My father’s head tilts on his left shoulder when he sleeps in his favorite leather recliner. He spends most of his waking hours sleeping. When he’s awake, he’s waving and looking out at the Excelsior neighborhood street from the window of the home my mom forced him to buy after they moved out of our crowded apartment on Folsom Street. 

At 98 years of age, wheezing asthmatic Pop is, at once, among the most vulnerable, yet time-tested survivors facing the global crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 virus. Sleeping or awake, Ramon Alfredo Lovato, Sr. has much to teach us, as we all face the crisis.

Born in a adobe and tin shanty town during a Great Depression in El Salvador—a Great Depression that made John Steinbeck’s look like a winefest—Pop rests from a life that also had him live through World War II, the bloody civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s, decades of union struggles (airlines, railroads and shipyards) in San Francisco, raising four kids and several cousins in a crowded Folsom Street apartment, the loss of his beloved wife, Maria Elena, and other struggles too numerous to name here. 

Pop also grew up hearing stories of survival born out of the greatest global health crisis of the modern era: the flu pandemic of 1918, better known as the “Spanish flu.” As he hears the relentless streams of news, mostly bad, coming out of the current crisis, Pop regularly says, “this sounds a lot like what happened in 1918.” The fear, supply shortages, government corruption and failure, mass death and other aspects of the crisis, have a familiar ring, as does the response he thinks necessary.

Roberto Lovato and his father, Ramon Alfredo Lovato, Sr, celebrate Father’s Day in 2019 at Puerto 27 in Pacifica, Ca. Courtesy: Roberto Lovato

“Hay que hacerle frente a esto,” he says, reminding his Salvadoran family that we have no choice but to use our powers of survival “al maximo.” In the language of my mission upbringing, “pull out your best shit, cuz it’s time—and hella necessary.” 

Coming from someone else, Pop’s advice would sound trite, a cliche in an Avengers movie or some other violent and silly spectacle of the child’s play era we must all leave behind. But coming from whatever marrow remains in his bony body, I know he’s reminding me and all of us to prepare for the extreme difficulty that has been and remains the life of many Salvadorans and other peoples of the global south. 

Pop lived under a fasicst military dictatorship, one of the longest-lasting in the Americas, one I committed a part of my adult life to fighting—and defeating—during one of the bloodiest civil wars of recent memory. 

The Trump Administration’s failed response to the COVID-19 crisis means the United States has been Latinoamericanizado, turned into a country of the global south in terms of both the concentration of wealth and its inability to meet its peoples needs. Like my father’s, my marrow is moving my entire body, mind and heart to heed another call to fight, for we should have no doubt that we are already in the fight of our lives.

Former union member Pop knows this in his waking and dreaming time. We need to fight to preserve his and our dreams.