The Man Who Bathed in Rivers: A Daughter's Ethnographic Oral History of Her Father

Introduction: 

When a Daughter Becomes an Anthropologist

Long before I became an anthropologist, I was a daughter. I spent nearly forty years occupying that role without ever imagining that one day I would sit across from my father with a recorder and an interview guide, asking questions that daughters do not ordinarily ask. Anthropology taught me to listen differently. It taught me that stories are not merely entertainment or family folklore, but repositories of memory, identity, values, and meaning. 

Yet this project repeatedly reminded me that scholarship does not replace relationship. I never stopped being his daughter simply because I became an anthropologist. Instead, the two identities learned to sit beside one another. Throughout these conversations, I found myself moving constantly between the role of researcher and the role I had occupied my entire life. Sometimes I listened with the curiosity of an ethnographer. Sometimes I laughed with the familiarity of a daughter. More often than not, I was both. 

This oral history emerged from that intersection. It is not simply the story of my father's life and travels through Latin America, nor is it solely an exercise in ethnographic inquiry. It is the story of what happened when a daughter became an anthropologist and discovered that the people she thought she knew best still contained entire worlds waiting to be explored.

This project emerged at a particularly fitting moment in my father's life. After decades of ministry, he was preparing for retirement from the Episcopal Church. My earliest memories of him are not of ordinary nine-to-five routines, but of watching him preach on Sunday mornings, greeting parishioners after the service, praying beside hospital beds, and sharing meals and conversations with the communities he served. Ministry was never simply something he did; it shaped the rhythms of our family life. He is also, and has always been, a remarkable storyteller. Much of my own voice as a writer and storyteller, the tendency toward deep thinking, an attentiveness to the human experience, and even a certain wry sense of humor, I inherited from him.

Long before he became an Episcopal priest, however, he belonged to the Dominican Order of the Roman Catholic Church. In his early twenties, after receiving his Master of Divinity from Berkeley, he spent time living and working among Indigenous communities in Mexico and Central America. These were the stories that fascinated me growing up. Monkeys in the jungle, villages hidden in the clouds, rivers used for bathing, and communities accessible only by horseback seemed impossibly exotic to a little girl whose earliest memories revolved around church life. Those stories had become part of our family's oral tradition long before I became an anthropologist, but adulthood and anthropology gave me different questions.

As someone deeply shaped by Indigenous studies, decolonizing methodologies, and anthropology, I found myself wrestling with questions that were both academic and intensely personal. How had my father come to love these communities so deeply while simultaneously participating in institutions so entangled with histories of colonialism? Did he experience guilt or tension? How did he reconcile his obvious admiration and affection for these communities with the historical realities of missionary work? How did he understand those years now, decades removed from them? These questions felt particularly difficult because they seemed so opposite from the man I have known my entire life. The father who taught me to respect people, to listen before speaking, and to appreciate cultural difference hardly resembled the caricature of missionary colonialism I encountered in my coursework. I was not interested in constructing either a defense or an indictment. Rather, I wanted to understand how one human being navigated those contradictions and how he himself made meaning from those experiences.

Methodologically, this project drew upon ethnographic oral history practices and life history interviewing. I employed semi-structured, open-ended questions designed less to establish chronology in order to encourage narrative reflection. Rather than treating memory as a collection of facts to be extracted, I approached storytelling itself as meaningful data. Interviews were audio recorded with informed consent and later transcribed. In addition to transcription, I maintained descriptive, analytical, and methodological field notes documenting not only what was said, but how it was said. I paid attention to pauses, laughter, gestures, repetition, shifts in posture, and emotional responses, understanding these performative elements as central to the construction of memory itself. Because the interviewee was my father, reflexivity became an important part of the methodology. Throughout the project, I continually moved between the roles of anthropologist and daughter, recognizing that my own positionality shaped both the questions I asked and the stories that emerged. Rather than viewing this relational dynamic as a limitation, I understood it as part of the ethnographic process itself. This oral history, therefore, is not simply a record of one man's life, but a collaborative act of remembering situated at the intersection of family, narrative, and anthropology.

Perhaps that tension was what compelled me most. In many ways, the questions I brought to this project are the same questions that animate anthropology itself. How do people make meaning? How do they reconcile contradictions? How do they understand themselves through time? And how do memory, faith, and love coexist alongside histories that are often far more complicated than we would like them to be? In interviewing my father, I was not simply documenting a life. I was attempting to understand how a man I deeply loved and admired made sense of a world that, at least on paper, appeared full of paradoxes. In the process, I discovered that the stories which had captivated me as a child still had much to teach me as an anthropologist.

Chapter One

The House by the Resaca

 

Before we get to South America, there was a resaca, a blanket, and the peculiar business of turning my father into an informant. Anthropologists like to talk about field sites as though they are somehow separate from ordinary life. To the rest of the world, one might think of a field site as a village, a marketplace, a cemetery, a restaurant tucked into an alley. Something appropriately exotic and suitably academic, outside the norms of everyday life. Nobody ever seems to mention that sometimes the field site is the home of your recently passed grandmother and your informant is the man who taught you how to ride a bicycle. Perhaps that omission is understandable to most, there is something inherently strange about asking your own father to sign a consent form.

The interview took place in Brownsville, Texas, in the home that had belonged to my step-grandmother, who had crossed over that wonderous life bridge the previous year. My father had come south for a few days to check on the property and make repairs. When I pulled into the driveway, the first thing I noticed was a towering pile of dried palm fronds stacked neatly near the curb. A recent freeze, mild by most standards but unusual for Brownsville, had browned many of the palms in the neighborhood. My father had already gathered the fallen fronds into an orderly pile, evidence of his inability to leave even nature's untidiness unattended. The yard somehow felt both cared for and abandoned at the same time. It struck me as an apt metaphor for grief itself.

Inside, the house carried the peculiar stillness that homes acquire when they are no longer lived in every day. The air smelled faintly of old wood. Nothing appeared neglected, yet nothing felt active either. Homes have rhythms, and when the people who animated those rhythms are gone, the silence itself seems to acquire an unbearable, yet nostalgic, weight. It is a complicated emotion to feel both the comfort of what was once an oasis of life and activity and the sadness that comes with its sudden absence.

We discussed where to sit for the interview. My father was unusually quiet and deferential, waiting for me to decide. His hands remained tucked inside the pockets of his jacket and his responses were shorter than usual. It took me a moment to recognize what I was seeing. He was nervous. I was nervous too, although we both seemed committed to pretending that asking one's daughter to interview him about the trajectory of his life was a perfectly ordinary way to spend a Thursday afternoon.

I suggested we sit outside. The backyard overlooks one of Brownsville's resacas, those remnants of the Rio Grande left behind when the river altered its course centuries ago. The late afternoon light reflected off the water in soft ribbons of gold, and the setting seemed to ease the tension. I dragged two wicker chairs across the patio while their legs scraped loudly against the brick courtyard that Nana and her husband Servando had lovingly laid more 50 years earlier. The shaded portions of the yard were too cold, so I positioned the chairs where the sunlight still lingered.

My father followed behind me carrying a blanket he had purchased for Nana during a trip to Santa Fe several years earlier. Without ceremony, yet a father-daughter ritual all the same, he draped it over my shoulders as I stepped through the creaky old metal back door. The blanket promptly slipped off and nearly landed on the ground. Neither of us acknowledged the failed attempt. There are entire books devoted to interviewing methodology, but none of them adequately prepare you for the fact that your informant may interrupt fieldwork to make sure you are warm.

We sat facing one another at a slight angle, both turned partly toward the water. I asked my first question, and almost immediately something changed. The nervousness disappeared. My father shifted into what I came to think of as storyteller mode.

Throughout the interview, he maintained strong eye contact. When memories became emotional, he would pause and look toward the sky. When he recalled moments of joy or wonder, his entire body seemed to participate in the telling. His hands moved. His voice shifted in pitch. Certain stories animated him so completely that they seemed less like recollections and more like relived experiences. I found myself becoming increasingly interested not simply in what he remembered, but in how he remembered. The pauses, the laughter, the changes in posture, and even the silences all became part of the narrative itself.

Yet I discovered very quickly that interviewing one's father presents its own methodological complications. I had spent nearly forty years being his daughter. As the daughter of the first and greatest storyteller I have ever known, I do not interrupt. When he wandered into stories within stories, I followed. When twenty-minute digressions appeared, I allowed them to unfold. I had prepared an interview guide complete with themes and carefully worded questions. My father, meanwhile, had prepared half a century's worth of memories and no particular interest in my outline.

What surprised me most was that my difficulty in redirecting the conversation had very little to do with interviewing technique and everything to do with relational roles. I repeatedly slipped back into what I came to think of as my daughter role, allowing him to set the pace and determine the direction of the conversation. Positionality, I realized, is not something anthropologists reflect upon after fieldwork. It is fieldwork. The relationship itself shapes the stories that emerge as much as the questions that are asked.

As the sun lowered behind the trees along the resaca and the evening air grew colder, we pulled our blankets tighter around our shoulders. Small insects began to gather above the water, and the golden light gradually gave way to blue-gray shadows. Somewhere in the midst of this ordinary South Texas evening, my father began describing another landscape entirely. He spoke of mountains hidden in clouds, villages reached by horseback, rivers clear enough to bathe in, and Indigenous communities scattered across the jungle.

Without leaving Brownsville, already at the edge of the country, I found myself following him even further south.

Chapter Two

The World Was Colorful

Memory, I have discovered, does not proceed chronologically no matter how much historians and anthropologists might wish otherwise. People do not remember their lives as timelines. They remember them as scenes. A smell, a phrase, a particular face, a song, a room. My father remembers this way. Events are organized less by date than by significance, and as I listened, I realized that the geography of his life was not measured in miles but in transformations. Certain phrases announced themselves almost like chapter titles. He would smile slightly, tilt his head, and say something cryptic with the confidence of a man who knew exactly where he was going, even if his audience did not.

"Montreal and a play," he said with a small grin, almost playfully, as though introducing a favorite story. 

Earlier, another phrase had appeared in much the same way: "The world was colorful." 

There was reverence in his voice when he said it, and I noticed his entire body shift as he spoke. He opened his arms wide, stretching them away from his body as though he was attempting to hold the memory itself in his hands. Even now, decades later, he seemed to marvel at what he had seen. According to my field notes, his movements became expansive and his voice softened when he recalled this period of his life. The memory had not diminished with time. It remained embodied, almost tactile.

Long before jungles and mountains entered the story, there had been transformation. He spoke about spiritual awakening, not with triumph but with wonder. "The first thing I experienced was the love of God," he told me. When he spoke of that moment, his voice cracked. He stopped speaking for several seconds and looked upward. His hand moved instinctively to the center of his chest. Then came another memory layered upon the first. He remembered his mother telling him she loved him for the first time. Even in the retelling, decades later, tears threatened to emerge. He paused, breathing shallowly before continuing. Some memories refuse to become ordinary.

Transformation, for him, was marked so completely that even his name changed. At twenty-two, he became "Ed." When he spoke of being renamed, he sat straighter. His shoulders pulled back. His chin lifted slightly. The posture itself conveyed meaning. Names, after all, are never just labels. They are declarations about who we believe ourselves to be. For him, "Ed" represented more than convenience. It marked a different chapter, a different understanding of himself, and perhaps a different understanding of vocation. The story of how Eddie became Ed was one he told with both humor and reflection, because by his own account the change was never really about the name itself. The name simply became shorthand for the person he was becoming.

If memory resembles rivers, vocation seems to resemble accidents. Looking backward, people often impose coherence on events that must have felt anything but coherent while they were happening. Listening to my father, however, I was struck by how frequently chance encounters seemed to alter the course of his life. A retreat, a friendship, Montreal and a play…one thing leading inexplicably into another.

When he recounted a particularly painful memory from Montreal, his demeanor once again changed entirely. His body became animated. He leaned forward. His speech quickened. His voice cracked repeatedly. My field notes record the sensation that he seemed to be reliving the moment rather than merely remembering it. He described seeing a woman in distress. He remembered running through freezing rain. At twenty-three years old, the memory of ice, panic and fear forever became etched into his memory. "God, what do you want of me?" he recalled asking aloud. It was not the question of a man seeking certainty. It was the question of someone overwhelmed by ambiguity and discovering that faith often arrives without instructions. 

Eventually, the story brought him south. Not immediately to South America, as I had imagined, but first to Mexico and Chiapas, where geography itself seemed to conspire against modern notions of convenience. Villages were scattered throughout the Altiplano. Some communities consisted of forty people. Others held several hundred. To reach them required descending into the jungle and climbing back upward into the mountains. Travel happened by horseback and mule. Sometimes, he said, they lived literally in the clouds.

"We would go in rotation to the communities in the jungle," he explained. "Some communities were forty, sixty people, others were two to three hundred. We would go on mule or horseback to those communities. Especially those by the river were in the bottom, and in the Altiplano you were in the clouds. Literally" (Gomez-Maxey 2026b).

The image fascinated me. Clouds had always existed in my imagination as something overhead, but my father described living inside them. There was something appropriately metaphorical about that. So much of his life, as he narrated it, seemed to involve existing somewhere between worlds. Between cultures. Between certainty and doubt. Between tradition and transformation. Between being an outsider and becoming, if not an insider, then at least someone trusted enough to sit beside people and listen.

The routines themselves sound almost idyllic when removed from their context. Rivers became baths. Streams became showers. Villages became homes for weeks at a time. There were waterfalls and hammocks suspended beneath mosquito nets. Nights were punctuated by the sounds of monkeys moving through trees so high above that the canopy itself appeared to shift. At first, he thought he was imagining things. Then leaves would drift downward, and he realized the trees were alive with movement.

"The most beautiful things were bathing in rivers," he said. "Or in streams and waterfalls in the jungle. Those were the most freeing and beautiful life-giving moments" (Gomez-Maxey 2026b).

The anthropologist in me wanted to ask about rituals and structures. The daughter in me was content to sit and imagine him at twenty-something, long-haired and idealistic, bathing in rivers beneath a canopy of monkeys, blissfully unaware that one day his daughter would be sitting beside a resaca in South Texas writing all of this down.

Perhaps that is the strange work of oral history. We imagine ourselves collecting stories when we are often collecting worlds. And my father's world, I was beginning to understand, had become much larger than I had ever known.

Chapter Three

Rivers, Monkeys, and Other Lessons in Humility

It is tempting, especially from the comfort of middle age and indoor plumbing, to romanticize adventure. There is a tendency to smooth rough edges and edit out inconveniences, transforming discomfort into nostalgia and difficulty into colorful anecdotes. Memory performs these little acts of mercy for us. But as my father spoke, I was struck by the fact that his stories retained both wonder and absurdity. The jungle, as he remembered it, was beautiful. It was also muddy, inconvenient, occasionally embarrassing, and populated by monkeys that appeared to have questionable intentions. Perhaps this is why I trusted the stories.

By the time he arrived in the villages, routine had already become something different from what most Americans might recognize. Communities were visited in rotation, and each arrival followed familiar patterns. The leaders would gather first. Greetings would be exchanged. News shared. Problems discussed. And before any formal work began, everyone bathed.

"We would all go into the rivers and streams," he remembered. "Which was always cool. It was really amazing" (Gomez-Maxey 2026).

His voice softened whenever he spoke about water. Rivers appear throughout his stories with almost sacramental consistency. They were baths and gathering places, sources of beauty and refreshment. There is a kind of freedom that emerges when one realizes how few things are actually necessary. Rivers, apparently, can replace showers quite effectively.

Of course, there was one notable exception: soap. Specifically, a large pink bottle of Suave shampoo. This story had occupied a permanent place in our family's mythology long before I ever thought to record it. Like all good stories, it improved with age and with repetition. I had heard versions of it before, but during the interview I asked him to tell it again. His eyes brightened immediately.

"You want to hear that story again?" he asked.

Apparently, he had been preparing for weeks in the jungle. He had packed carefully. Supplies had to last. He remembered buying the largest bottle of pink Suave shampoo he could find. He paused, laughed, and then added with characteristic self-awareness, "Well, I had hair back then. Long hair back then."

On his first rotation into the jungle, he headed to the river to bathe. For reasons no one ever explained, fifteen or twenty children followed him. They stood around staring, fascinated by this strange outsider with body hair and unfamiliar habits. One child reached out and touched the shampoo foam.

"So then I thought, 'What the heck, let me shampoo them.'" Soon he was shampooing every child in sight.

"And all the kids," he laughed, "AH HA!" Their hair covered in suds while foam drifted downstream. "We probably polluted an entire tributary with Suave shampoo" (Gomez-Maxey 2026).

Hours later, everyone gathered for dinner and community meetings. A sort of chicken soup (mostly broth) was prepared in a large pot. One chicken served an entire village, circulated among families. Noticing heads of fluffy hair running around the village, the priest who had worked there for decades looked at my dad and immediately asked, "You shampooed their heads, didn't you?"

Apparently, this was not the first time youthful enthusiasm had collided with local realities.

By evening, every child appeared with hair standing straight upward. Shampoo, it turned out, was an unnecessary luxury in communities where natural oils and river water had always been sufficient. My father laughed telling the story, but underneath the humor was something anthropologically important. Good intentions do not necessarily equal understanding. Sometimes the impulse to help is simply another way of imposing familiarity upon people who never asked for it.

Another lesson in humility arrived in the form of T-shirts. In one village, a young European priest from a wealthy family became deeply uncomfortable with the fact that the women wore no tops. The women breastfed openly and moved through daily life without embarrassment. Nudity, after all, is largely a cultural category. Bodies themselves are simply bodies.

Convinced he was solving a problem, the young priest ordered hundreds of T-shirts. The next day, everyone gathered for Mass. One of the senior missionaries, a Spaniard named Pablo suddenly began laughing uncontrollably. My father looked up and nearly lost his composure himself. The women had dutifully accepted the shirts. Then they had cut holes into them. Some cut one hole. Some cut two. They simply pulled their breasts through and continued life exactly as before.

"They had nice new T-shirts," my father laughed, "with their breasts out there" (Gomez-Maxey 2026).

I laughed too, perhaps harder than I should have. But there was wisdom in the story.The women had neither rejected the gift nor surrendered their own cultural practices. Instead, they adapted the object to fit their world rather than allowing the object to redefine it. Anthropology is filled with discussions of resistance and agency. These women managed both with scissors and remarkable practicality.

Eventually, my father himself stopped noticing. "After a couple weeks you don't even notice," he explained. "It's just skin. It's a body."

He recalled his own awkwardness the first time he bathed with the men. "They were all standing naked just looking at me. And I'm there with my soap. Awkward."

Eventually, he ran out of soap altogether. "So I just jumped in the river and got wet." There was no tragedy in this. No grand revelation. Just adaptation. Human beings, after all, are astonishingly flexible creatures.

Nights brought their own rhythms. In some villages, wild animals made sleeping on the ground impractical, so hammocks were strung beneath mosquito nets. Food and supplies hung from rafters. Socks were nonnegotiable. Beetles and other unnamed creatures apparently had opinions about exposed skin. He spoke matter-of-factly about these details, as though hammocks suspended above the jungle floor were the most natural thing in the world.

The monkeys though, fascinated him. At first, he thought he was hallucinating. High above, the canopy appeared to move although there was no wind. Then leaves would drift downward and he realized entire troops of monkeys were leaping from branch to branch, freezing in place before moving again.

"I thought, my God, we're going to be eaten by monkeys." The statement was delivered with complete seriousness and entirely undermined by his own laughter.

Even bathroom routines carried lessons. Corn sustained the communities. Once the husks had served their purpose, they were thrown into a central pile. When nature called, one simply grabbed a couple husks and headed for the woods.

"It works really well," he insisted. "And it's biodegradable." Then came the line that made me laugh out loud. "You know, sometimes you get corn nuts in your butt."

It was impossible not to laugh. The humor, however, never obscured the deeper admiration that permeated his stories. He spoke about environmental stewardship with genuine respect. Communities hunted selectively, managed resources carefully, and treated the land with reverence. Long before sustainability became a fashionable buzzword, these villages had developed systems rooted in reciprocity and restraint.

Listening to him, I was struck by how many of his stories centered on learning rather than teaching. This was not how missionaries are usually imagined. Popular imagination often casts them as bearers of answers, moving confidently into unfamiliar spaces armed with certainty. But certainty was conspicuously absent from my father's stories. What emerged instead was humility, embarrassment, laughter, and gradual understanding. The jungle, it seemed, had little interest in preserving anyone's illusions.

That was its greatest gift; because somewhere between monkey-filled canopies, corn husks, rivers, and children with vertically challenged hair, my father stopped behaving like a visitor and began learning how to become a guest.

Chapter Four

Accompaniment

 

If the jungle taught my father humility, the people he encountered there taught him something much more difficult: the difference between changing people and accompanying them. Looking back over our conversations, I think this distinction came to define much of how he understood ministry for the remainder of his life.

When most people hear the word missionary, they tend to imagine conversion. They imagine sermons, altar calls, and strangers arriving with a bible on one hand, and certainty in their suitcases. History provides enough examples to justify those assumptions. Five centuries of colonialism in the Americas have left few Indigenous communities untouched by those ambitions. Yet as I listened to my father describe the communities where he lived and worked, I was struck by how little his stories centered on conversion and how much they centered on relationship.

"The Dominicans had been there five hundred years," he told me, almost with admiration. "And there had never been one native vocation to the priesthood" (Gomez-Maxey 2026). 

The observation fascinated him. It still did decades later. He was not offended by it. If anything, he seemed impressed by what it represented. Five hundred years of Catholic presence and the communities remained unmistakably themselves. They had not abandoned older ways of understanding the world. Instead, they had incorporated Christianity into existing systems of meaning. Saints became associated with older spiritual figures. Catholic rituals existed alongside Indigenous practices. They had translated Christianity into something intelligible within their own cosmology rather than allowing it to erase what had come before.

"They never really left their nature religion," he explained matter-of-factly. "They just incorporated it."

He described people sitting before saints for hours, praying and passing around bottles of Coca-Cola. The drink itself held practical value. Mexican Coca-Cola settled the stomach, and sharing it formed part of communal ritual. Families gathered together in prayer, taking turns sipping from the bottle as they offered intentions. To outsiders, it might have appeared strange or contradictory. To those participating, there was no contradiction at all. It was simply part of the world they inhabited.

Illness occupied a similarly complex place. People visited churches, but they also sought out traditional healers. According to the stories he heard, human beings shared souls with animals living somewhere in the jungle. When someone became sick, the medicine man would send apprentices into the forest to locate the wounded animal. Heal the animal and the person recovered. If the animal died before it could be found, then death itself became part of the natural order.

"And it worked," he told me simply. "I SAW it."

There was no sarcasm in his voice, no dismissiveness, and no attempt to explain the practice away. I remember smiling when he said it, partly because the anthropologist in me wanted to ask a dozen follow-up questions and partly because I realized he was comfortable allowing mystery to remain mystery. Not everything needed translation, and not every belief required dissection. Sometimes understanding begins with admitting that someone else's explanation of the world need not become your own in order to deserve respect.

Perhaps what surprised me most was how little his work resembled the popular image of missionary life. By the time he arrived, he explained, the work was no longer focused on conversion. 

"Nothing like that," he said. "We never told people they had to follow Jesus. That era was long gone by the time I arrived" (Gomez-Maxey 2026). 

Instead, ministry consisted largely of ritual, accompaniment, and advocacy. They celebrated baptisms and weddings because families requested them. They blessed graves. They presided over funerals. They served as arbitrators during conflicts between communities and advocated with local governments and outside companies seeking access to Indigenous lands. "It was justice ministry," he told me, and I noticed that phrase carried more weight for him than almost anything else we discussed.

He spoke with equal fascination about the social organization of the communities themselves. Leadership was earned gradually over a lifetime. Young men first proved themselves as sons, then husbands, then fathers. Marriage itself required years of labor. A prospective husband often lived with his future wife's family, working their land and demonstrating responsibility before marriage was permitted. Land belonged to the community, and authority emerged through trust rather than wealth. Leadership was not inherited automatically nor purchased, it was accumulated through a lifetime of service.

"This is very Mayan," he told me with obvious admiration.

Marriage ceremonies themselves left a lasting impression on him. The bride's dress might take years to complete while the dowry obligations were being fulfilled. Families worked together crafting elaborate garments from brilliantly colored bird feathers. Even decades later, he smiled when he described seeing one for the first time.

"When I first saw it," he remembered, "I thought, 'Oh man.' Beautiful. Just beautiful."

Beauty, it seemed, occupied an important place in his memories. He never described these customs as primitive or exotic. Instead, he spoke about them with the same reverence one might reserve for great art.

One detail fascinated him particularly. In these communities, adulthood and authority were inseparable from family life. To care for others was the ultimate sign of maturity. Having a wife and children demonstrated responsibility. This, he admitted, made the celibate priesthood difficult for many people to understand. 

"Having a family is the ultimate sign of responsibility," he reflected. "That's what gives you authority." Celibacy, by contrast, made little sense within a worldview where responsibility was measured through relationships and obligations to others.

History itself remained present in the place where he lived. The church where he stayed had been founded by Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar and first bishop of Chiapas who condemned Spanish brutality against Indigenous peoples and documented the atrocities he witnessed throughout the Caribbean. Five centuries later, my father found himself sleeping in the same place.

"I stayed where he stayed," he said with quiet pride.

Listening to him, I was struck by how often ministry resembled anthropology more than evangelism. It required listening. It demanded patience. It required understanding systems of kinship, authority, ritual, and meaning. It required learning to sit with ambiguity. Of course, neither anthropology nor Christianity can claim innocence. Both are entangled with colonial histories and unequal relationships. 

My father understood this, even if he did not articulate it in academic language. There was no triumphalism in his stories. If anything, he seemed continually surprised by how much he had learned from people he had supposedly been sent to teach.

Perhaps that is one of history's quieter ironies. We imagine ourselves bringing answers and spend years discovering questions. Somewhere in the mountains of Chiapas, among feather dresses, saints, Coca-Cola bottles, and stories about souls shared with animals in the jungle, my father learned that accompaniment was not weakness. It was simply another name for love, and love, unlike conquest, has very little interest in winning.

Chapter Five

Tapachula

Memory offers a sort of protection; that is its kindnesses. We tend to remember funny stories in greater detail than painful ones, and over time the sharp edges of grief become less jagged. Humor survives because it is easier to carry. Listening to my father, I noticed this repeatedly. Entire evenings could be spent talking about monkeys, rivers, or children with shampoo-stiffened hair, and then suddenly, almost in passing, he would mention something that stopped me cold. It was never delivered dramatically. There were no long pauses or declarations announcing that something important was coming. He would simply say it and continue, as though he had spent so many years carrying the memory that he had forgotten how astonishing it sounded to everyone else.

"It was very hard," he said quietly. "We had to bury entire families."

He was talking about Tapachula. By the time he arrived in southern Mexico, the wars in Central America had spilled beyond borders. Violence rarely respects maps. Refugees were moving northward, and among them were Miskito Indigenous families fleeing Nicaragua. They were exhausted, displaced, and vulnerable. Some never made it to safety. According to my father, Mexican authorities sometimes treated them with suspicion and brutality. Bodies accumulated faster than governments wished to acknowledge.

"The Mexican government was just shooting the Miskitos that were coming," he recalled. "They would only allow us to bury them" (Gomez-Maxey 2026).

The sentence itself felt almost impossible to absorb. There are certain moments during interviews when the role of researcher becomes secondary to the role of human being. I remember my immediate response.

"Oh, wow." Not because I lacked better words, but because I had none.

For all the stories he told me over the course of our interviews, this may have been the moment when I became most aware of the age he had been when these events occurred. I interrupted him and asked, almost instinctively, "How old were you?"

"I was twenty-nine," he answered. "Twenty-nine that year."

Twenty-nine struck me with surprising force. Twenty-nine no longer seemed old to me. Twenty-nine was young. Twenty-nine was young enough to still be trying to figure out who you were. Young enough to still believe that most problems had solutions. Young enough to discover that history does not particularly care how old you are when it arrives.

He admitted that he was terrified. "It was very hard," he said again. "I was terrified."

The repetition caught my attention because repetition appeared frequently whenever something truly mattered to him. He did not elaborate much. He did not describe the bodies or the circumstances in graphic detail. In many ways, the absence of detail spoke volumes. Trauma often resists narration. Some memories are recalled in fragments because fragments are all that remain manageable. Even decades later, his account remained sparse. There was no embellishment. No effort to transform suffering into something profound or inspirational. It had been terrible. He had been afraid. Entire families had died. Those facts alone were enough.

What struck me most was how different his demeanor became when speaking about these memories. Earlier stories animated his entire body. Rivers brought smiles. Monkeys inspired laughter. The shampoo story practically performed itself. But this section of the conversation was quieter. He leaned back into his chair. The energy that characterized so many other stories receded. He spoke carefully, almost economically. Looking back at my field notes, I am drawn not by what he said, but by what he did not say. The silence around certain memories seemed as significant as the words themselves. Anthropologists often remind us that absences carry meaning, and nowhere was that clearer than here.

For years, I suspect I imagined missionaries primarily through stories of faith and service. I imagined baptisms and sermons. I imagined beautiful landscapes and meaningful conversations. Listening to my father, however, I was reminded that history also intrudes upon ordinary lives. People do not volunteer for historical moments. They simply find themselves inside them.

At twenty-nine, my father was not a famous theologian. He was not a scholar or politician. He was a young man far from home, trying to do what he believed was right while events far larger than himself unfolded around him. History remembers wars through treaties, presidents, and dates. Ordinary people remember them differently. They remember the fear, the names, the smell of dirt, and my father remembers digging graves.

I wanted to ask more questions. The anthropologist in me wanted to know how they were buried? How many people? What happened afterward? But another part of me, the daughter, recognized that interviews are not interrogations. Sometimes love means allowing silences to remain intact. Some stories arrive with edges still too tender to press.

Not every memory needs excavation.

Throughout our conversations, I noticed that my father rarely framed his life in terms of accomplishments. He spoke about people, communities, his brothers, teachers, and friends. Even when discussing suffering, he focused outward rather than inward. There was very little self-congratulation in his stories. He never presented himself as heroic. If anything, he seemed slightly uncomfortable whenever his role became central.

Perhaps that is why this particular memory lingered with me long after the interview ended. Not because it was dramatic, but because of the simplicity with which he described it. There are experiences so painful that they resist transformation into stories. They remain testimonies, and testimonies, unlike stories, do not seek applause. They simply ask to be remembered.

 

Chapter Six

These Were My Brothers

By the time we reached the later portions of the interview, I had begun to recognize a pattern. My father rarely described his life in terms of achievements. He did not organize memory around promotions, titles, or milestones. Places mattered, certainly, and events appeared in vivid detail, but almost every story eventually returned to people. In his telling, life was measured through relationships. Communities occupied center stage. Individuals mattered more than accomplishments. Even suffering, when he described it, was filtered through concern for others rather than through his own experience. Looking back over the transcripts, I realized that what endured most powerfully in his memory was not success, but belonging.

Throughout our conversations, he spoke frequently about priests, nuns, and Indigenous leaders, but he almost always referred to them by name. No one appeared merely as an abstract category. They were companions and friends. They were people with whom he had shared rivers, meals, fears, and laughter. There was affection in the way he spoke about them. Even decades later, they remained present in his memory not as coworkers or colleagues but as fellow travelers.

At one point during our first conversation, he became particularly animated. His voice grew louder. His eyes widened. He leaned forward and struck the arm of his chair with his hand, emphasizing every word.

"These were my brothers!" he exclaimed.

I made note of the moment immediately. According to my field notes, it was one of the few times during the interview that his volume noticeably increased. There was joy in the declaration, but also something deeper than joy. The statement seemed to emerge from somewhere far below ordinary memory. It was not merely a description, it was a confession about how he understood himself and his life.

Belonging, after all, is one of those curious things human beings spend their lives pursuing without always realizing it. Anthropologists devote entire careers to studying kinship, social organization, and identity, yet underneath all those theoretical frameworks lies a remarkably simple question: Who are my people? Listening to my father, I realized that he had spent much of his life answering that question over and over again.

The answer was seldom geographic. Home, at least in his stories, was never entirely reducible to a place. Home was something created between people. It was shared meals in villages hidden by clouds. It was sleeping in hammocks beneath mosquito nets. It was long conversations with Spanish missionaries and Indigenous elders. It was blessing graves and arguing over theology and laughing over cultural misunderstandings. Somewhere in the accumulation of ordinary days, strangers became companions, and companions became brothers.

I had spent much of my own life understanding identity through movement. Our family moved often. Places changed, churches changed, communities shifted - there was always another chapter waiting. Yet listening to my father, I began to understand that movement itself had never prevented him from forming attachments. Quite the opposite. His stories revealed someone who possessed an unusual capacity to create community wherever he found himself.

Perhaps this is why he rarely described those years in terms of sacrifice. There were certainly hardships. There were illnesses, dangers, discomforts, and tragedies. Yet those things occupied surprisingly little space in his narratives. Instead, he remembered meals, friendships and shared work. He remembered laughter. Even the shampoo story was fundamentally a story about children. The monkeys, the rivers, and the feather dresses all existed alongside people who had welcomed him into their lives. Relationships gave meaning to everything else.

As I listened, I found myself thinking about the anthropological literature on fictive kinship and ritual brotherhood. Communities have always expanded the language of family beyond biological ties. Human beings are remarkably creative when constructing belonging. We adopt one another. We assign kinship terms to those who share our experiences and values. Brothers and sisters are not always born into existence. Sometimes they are forged through years of mutual dependence, trust, and shared suffering. Looking back, I suspect my father would have found such theoretical language unnecessarily complicated. He would simply say, "These were my brothers," and for him that explanation would have been sufficient.

His understanding of brotherhood seemed to transcend nationality and culture: Spaniards, Mexicans, Indigenous peoples, priests, nuns. They all appeared in his stories as part of the same social world. Difference existed, certainly, but it was not the organizing principle of his memories. Relationships were. And perhaps that perspective emerged precisely because of the years he spent living outside familiar contexts. Being a stranger in a new community teaches a person to recognize humanity in others. Anthropologists often speak about liminality, about existing between worlds, but perhaps living between worlds also creates the possibility of wider forms of kinship. Once identity becomes untethered from place, it becomes easier to discover home in people.

I suspect that lesson stayed with him long after he left Latin America. Even now, decades later, he speaks about those years with affection rather than regret. There is longing in his stories, certainly, but not bitterness. Time has transformed many things, but not his gratitude.

Near the end of our interviews, I found myself wondering whether oral histories reveal facts or values. Dates and events matter, of course, but they are only part of the story. What emerges most clearly through memory are the things people have decided were worth carrying. The stories we preserve become a map of what we love.

Listening to my father, I realized that beneath all the rivers, mountains, villages, and historical events lay a much simpler truth: the places mattered because of the people. The adventures mattered because they were shared. And when he remembered those years, what surfaced most readily was not hardship or achievement, but gratitude.

"These were my brothers," he had said. And after everything I had heard, I understood that he meant it.

Chapter Seven

Listening to Someone You Thought You Already Knew

One of the more humbling discoveries of this project was realizing how little I knew. Not facts, exactly. I knew my father. I knew his habits, mannerisms, and terrible dad jokes. I knew the stories that had become family legends, the jokes that resurfaced every Thanksgiving, and the phrases that appeared so regularly that they had become part of the furniture of our lives. I knew him in the way daughters know fathers, which is to say imperfectly but intimately. Or at least I thought I did.

Anthropology, however, has an irritating way of exposing assumptions. We enter fieldwork believing we are there to learn about others, only to discover that the more uncomfortable revelations often concern ourselves. I had approached this project with all the confidence of someone interviewing a person she had known for nearly forty years. Surely there would be no surprises. Surely the challenge would involve organizing memories, asking thoughtful questions, and transcribing hours of audio. Instead, I found myself repeatedly astonished by stories I had never heard and perspectives I had never considered.

I had known, of course, that my father had spent years in Latin America. I had heard references to Chiapas and stories about monkeys. I knew he had worked in missions. But there is a tremendous difference between knowing facts and understanding a life. Facts are tidy. Lives are not.

What impacted me most were not the extraordinary moments, but the ordinary ones. The blanket over my shoulders. The way he looked toward the sky when emotions overwhelmed him. The way he laughed before reaching the punchline because he already knew which parts amused him most. His tendency to answer one question by beginning somewhere entirely different and eventually arriving at the answer through a route only he seemed capable of navigating. During one interview, I watched him pause in the middle of a memory, stare into the distance, and smile softly to himself. I realized then that I was witnessing something more than recollection. I was watching someone visit another time.

Stories, after all, are performances. They do not simply convey information. They communicate values. Throughout the interviews, I became increasingly aware that my father's stories always had an audience, even when he was unaware of it. Humor was carefully timed. Repetition emphasized meaning. Certain phrases appeared again and again. "The world was colorful." "These were my brothers." "It was justice ministry." "Beautiful." These were not accidental repetitions. They were clues. They revealed what mattered to him. Anthropologists often concern themselves with what people say, but oral history reminded me that how people tell stories matters just as much as the stories themselves.

I also discovered that interviewing one's father presents certain methodological complications rarely discussed in textbooks. As a daughter, I found myself repeatedly slipping out of the role of researcher and back into the role I had occupied my entire life. My carefully constructed interview guide quickly became more suggestion than roadmap. Questions disappeared beneath digressions. Stories nested inside other stories. Entire themes emerged that I had never intended to pursue.

Oddly enough, this turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of the project. Had I interrupted more often, had I rigidly adhered to my outline, many of the best stories would never have surfaced. The shampoo story probably would have been reduced to a sentence. The feather wedding dresses might have remained unmentioned. The phrase "These were my brothers" would never have arrived with such force. In surrendering control of the interview, I gained something far more valuable. I gained access to the ways my father himself organized meaning.

My field notes reveal another complication. I often found myself responding not as an anthropologist but as a daughter. Sometimes I laughed. Sometimes I interrupted with "Oh, wow." Sometimes I forgot entirely that I was conducting research. Looking back, I do not view those moments as failures. If anything, they remind me that ethnography has always been relational. Objectivity, despite our best efforts, remains something of a myth. Human beings encounter one another as people first and researchers second. The relationship itself becomes part of the data.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of all was realizing how much joy animated his memories. The years he described were not easy. There was danger. There was fear. There were deaths and losses and hardships I cannot fully imagine. Yet when he remembered those decades, what surfaced most consistently was wonder. Rivers. Mountains. Feather dresses. Children. Brothers. Beauty. Gratitude.

I found that deeply moving.

There is a tendency, particularly in contemporary life, to imagine happiness as the absence of suffering. Listening to my father, I began to suspect that joy and hardship are not opposites at all. They coexist. They occupy the same memories. Perhaps this is why his stories remained so vibrant. They were not nostalgic because they ignored pain. They were hopeful because they remembered beauty alongside it.

By the end of the interviews, I found myself thinking less about anthropology and more about time. We spend so much of our lives assuming there will always be another conversation. Another holiday. Another opportunity to ask questions. Oral history, however, is built upon the uncomfortable recognition that memories disappear. Stories disappear. Entire worlds vanish quietly unless someone stops long enough to listen.

What I am preserving is the sound of my father's laughter when he remembered having hair. The way his eyes widened when he spoke about bathing in rivers. The pride in his voice when he said, "These were my brothers." The silence that followed memories too painful for words. The tears that appeared unexpectedly when he spoke about love. The gestures. The pauses. The stories within stories.

In the end, I discovered that oral history is not only about remembering the past. It is about paying attention in the present. It is about sitting beside someone you love and realizing, with equal measures of humility and gratitude, that there are still entire worlds inside them waiting to be discovered.

And perhaps that is the strangest and most wonderful thing about families. We spend our whole lives believing we know one another. Then one afternoon, sitting beside a resaca in Brownsville with blankets over our legs, we discover that the people we love most are still capable of surprising us.

Epilogue

The Stories We Carry

There is an old temptation within both history and anthropology to imagine that preservation is primarily about objects. We save photographs. We digitize letters. We catalogue books. We place artifacts in acid-free folders and assign them accession numbers. We build archives and museums and reassure ourselves that, because the objects survive, the past survives too.

But objects, stubborn things that they are, cannot laugh. They cannot pause halfway through a sentence because emotion unexpectedly catches in the throat. They cannot look toward the sky when remembering something painful. They cannot smile at the memory of monkeys in the jungle. Objects preserve evidence. Stories preserve people.

That is why oral history feels so sacred to me. For all the techniques and methodologies we employ as anthropologists, there remains something wonderfully simple at the heart of the work. Someone sits. Someone speaks. And someone listens. The exchange itself becomes an act of trust. Memory, imperfect and selective though it may be, becomes a gift offered by one person to another.

Throughout this project, I often found myself thinking about archives. In my recent work preserving the history of a local church in Brownsville, I have handled books more than a century old. I have carefully removed brittle papers from inside hymnals and brushed dust from pages touched by people whose names have long since disappeared from living memory. There is a reverence that accompanies such work, but I increasingly suspect that the greatest archives are not shelves or boxes. They are people.

Ive heard the description that entire libraries walk among us. And one day, quietly and without ceremony, they are gone.

Anthropologists recognize that stories do more than recount events; they communicate values, preserve identities, and explain who we are and… where we belong. But oral histories do something even more remarkable: they preserve voices. Not merely what someone said, but how they said it. The pauses. The repetitions. The laughter. The parts that made no sense until twenty minutes later. The details no one would think to write down because they seemed too ordinary to matter. Yet ordinary things matter immensely.

No official document would ever record the image of a father carrying a blanket onto a patio because he worried his daughter might be cold. No archive would preserve the sound of him laughing at the memory of having hair. No historical marker would mention shampooing twenty children in a river or his astonishment at seeing monkeys high above the canopy. There are no monuments commemorating feather wedding dresses or the simple declaration, spoken with almost boyish enthusiasm decades later, "The world was colorful." And yet these things matter.

They matter because they reveal the contours of a life. They tell us what was beautiful, what was painful, and what was worth remembering. Looking back over the interviews, I am left in awe by how often joy appeared in my father's stories. Not because suffering was absent, but because even in memories marked by fear and loss existed there existed memories of wonder. One of memory's quiet miracles is that it allows sorrow and joy to coexist without demanding that one erase the other.

I began this project believing I was documenting my father's life. Somewhere along the way, I realized I was also documenting a relationship. The interviews became less about gathering information and more about paying attention. There is a difference between hearing someone and listening to them. Families often mistake proximity for knowledge. We assume that because we have shared holidays and birthdays and ordinary Tuesdays, we know one another completely. But human beings are not static things. We contain decades of experiences, thousands of memories, and entire landscapes invisible to those around us. Sometimes the people we think we know best still contain worlds waiting to be discovered.

That realization feels both comforting and bittersweet. None of us are finished stories. We continue becoming until the end. And because memory itself is fragile, there is urgency in listening. There will never be enough time. There will never be enough questions. There will always be one more story we forgot to ask about.

That is why I find myself returning to the image that opened this project. Two wicker chairs on a patio overlooking a resaca. The winter light beginning to fade. Blankets over our legs. My father sitting across from me, nervous for reasons neither of us could quite explain. And then, slowly, he began talking.

What followed were mountains and rivers, monkeys and feather dresses, fear and laughter, brothers and beauty. There were tragedies too, and silences, and memories too painful to fully articulate. There were stories I had heard before and stories I had never heard at all. But beneath all of them was something much simpler and much more profound. There was love, the kind that reveals itself through listening. The kind that says, perhaps without ever saying it aloud, I am here. Tell me again. I have time.

In the end, I do not think oral history is really about rescuing the past from oblivion. I think oral history is about honoring the present. It is about recognizing that the person sitting across from us carries an entire universe within them and deciding, for however long we are given, to listen. Because one afternoon in Brownsville, beside a quiet stretch of water left behind by a river that changed its mind centuries ago, I discovered that the man I had known my entire life still had stories left to tell.

And I was finally old enough to listen.

Primary Sources

Gomez, Edward. 2026. Interview by Alexandria Gomez-Maxey. Oral Narratives Project, Recorded January 2026.

Gomez-Maxey, Alexandria. 2026. Field Notes. 

Gomez-Maxey, Alexandria. 2026. Transcription.