Hiram Soto is a communicator and social activist. He lives in Poway.
Having a great dad is not something we can choose, any more than we choose where we are born or our native language. I was lucky with my dad. As my mom tells the nurses when they treat him at the hospital: “he is an incredible person, a great father and grandfather, a retired civil engineer, a former university professor and a true gentleman.”
She tells everyone this so they can see the man she has been married to for the last 50 years. I suppose it’s difficult for someone to see beyond the patient sleeping in a hospital bed, to know the life she has lived, the family they formed and what they have built.
My parents, Jorge and Yoli, met in Tijuana in the early seventies when my dad went to a travel agency to buy a ticket to Guadalajara to visit his girlfriend. My mom sold him the ticket and, in the process, they fell in love. Together they formed a family with five children. We immigrated to the United States in the mid-1990s and San Diego has been our home ever since.
Parkinson’s has taken a lot from my dad: a lot of his mobility, and his ability to read and write. This is especially painful for someone like my dad, who wrote an autobiography and who read the equivalent of a library in his lifetime. Parkinson’s has also affected his ability to speak. But it hasn’t limited his determination to fight the disease, even at this advanced stage. After a recent decline in his health, and just when we thought Parkinson’s was tightening its grip on his body, my dad started walking again. He got up and when the radio started playing boleros, he started dancing. It was my dad dodging Parkinson’s again, like a bullfighter dodges a bull.
My dad has always been a fighter. He was a student leader at the University of Guadalajara during the 1968 student movement, which was violently repressed by the government. He studied civil engineering and came to Tijuana with big dreams. He ran his own construction company, building roads, bridges and schools for the government. Despite his entrepreneurial spirit, he always remained true to his activist heart.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he launched an environmental nonprofit to stop a chemical waste company that wanted to set up shop along the beaches of Baja California. He asked me: “Mijo, a company in the United States wants to recycle truck engines, car batteries and other industrial waste next to the beach. Do you want to help stop them?”
It was my first experience as an activist.
It was his pursuit of justice that ignited my passion for social issues. I began my career as a journalist at The San Diego Union-Tribune and wrote about injustices for nearly 10 years. After journalism, I became a communicator and social justice advocate.
That’s what good parents do, they lead by example. They show their children the meaning of integrity, not just by talking about it, but by showing them what it looks like, like the time my dad exposed a corporation he worked for for burying toxic barrels of chemicals in poor neighborhoods east of Tijuana.
Good parents support their children’s dreams instead of imposing their own dreams on them.
Good parents teach their children that life is about serving others, not just yourself.
Good parents teach their children to love life, no matter what life throws at them.
During a recent “good day,” when his speech was better than normal, I asked him how he felt about having Parkinson’s. I asked him how he found the strength to fight a brutal disease that slowly freezes your body and darkens your mind.
“You can’t deny yourself,” he said, struggling to find the words. “We all have our own path. This is my way. And it is on this path, and only on this path, where I will find the true light.”
Original story in English language:
Opinion: What my Dad has shown us in his fight against Parkinson’s
