the early 1880s. The next morning, Jenny wakes up to her second or third day in the New World and she peers out the window to discover what might have made the taxi rise up and fall down in front of each house. And it turned out that in Chicago there was no garbage pickup service. And in the winter, when you threw the garbage out into the street, it just froze. And then in the spring the dogs and pigs ate it. Uh, Jenny, Lindibore, met Victor when they were both students at Augustana College, a Lutheran college in Rock Island, Illinois. One day she was walking through the snow drifts, minding her own business, but she tripped and her boats, books, fell in the snow. A strapping young lad gallantly picked them up, and that was the beginning of the Victor O. Peterson and Jenny A. Lindeport line. About the children of that union, that is, my great aunts and uncles. Well, one of them was my grandmother, um, but uh the rest of them were great uncles. The first was my grandmother Edith, who became ill in Mexico with rheumatic fever, and was later told that she could never have children. She subsequently had four children with my grandfather, uh, including uh my mother Dorothy, who is now 97. Edith died when my mother was 14. Uh Edith died from tuberculosis, the same thing that um Jenny's mother died of. The second child was Harold. He was the carpenter of the family. Um, and he was the one, remember, who worked with um uh with Victor O at the plantation and did a lot of carpentry. During World War I, Harold uh tracked down army deserters in Cuba, Canada, Alaska, and the Everglades. So he never served in the war, uh, but he tracked down deserters. And in Cuba, Canada, Alaska, and the Everglades. He was seriously wounded in the Everglades. Later on after the war, he developed epilepsy. And his mother, Jenny, nursed him until she died. She would nurse him by mixing anti-epileptic medicines into his food. But when she died, he no longer took the medicine because she couldn't get him to take it, and she had to sneak it in. And then he eventually succumbed to epilepsy. So it must have been very grand mall epilepsy. Uh, Ruben, the next in line, who was the picky eater that I talked about, uh he invented an oil pipeline brush, and his company was bought up by the Fuller Brush Company. So he became comfortably wealthy. We used to uh go down to Cleveland from Detroit to visit Ruben and his wife, my aunt, uh Marie, in the heights of Cleveland. Uh beautiful, beautiful neighborhoods. I'm sure those of you who know Cleveland know the heights quite well. Uncle Ruben was a kind Benjamin Franklin sort of person, quiet, unassuming, intelligent, and wise. I really loved him. And I was only nine when he died. Oliver, the Indio in our adventure, ended up a vice president of Standard Oil Company. I don't I might have met him, but I don't have any memory of him. Uh Rolf, who was next in line, he was too young to go to Mexico. Remember, uh, he and uh Edith never made it. Uh so he he he stayed in in the United States. Now, when he was an adult, he worked for American Can Company in South Orange, New Jersey, and he was the lead researcher developing the milk carton. So another inventor. Uh and Victor, the author of this manuscript, was born two years after the adventure was over. So all this material is stuff that he gleaned from his brothers and sisters and his parents. Uh he never joined the work-aday world, never really had a job. And in the 1960s, he became somewhat of a hippie and eventually joined an ashram. I only met him once. I'm sorry, he did have a job, but he uh was damaged. Uh his lungs were damaged anyway. I only met uh Victor once uh when he and some of his gurus followers made the trek east from California and stopped along the way to visit relatives, including us. Well, that's the end of this uh exploration of this manuscript. I hope you enjoyed it. Uh, that's so that's the end of podcast number 30. We have managed to pull out of Hawk the um tempering machine. So just a little bit about Project Open Fairness and where we are there. The tempering machine, which was a$6,000 purchase that was paid for by a USDA grant, and then Project Open Fairness has paid for the$4,000 to get it out of customs. And now David is working with it, and I'm training him in how to use it online. I keep writing to him and telling him how to use it. So that's uh that's the next exciting thing. That's the next big piece of equipment. And so we're making good progress in we're going to be uh shipping 2,000 chocolate bars to the United States toward the end of November. So I'll be getting in touch with you about uh purchasing uh chocolate bars for Christmas. All right. Well, that's the end of the podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for listening.