Tracking Miskito School Children

 

In Spanish America, every newborn who is entered into the national registry possesses two legal surnames, the father’s first, and then the mother’s. A boy child named Juan born to Manuel Martínez Solórzano and Maricela Vargas Vanegas would thus be Juan Martínez Vargas. Juan’s sister Alicia would also be Alicia Martínez Vargas. If Alicia grew up and married Leo López Ortiz she would still retain her legal name: Alicia Martínez Vargas. Whatever name is on your birth certificate, that’s your name for life. That’s the way it is supposed to be in all Latin America.

In mestizo society the simplicity of this system has been disturbed by the phenomenon of the single mother. When a man refuses to recognize a child as his, the mother is left with the sole recourse of registering the child with her last name only: that is, her father’s. The popular Mexican ranchera “Hijo de Nadie” decries this sorry fate with the famous lyrical protest, “solo cuento con un apellido” (I only have one surname). Wherever there is a trained registrar, that’s as complicated as it gets.

Among Latin American Native peoples such as the Miskitos, however, there’s a whole series of circumstances that confound the issue.

Florcia Vicente

Florcia Vicente's legal name would be Florcia Waldan Espinoza, but she's with her maternal grandmother Viola, Augusto Vicente's sister.  

The Legally Nonexistent

    At the point in history when the national registry system was set up, the Spanish speaking government officials unintentionally left people without European heritage completely outside the realm of legal existence. As a result, many native children have great difficulty becoming properly registered. To register one’s newborn, parents must first present their own birth certificates in evidence of their identity. If they have none, because their parents never had birth certificates either, they are told that these are absolute requirements. There does exist, at least on paper, an alternate route, but it is so convoluted in theory and in practice that most registry officials won’t even bother to inform the parents. It requires plenty of diligent work on the part of both parents and government officials ... no one really believes the other party is willing to make the effort, so apathy reigns. 

    Nowadays, many corrupt registrars will issue quick “constancias” for a price, in order to “facilitate,” the process, leading the parents to believe that their baby’s identity is registered with the national government. When that baby grows up and wants to attend high school, however, he finds out that the identification number he has been given belongs to somebody else from a faraway city, because no such legal provision was ever given to rectify the problem in this manner. 

    From time immemorial native people have lived and died on the land with an identity rooted in the hearts of their communities and in the land itself. There was never any controversy over legal land title or need of a marriage contract before a judge. In the bosom of family and community, everyone knew who everyone was and who belonged to whom. Now, many Miskitos can’t claim they legally exist in the world. Identities and marriages are “common law” because there is no access to “Spanish” law. Whatever name they are given as children is filed in the archives of oral history, which is subject to rejection by the educated world.

    As coordinator of a child labor project between 2001-2004 I found over 600 children in the municipality of Villeda Morales, Honduras, who were in danger of being denied primary education because they had no birth certificates. The government was trying to eliminate teacher fraud (tenured positions are given to schools on basis of enrollment, and teachers are wont to pad the student population with phantom children). Our project worked long and hard to get these children legal standing, meeting with teachers, community, parents, registrars, and government officials. We obtained supporting documents such as the “Fe de Bautismo” given by denominations that baptize infants and written testimonials of relatives. We complied with every cumbersome detail in the law and got promises from the National Registry. We even financed the salary of an adjunct registrar for several months whose exclusive task would be to process the mountain of information and leave each folder ready for the formal Registrar’s signature and stamp. In the end the vast majority of these cases was never resolved for want of a signature.

    There is a way Miskito people can obtain legal existence. When they are old enough to vote, the political parties will recruit them and get them a national ID card, complete with a real registration number, in exchange for party loyalty. Welcome to the System!

  

 

Patriarchal vs Matriarchal Family Structure

    Go to a Miskito village--any village--and point to a child bathing in the river. Ask, “Whose child is that?” Odds are you will get a mother’s name in reply. “Apolonia luhpia,” or something like that. Point to a house and ask, “Whose house is that?” You’ll probably get a woman’s name in reply. Miskito social order is built around the woman of the house. It’s her house, they’re her kids. If Miskito people had set up the system of registry and legal identification, they probably would have reversed the order of last names, placing the mother’s before the father’s. When someone from a small village introduces himself he will likely give only one last name--his mother’s. Other people in the village will also refer to him with his mother’s last name. He grew up amidst his mother’s extended family. If he has never been registered “Spaniard-style” in a government office, that’s who he’ll be and how he’ll be remembered after he is gone.

    Women have babies before they are women. Girls have babies. This was always the case, but nowadays it is increasingly common to find that the father doesn’t stick around. Society has become a lot more mobile with the arrival of formal education, motor transport, and other aspects of modern life. Children of adolescent single mothers grow up under the care of their grandmothers and become identified as if they were their grandmother’s natural children. Such a child will likely be called by his mother’s mother’s maiden name. 

    When such children are enrolled in school or taken to a public health clinic, there is pressure to conform to the Spanish system, but anything might happen. There are a number of options. After repeat visits to a clinic a single child may have been registered with multiple identities, making it difficult to track his or her medical history. Each year at school, children “disappear,” being reinvented as someone else. This is a very common occurrence. The classroom teacher may not even be aware that a child’s identity has changed; the “initial enrollment” at the beginning of that particular school year is the beginning of the classroom teacher’s responsibility concerning that child’s existence. There’s very little attention given to long term academic development in the culture of schooling.

    There is one aspect of Miskito culture that makes it possible to track children from year to year: the exclusivity of the first name. Miskito people believe it is disrespectful to give a baby a name already selected and in use in the community. In a land without credit cards, this would be the worst form of identity theft. So a mother takes great care in naming her baby, observing it for a month or more after its birth before actually coming to a decision. Foreigners are consulted to see whether they know any names that have never been heard in the village. People also readily pull names from radio newscasts, yes, even Saddam and Osama, I have a friend, a retired school teacher in Honduras, whose name is Smelling Wood. I’m not kidding. I always wondered how he got that name. He’s pretty old, but his father, Alberto, son of an American mahogany cutter, is really old, more than 100. One night while lying on my bed the answer came to me: “Aha!!! He was born in the early 1940’s ... what names were being tossed around on the airwaves back then ... remember, Alberto understands English now ... I got it: Max Schmelling!” I asked Alberto about it and he said it was true. There is no confusing Smelling Wood; there is none other in the universe.

    Of course not every child has such a distinguished name as my friend, but each is the only one in the village with the name he or she has. Of course, most kids are called by their nicknames (which are often humorous), which might confuse a foreigner, since even their “Christian” names sound a bit strange to them. In the village, however, everyone knows the difference between a nickname and a fine Christian name like Saddam.

            

    School records, then, are better organized according to the student’s first name. In attempting to keep track of Seek the Lamb sponsored children, we must also be aware of these anomalies and not become too upset when we come across children whose last names have been changed yet again this year. We must be mindful of the incredible difficulties which these people face in their path towards inclusion in the global society, and always prayerful concerning the outcome. Let God's eternal truth triumph in hearts everywhere!

 

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