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Introducing her book
"I am my father's daughter"
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| Unlocking a father's secrets |
| Written by Elaine Ayala (San Antonio Express-News) |
| Tuesday, April 18 2006 |
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In hindsight, María Elena Salinas thinks she should have picked up on all the clues. The author of "I Am My Father's Daughter: Living a Life Without Secrets" (Rayo, $19.95) says the signs were there.
"He spoke six languages, including Latin. Who speaks Latin?" she says from Los Angeles, where she was covering immigration marches. Her father also studied in Rome, was deeply religious and would "meditate every single day. He would take long walks and read."
"How could I have lived with a priest all my life," she asks incredulously, and not know it?
The secret her father long hid didn't surface until after his death in 1985 in what she calls his "box of secrets," which was filled with books, loose pages, birth and baptismal certificates, letters and family photographs. There, in a small church pamphlet about their uncle's 25th anniversary as a priest, she found that her father, José Luis Cordero Salinas, the man she worked so hard to make proud, who upheld a strict code of ethics and behavior for his daughters, a man she adored, had been a Catholic priest in Mexico before immigrating to the United States.
Initially, her book wasn't going to be about her family's past. It started about her own career. The seven-year project became both an investigation into her father's secrets and a biography, beginning with her beauty pageant days to her start in radio and then the "Noticiero Univision" anchor desk she shares with Jorge Ramos.
It's an enviable perch. According to Univision, the newscast is seen by 2.3 million Hispanic viewers every weekday. The network has more than 90 affiliates in the United States, including San Antonio, and is seen in Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, among others.
Portions of the book home in on the medium's turbulent rise, the business of broadcast news, noted interviews with "dictators, strongmen and comandantes" and those that most tugged at her heart: ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Journalism has taken her all over the world, not bad for the daughter of an undocumented immigrant.
The book would have been done sooner but for the nagging doubts Salinas had about telling her father's story. She harbors none about her thirst to discover why her father left the priesthood. While part of the reason was that he fell in love and married her mother, Salinas has some evidence that other issues were at play, including a clash with superiors. "My mother said he suffered a great disappointment."
Salinas' mother died in 1998 and not knowing the source of this disappointment still haunts her daughter.
But getting proof that he was a priest was a relief, as were photos of him dressed in a cassock. They were a godsend for a woman who could never understand why her father, though loving, always seemed just out of arm's reach.
Take this passage: "My love for him ran as deeply as the mysteries surrounding his life. Disciplinarian, pacifist, intellectual, undocumented. He had been an enigma, even in our small, tight-knit family. He bounced around from job to job, enterprise to enterprise. He worked as a Realtor, an accountant, a bowling-alley manager, a professor. But it wasn't big bucks or salary bonuses he seemed to be after. Instead, he was driven by a sense of mission and charity."
Researching the book reunited her with members of her father's family in Mexico, from whom he had cut ties after leaving the priesthood in the '40s. With their help, Salinas connected more dots. Some dug into their own archives and pointed her in new directions.
She found a priest who received first communion instruction from her father and knew some of what her father experienced as a young priest. Besides having a demanding, difficult superior, her father strove to improve conditions at the parishes to which he was assigned. He also established an art gallery in the church.
Salinas also visited church offices in Mexico City that documented when her uncle was ordained but made no reference to her father.
"My Father's Daughter," written with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Liz Balmaseda, doesn't answer every question, so Salinas won't rule out further inquiry or another book. Her search may take her to Italy and the Vatican. She found a letter written by her father in Latin in which he asks the pope's forgiveness for leaving the church.
"I want to know if the Catholic Church forgave him," she says.
Salinas has reached one conclusion: Secrets "get in the way."
"I understand people may be ashamed of certain things in their lives" and don't think their children will understand. "But I think people should share their secrets. You can learn from your parents' past."
More importantly, her father carried a burden unnecessarily -- and alone.
As soon as the secret was out between Salinas and her mother, "she started telling me her own secrets," including information about their relationship and her family's poverty. "It helped us become closer."
"My Father's Daughter" was expected out sooner, Salinas says, but immigration issues were touchy at the time and its publication was delayed. "Little did I know that it would come out in the time of the highest anti-immigrant sentiment."
"My Father's Daughter" hits bookstores as millions marched across the nation's cities in support of immigrant rights.
Her father lived a life undocumented, so perhaps it was perfect timing.
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