I first laid eyes on the Three Sisters in the Sierra Madre, north of Mexico City. As my BMW motorcycle bumped along dusty paths leading through fields in the lowlands of Costa Rica, I saw the Sisters again. I got more acquainted as I hitchhiked across the altiplano of the Andes.
The Three Sisters are the three principal crops of the Americas: winter squash, maize, and climbing beans. They have been grown by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. They grow together in a truly symbiotic process. The big corn seeds take root at the center of a dirt mound, forming a sturdy base. This supports the growth of the climbing beans and the flowering squash. As the beans grow, they produce nitrogen that fertilizes the maize and squash. As the squash spreads along the ground, it forms a living mulch, creating a microclimate that retains moisture in the soil. The leaves of the squash also block out sunlight, preventing weeds from taking over. The prickly, hairy texture of the leaves deters pests.
During my travels in South America, I lived with many families who cultivated the Three Sisters. When I stayed in the homes of Quechua farmers, they were a staple of every meal. Meeting farmers from Chile, I learned to refer to beans using the word poroto. Poroto is a word unique to Chile, southern Peru, and Argentina. It comes from the Quechua word for bean: purutu. I was continually amazed at the importance of those three crops, and the way they could sustain so many people.
I know that the farmers who took me in experienced the Sisters in a way that was utterly different from the view of a North American college dropout, who saw the life of a subsistence farmer growing these three crops in a poetic cooperative process as an uplifting departure from capitalism. To me, the Three Sisters were an incredible, romantic metaphor for sustainability and a natural way of life. Yet I know that for those families, life was neither natural nor unnatural; it was just life, the often-harsh reality of living hand to mouth. The year was spent planning for the year ahead, and the Three Sisters were always part of the plan.
In the Andes, several families allowed me to stay in their homes. The bedrooms slept four or five people, maybe six, with family members of varying ages. The houses were always neat and tidy and largely empty, with no more furniture than a closet hewed from rough pine. Often the family outhouse was placed over a running stream or rivulet of flowing water, to carry excrement downstream.
Despite my wide-eyed wonder at discovering subsistence farming, I was aware of how political forces created certain outcomes for indigenous farmers. Most farmers whom I met didn’t produce much of a surplus to take to market. In order to purchase goods like sugar, building materials, tools, and bikes, they had to trade goods made from sheep wool or other animal products. If they had cheese and other dairy products from a cow or goat, that could also be used to barter.
After I returned to the United States, I wanted to incorporate the lessons of the Three Sisters into a career in agriculture. I couldn’t help being North American, and the son of a onetime industrialist, but I thought that my experiences could guide me. By becoming a small farmer, I would try to live out in my daily life the fundamental economic and political lessons I had gained from my travels.
Dad, on the other hand, was driving relentlessly forward in his career at the World Bank. If he had bothered to ask me, he might have gained perspective on the lives of the subsistence farmers he claimed to advocate for—the people I had met and lived with.
I understood the depth of his failures as the architect of Vietnam. I knew that, despite his outward silence and confidence, he was burdened by his mistakes and his regrets. I wanted a more sustainable career for myself.
In an effort to better understand localized farming practices, I traveled to Mexico for most of 1973 and 1974. It was my second journey out of the US, and it took place just a few months after I had returned from Chile. Twenty-four now, I retained my farming dreams, but I remained deeply uncomfortable in the United States. Stanford had lost its appeal, and I was not ready to give college another try. Up until September of 1973, it had truly been my goal to return to Chile and reunite with Carmen. The Pinochet takeover ultimately destroyed that dream. I was neither ready to be back in the States nor able to return to my adopted home country. As I flew south, bound for Mexico City, I hoped to discover a new experience that would bring me closer to farming.
In Mexico City I stayed in the Friends House, a Quaker hostel, where I met Walter Illsley. Walter had left the United States because of his Communist sympathies; he had served as an engineer in Mao’s China in the 1940s. Now he lived with his wife and their six children in Uruapan, Michoacán. On Walter’s advice, I traveled to Michoacán and ended up in a pueblo called Tomendán. There, I looked for the farming experience I needed.
Tomendán is nestled up against hills of volcanic soil, its fields golden with sugar cane. In the lands around the town, the pine and oak and dry shrubs stretch as far as the eye can see. When I first saw the pueblo, I thought it looked like a Garden of Eden, with edible plants and fruit-bearing trees dotting the countryside. Soon after I arrived there, a friend of Walter’s named Raoul welcomed me into a chocolate-brown adobe house.
Raoul and his brother Emmanuel were sugar-cane farmers. One morning I ventured out from Raoul’s house and came upon their group of campesinos, resting after a morning of difficult work. I must have looked strange to them. Was I the first gringo in years to walk into their town? My huaraches were old and covered in mud like theirs. But my long hair and beard, together with my backpack, certainly gave me away.
I explained to Raoul that I wanted to work alongside the group, to cultivate and harvest the cane. I told them that I wanted to be a farmer, and that I’d work for free. My Spanish wasn’t perfect, but I must have tried to tell the whole story: how I’d recently returned to the US from Chile but couldn’t stay in El Norte, how I wanted an understanding of cooperative farming, and how I’d traveled south again, to this remote village in Michoacán, to find it.
I remember that the two brothers stepped aside and discussed my offer. They asked their fellow campesinos to weigh in. A few nodded their heads. Someone said that they could use the help because these were hard times. Then, in a very respectful manner, Emmanuel told me that they needed to think about my offer. He suggested that I, too, should reconsider. They told me to come back in a few days. I didn’t know if they were hesitant about bringing me on or if they just couldn’t believe someone wanted to work for free. Maybe they wanted to see if I would keep my word. When I returned, what could they say?
Raoul and Emmanuel first put me to work in the piloncillo factory. Piloncillo means “little loaf.” It refers to a variety of boiled, hardened, and refined sugar cane with a smoky, earthy taste. Piloncillo has more flavor than brown sugar, and it’s also healthier, with several immunological benefits. In Mexico, piloncillos have been made for more than five hundred years. By the time I arrived, the ejido—the state-owned, communal farm—had been operating for two years. Before that, it had been a hacienda.
Everyone specialized in a different part of the process behind piloncillo production. I helped operate a thirty-foot waterwheel, used to crush huge mountains of freshly harvested sugar cane into juice. Others brought fuel for the wood fires that heated the long vats from below. A few workers poured the heated juice into the molds, and the rest bagged the completed product.
The sugar-cane mill had many uses. At sunrise, the women of Tomendán took buckets of corn soaked in limewater up to the mill to be ground into masa. Throughout the day, they used the masa to make fresh tortillas, patting it back and forth between their hands. The huge waterwheel also powered the electric saws that Emmanuel used to mill all of the timber for constructing houses across Tomendán.
For the next nine months, I worked with Emmanuel and Raoul, hoeing cane on the rocky slopes of Mt. Tepitario, planting corn and beans, harvesting mangoes that tasted like ambrosia, and enjoying tamales made from fresh corn. From the fields to the kitchen table, we talked for hours about our hopes, our dreams, and our fears. I quickly learned that the ejido faced many obstacles. All of the workers had different specialties, but nobody had mastery of the whole process. Hiring a maestro to oversee or consult on the operation was expensive. Organizing a collective effort was difficult, and each man’s level of effort was different. This was especially true for the more exhausting roles, like keeping those hot ovens running. The work was never-ending, and the campesinos had a hard time selling their piloncillos for a good price. Making things worse, they covered their production costs by drawing credit from regional bureaucrats.
Long after my first encounter with the campesinos, I learned why they had been hesitant to bring me on. They were embarrassed to have me join them, Emmanuel explained. Embarrassed because the work they were doing was not sustaining them.
Knowing this now, I am amazed at how Raoul’s and Emmanuel’s families shared everything. We had fresh tortillas and beans with every meal, simple and perfect. We enjoyed many Mexican desserts made with piloncillos, the products of our hard work. My favorite desserts were atole, a sweet drink made from corn flour and seasoned with cinnamon and vanilla, and the ubiquitous flan. I learned to make calabaza tachada, an extraordinary dessert of winter squash. After cooking the calabaza squash in sugar-cane syrup overnight, we would collect it at dawn and pour fresh milk over the golden caramelized flesh of the squash. I was addicted for life after one bite of this local confection.
At family meals, I talked to my hosts about the problems facing the cooperative. Over many months, I came to understand that the ejido system that Emiliano Zapata had fought for in the Mexican Revolution was falling apart. Widespread corruption, illegal sales and transfers of ejido lands, ecological degradation, and low productivity were all contributing to the system’s failure. The most heartbreaking thing of all was that the campesinos didn’t trust one another. Drawing credit meant that profits were rarely realized. Where money was concerned, unity couldn’t be built. The lack of trust was a difficult lesson to learn, a departure from the sense of solidarity I’d felt with the cause of Chilean farmers.
At length the conversations in Tomendán began to turn toward socialism and politics. For a while I held back my innermost thoughts, paranoid about being branded a Communist. Once, I worked up the courage to ask Emmanuel what the collective farmers in Tomendán thought about their prospects. His reply told me more than I was ready to hear.
“You know,” he told me, “our problem here is how we treat each other. When one person begins to rise, he treats the rest of us as the patrón did in the time of the old hacienda. We have to learn. Our consciousness must grow.”
I pondered the meaning of Emmanuel’s words—what they meant for him and what his sentiment might mean for my own future in farming. Throughout my time in Tomendán, I had several other opportunities to reflect on the problems that the collective faced. I often attended the juntas (meetings) held by the campesino workers. We gathered in the old grain room of the hacienda, its doors thrown open. The older men sat in the corners, smoking cigarettes. The young men sat on wheelbarrows, on top of fertilizer bags, or on the unswept floor.
These meetings would practically swirl with changes in intensity. Sometimes there was laughing, sometimes yelling and finger-pointing. I remember one meeting where I was asked to take notes, because the elected secretary was hungover. There was a debate about the construction of a concrete basketball court, which had been bankrolled by a government commission in exchange for labor. It appeared that some of the men had pocketed their stipends without working on the project.
This kind of financial disagreement came up often. At one junta, a single member of the ejido spoke out and challenged the fragmentation of the group. Shouldn’t we feel a sense of brotherhood, of common cause? It was easy for me to agree. But who was I to judge the conflicts in the lives of these ejidatarios? I had traveled to the village in order to learn about farming, but plenty of them would have gladly given it up if they’d had any choice.
When I returned to the States in the fall of 1974, I realized that it was my destiny to remain in my home country. I had made my second journey to Mexico without any timeline for a return, but the conflicts of the ejido had weakened my determination to remain outside the US. I think part of me also realized that I couldn’t travel anywhere without bringing myself along. Probably I was ready to settle down. I had come a long way from Stanford, and I didn’t feel like a kid anymore.
I don’t think I could have put it into words back then, but in retrospect, I was clearly involved in a personal project of reshaping my family’s legacy. I was consciously trying to distance myself from issues relating to the Vietnam War. Looking back, I am sure that the fact that there was no longer a draft contributed to my decision to return. I had no idea that the US’s war would come to an end just months later, in April of 1975.
I felt at the time much as I had when Dad left the Pentagon; this could be another opportunity to turn a page in our family’s life. Although I was deeply cynical about a US war planner weighing in on Latin American economic development, there were aspects of my father’s work at the World Bank that I respected, especially his leadership in pushing the Bank to invest in global agriculture. I don’t think he understood why I wanted to participate in agriculture at the level of the soil, but he understood on the most basic level that global agriculture was not meeting the needs of the globe.
In order to become a first-generation farmer in the United States, I needed an education. Not long after my second return, I hitchhiked from San Francisco to Davis. Acceptance letter in hand, I had decided to study agriculture. I reentered college as a twenty-five-year-old, and for the first time in my life, I was singularly focused on my education.
When I got to Davis, I did what most people do—I bought a used bike. My next job was to find a place to live. I knocked on dozens of doors, asking the unsuspecting occupants if they had a room to rent. Everyone said no. I think some of them had rooms available, but they took one look at me and shut the door. Finally, down by the train station, not fifty feet from the tracks, the door of a cottage opened and a woman appeared.
“Well, yes,” she said, “my roommate just moved out. But I was looking for another woman.”
Clearly I didn’t fit the bill. Maybe retaining my hippie look—long hair, long beard—had something to do with my difficulties. I was so desperate that I blurted out, “I’m a good cook, and I do the dishes.”
Mary Lou took me in. For the next year, I would be woken at 3 a.m. every day by the creaking and bumping of freight cars rolling past my window.
Farming is not an easy field for anyone. Even if you’re passionate and educated, issues of land ownership and economics dictate whether you can make a living. I knew this even at the beginning of my studies. I felt innately that the next decade would be filled with peak stress. Remembering it now, everything from those days—the houses I lived in, my roommates, my regrets, the occasional visits from my parents—is encircled by the big narrative I’d defined for myself.
As a result, I think I took less notice of the ways in which the country was changing. Back in 1969, when I arrived at Stanford at the peak of the nation’s unrest, there was a sense that a real widespread revolution of ideas was possible, maybe even imminent. Now, going into the mid-’70s, that momentum was winding down. The revolution hadn’t arrived, but the national darkness that inspired it remained. It was a good thing that I saw a way forward in life through farming, because I think the national psyche was very damaged.
This was especially true for those who had returned home from fighting the war in Vietnam. Today we understand the decades-long aftereffects: veteran suicides in the thousands, posttraumatic stress, and a sense of national unity from the early 1960s replaced with absolute polarization. Back then I wasn’t educated about these things and didn’t allow myself to seek out any veterans or listen to the experiences of men who fought in the war. And I knew that they were around. Some of them were my peers.
For years I couldn’t utter the word Vietnam without wanting to cry. There were many moments every day in which the subject of the war waded into my thought stream. It occupied the place of a childhood shame, early and overpowering. My horror concerning the war was never entirely absent from my experience; nor was it ever entirely present. In that way, the idea of the war was like my father, with whom I’d spent so much time yet whose absence I felt so acutely. Maybe I intentionally avoided the subject. The people in their late twenties who were my friends in Davis weren’t eager to talk about it.
I graduated from UC Davis in December of 1976. Not long after receiving my diploma, I decided to look for some good soil. I hopped in my Datsun pickup truck and began a monthlong journey across America. The trip took me from Durango, Colorado, to Springfield, Ohio, and on to Summertown, Tennessee. Along the way, I often paused by the side of country roads to take soil samples with an auger. Pressing the moist soil between my fingers, I would feel the mixture of sand, silt, and clay forming loam. With a sniff and a trained eye, I’d guess at the soil’s organic matter percentage before taking my measurements.
While in Summertown, I stopped at something called The Farm, home to about three hundred hippies (spiritual seekers) who had caravanned from Haight-Ashbury. Their slogan: “Out to Save the World!”
This was a back-to-the-land community. Everyone grew food and adhered to strict vegan diets. To join, all you needed to do was sign a vow of poverty and turn over your cash and other possessions to the group. During my short stay on The Farm, I remember digging up huge orange yams with my hands. We pulled whole baskets of them from the red earth. The soil was good.
At the time, I thought of The Farm as a curious subculture. I can’t remember how seriously I thought about joining that project. As I look back now on the entirety of my agricultural journey, my feelings about The Farm illustrate a transition in my thinking. The revolutionaries who inhabited The Farm seemed to be endeavoring to create a facsimile of the authentic subsistence farms I had encountered in South America. At one time it had been my dream and ambition to do something similar—maybe not in the United States, but certainly in Chile, with Carmen.
It struck me as I left The Farm that there was a significant political difference between the indigenous subsistence farmers who lived that life by necessity, by tradition, and by culture and the farmers who opted into it by renouncing their possessions. I felt that I could be more effective elsewhere. It was not that my politics had changed, but being in college in my midtwenties had definitely rounded the edges of my radicalism.
My relationship with Julie was a significant part of my thinking. She was from Jane Street in the West Village of New York City. She had come to UC Davis to work toward her master’s in entomology and was one of the few women in the agriculture program. We met at an Aries party, a very Californian occasion that she still likes to joke about with her New York friends. I remember her being taken aback when she learned I was the son of Robert McNamara. She told me she had also been against the war. Julie understood that I wanted to be different from my father. Coming from New York, aware of the suffocating effects of East Coast society, she didn’t judge me based on my family alone. To this day, Julie perceives people based on their integrity and trustworthiness rather than the success or failure of their parents.
After my visit to The Farm, I continued east, thinking about my family, my desire to start my own family, my political beliefs, my responsibilities, and everything I’d been through. There was a short visit with my folks in Washington. Like it or not, that was the first soil I grew in before I understood anything about actual soil. I wondered if the place where I had been planted was healthy. Certain things about it were. On that visit, I did not feel so alienated. The sight of refrigerators didn’t make me have a panic attack as it had when I returned from Chile.
I was optimistic that things could get healthier and more natural between my father and me. I held out hope that, now that I was returning to the United States and settling down, we might start to have some of the honest conversations that I had wanted since I called him from the phone booth at St. Paul’s. I didn’t think I could fix what my father did or “save the world,” like The Farmers. But I thought I could tell the truth about a violent legacy and try to do something better.