Father Edward Bastien was known in each of his South Texas parishes as a priest who would happily join in his parishioners' latest plumbing or electrical battles at home at the same time that he worked toward their spiritual well-being at church. But only when he arrived in the poor border town of Zapata, soon to be flooded by the building of the U.S.-Mexico Falcon Dam, did his tenacious efforts to help his parishioners fight the battle of their lives earn him the honorary moniker of the Fighting Father of Zapata.
When Father Bastien realized that a series of bureaucratic mix-ups and power struggles at the federal level would keep his parishioners from being fairly compensated for their long-held family homes and property, he began one of the most prolific and determined letter-writing campaigns to affect such a project before or since. With equal parts wit and unbending courage, Bastien wrote a deluge of letters to the likes of then U.S. Senate Lyndon B. Johnson and even President Eisenhower, both of whom eventually responded to his humble yet persuasive pleas. At the same time he kept a steady stream of letters flowing to the Laredo Times under the pen name I. POZ, which stood for Irate People of Zapata.
Maía Rollin knew Father Bastien when she was a child. He gave her family a copy of his Zapata letters interspersed with his personal musings and anecdotes of the events of that time. Later Rollin realized that this man's manuscript is a humorous yet powerful personal account of bureaucracy gone amok, of poor South Texans forced into a diaspora, and of a priest who was willing to fight for the temporal as well as the spiritual needs of those who had no voice. This is his story.
María Rollin has a diploma of Hispanic Studies from the University of Madrid, Spain. She holds an M.A. in Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Applied English Linguistics from the University Texas at El Paso. She has taught Spanish and English in Spain and Spanish in Japan. She currently teaches Spanish and English as a Second Language at Laredo Community College, Laredo, Texas.
Southwestern Studies Series No. 110
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ISBN 0-87404-285-2 Paper $18.00
6 x 9, 265 pp., biblio., paper, 2003