The railway is life, it is everything: Salvador Zarco

Puebla, Pue., The train is poetry, the train is life, because the train is like the veins of a living being. It is history, it is everything.stated Salvador Zarco Flores (Mexico City, 1945), a fierce union leader, tireless social fighter and staunch defender of the railroad, its drivers and its heritage.

Smiling, visibly happy and at the same time memorable, he was a militant of the Spartacus Communist League, a philosophy student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, arrested during the student movement of 1968 and imprisoned in Lecumberri until 1971, where he was proletarianized, and later became a railway conductor, was honored at the National Museum of Mexican Railways (MNFM) last Saturday.

How many friends have you made in your life?asked the director of the MNFM, Teresa Márquez Martínez, to Salvador Zarco, in a wheelchair and dressed in a white guayabera, finely embroidered with beads in the shapes of multicoloured parrots and macaws.

I am one of themanswered Ezequiel Flores from the audience and under the watchful eye of Livier Jara García, from the Department of Historical, Artistic and Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Culture of Mexico City; the novelist and researcher Francisco Pérez Arce; the historian and cultural promoter Guadalupe Lozada; Carolina Velázquez, from the Teodoro Larrey book club, from the Museum of Railway Workers, and Gilberto Silva, from the Mexican Federation of Retirees and Pensioners of the Railway, among other attendees at the tribute.

At the meeting of friends, family, former cellmates and fellow fighters, former railroad workers, and members of the MNFM and the Railroad Workers Museum, founded by Zarco in 2006, in Mexico City, the honoree was defined from the plurality of experiences, views and anecdotes as stubborn, passionate, promoter and defender of railroad heritage and union life; consistent, direct, complicit, promoter of projects and owner of an unbreakable fighting spirit.

At the tribute, held at the former MNFM station, Luis Hernández Navarro, Opinion Coordinator of The Day, assured that Salvador Zarco It is one of our essentialsbecause it summarises fundamental stages of the social struggle in Mexico: the student and worker movements, where it takes up the old railway struggles of more than a century, giving continuity, form and organisation to Vallejismo and the Railway Trade Union Movement; later, because it undertakes the struggle against the privatisation of the Mexican railway system and the recovery of the rail culture.

Congruent and brave

Not only that: while he was a railroad leader, he organized, around the Lázaro Cárdenas Workers-Cultural Association, workers’ groups, film clubs, reading clubs, daycare centers… an extraordinary work that summarizes the struggles as a workers’ and popular insurgency of the 1960s; later, once the defeat of the railroad movement was inevitable, he found in the defense of the railroad workers’ heritage a way to give life and continuity to that struggle.said Hernandez Navarro.

He also recalled how, after almost two years in prison, in October 1970, he appealed the decision to formally arrest him. Since the judges wanted it to be done in private, Salvador Zarco refused. He wrote as a defense document an erudite memorial of grievances from the Mexico below.

He reminded us how the bayonets of October 2 in Tlatelolco were an extension of those that assassinated Hidalgo in Acatita de Baján or massacred the proletariat in Cananea and Río Blanco; of those that riddled General Emiliano Zapata in Chinameca and Rubén Jaramillo in Xochicalco.

In her case, Teresa Márquez, head of the National Center for the Preservation of Railway Cultural Heritage, mentioned that she knew Salvador Zarco by hearsay, from the mouth of a worker or an official, with whom she could not agree and who even felt angry about his work, but everyone “had deep respect for him.

Salvador has been one of the most consistent, honest and strong people I have ever met. He is truly indispensable.he said, recalling that when he spoke to him, he was impressed by the way he joined the fight for the heritage, in the same way he did for the workers and the railway community.

He pointed out that the former member of the Railway Union Movement of Demetrio Vallejo was an active part in the formation of the MNFM, as accomplice and promoterin addition to excellent photographerwhich sent him images of the tracks, stations, workshops and other spaces that needed attention.

Márquez Martínez highlighted that, as an example of his good nature, he donated his personal library to the MNFM, built throughout his life with the same passion and strength that he has dedicated to each of his works and actions.

In the end, moved by the applause and recognition given to him by the museum attached to the federal Ministry of Culture and a scale copy of Petra, One of the machines kept in the Railway Workers Museum, Salvador Zarco took the floor to tell how he became what he is, as well as events from his childhood and adolescence that led him to fight.

Anecdotally, he narrated that he studied in an elementary school extraordinarybecause there he was instilled with a love for history and native cultures, until it changed owners and lowered its educational level. In his secondary school, on the other hand, there was a alcoholic director who was not a teacher and mistreated his students.

In high school he faced academic problems: he failed several subjects which caused him, after being threatened by his father, to leave home to become a lazy by professionwho arrived from Mexico City to Oaxaca, where, by chance, he found an uncle who brought him back to the capital, to return to school and pass all his subjects, thanks to a philosophy teacher who taught him logic and the ABCs of Marxism, who encouraged him to form a group and promote culture at school, to win a painting course and to travel around the southeast of the country.

It was an extraordinary journey; I was marked for life. It was a path in which the culture changed me.Zarco concluded to loud applause, and, finally, asked that criticism and philosophy subjects not be eliminated from classrooms.