The Fighting Padre of Zapata gave voice
to those who could not find their own

The Fighting Padre of Zapata:
Father Edward Bastien and
The Falcon Dam Project.
Edited by María Rollin.
El Paso: Texas Western Press.
2003. 265 pages.

By María Eugenia Guerra

María Farias Rollin's recently released The Fighting Padre of Zapata is the book about the history of the Falcon Reservoir that I have always wanted to read. Those of us who have researched and written over years about the impact of the construction of the reservoir on Zapata and Guerrero Viejo welcome Rollin's volume into the long and always poignant narrative of an event that forever changed the histories of the sister cities and a handful of surrounding towns that date back to Spanish colonial times.
A pivot upon which justice turned in Zapata County at the time of the reservoir's construction was Canadian Oblate Father Joseph Eduoard Narcisse Bastien, a front line resistor and witness to the injustices of the federal government's condemnation of old land grant properties along the Río Grande. The pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Zapata became, often to the chagrin of his superiors, a champion of the people, an outspoken advocate who wrote in missives to newspapers that the initials of the International Boundary and Water Commission really stood for "I Bully Women and Children." Father Bastien's regular letters to the Laredo Times were written under the sobrenombre I. POZ (Irate People of Zapata).
Rollin, who knew Father Bastien as a close family friend while she grew up in Laredo, took possession of a copy of a manuscript Father Bastien had given her parents, Isidra M. and Anastacio Farias. He had prepared several copies, but only this one appears to have survived. Rollin promised her mother she would one day see to it that the manuscript was published. "I did so as a tribute to the friendship between my parents and Father Bastien," Rollin said of the effort to edit the letters, personal papers, anecdotes, and newspaper articles that are the substance of the manuscript.
As a journalist, I found of special interest the exchange of warm correspondence between Bastien and writer Don Hinga of the Houston Chronicle and the subsequent stories Hinga wrote for his paper. Over years, I had read of the heroics of Father Bastien and made note of his role in the fight to arrive at a just settlement for the value of the homes of those displaced by the construction of the reservoir, for he was often quoted in the news stories of that epoch. To read for myself in a body of inspired writing, his own, is quite another story, an affirmation -- especially in light of the state of the water issues that face Zapata today -- that the "greater good" justifications of flood control, water conservation, and hydroelectric generation were as skewed as the government's paltry offerings for the value of the historic homes and ancestral lands of the people of Zapata County.
Father Bastien's papers present a whole picture of a time and the depth of the struggle of Zapatans against a cruel bureaucracy. This picture as it is edited so devotedly by María Rollin gives readers like me a portrait in full of the man who led that struggle against the local politicians who sold their own town down the river. Father Bastien's papers are a chronology of resistance and opposition to the actions and inactions of federal bureaucrats. They are in fact, the story of a diaspora and the heroics of the man who gave voice to those who could not find their own.
María Rollin lives in Laredo with her husband Mike and teaches Spanish and English as a Second Language at Laredo Community College. She is a graduate of the University of Madrid, Spain, and holds an M.A. in Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Applied English Linguistics from the University of Texas at El Paso.