Her life has not been easy, but Marta Umanzor made an enormous difference in the lives of people from El Salvador to Arizona to Vermont.
By Jordan Kilty ’12
Photos by Andy Duback
It is 5:30 a.m. on a chilly Friday morning and Marta Umanzor, professor of Spanish, is once again awake before the sun. After slowly getting out of bed, 66-year-old Umanzor begins her morning exercises—mostly stretches for her bad knee—and then she takes a shower. The night before, Umanzor laid out the clothes she was planning to wear so she wouldn’t have to rush to get ready this morning. Today, she puts on a navy blue and mint green striped sweater, navy dress pants and the wooden cross necklace that often hangs from her neck by a thick black cord. After getting dressed, Umanzor recites the Lauds Prayer, which she says every morning to to give her the strength to handle anything that goes wrong during the day, and the resolve to let go of what she can’t fix.
“It is a beautiful prayer. I cannot live without it. It is part of my life,” she says.
Once done, Marta grabs her brown-bag lunch and leaves her austere two-room apartment at Handy’s Extended Stay Suites, where she’s been living for the past three years. She walks across busy College Parkway and arrives at her office in the Durick Library at 7:30. After sorting through e-mails, she prepares for her first class, Conversations in Spanish, which she teaches at 10:30 with as much excitement as a kid at Christmas. She approaches her second class, Spanish Literacy Studies, with the same positive attitude. Umanzor’s enthusiasm is contagious—her students are constantly smiling and they actively participate in the class discussions. She has been teaching this way at Saint Michael’s for 20 years.
At 12:50 p.m., finished teaching for the day, she walks back to her cluttered office to catch up on some more e-mails and to eat her lunch. Inside her office hangs a picture of Cesar Chavez with a quote next to it by Pope John XXIII that reads, “Charity will never be true charity unless it takes justice into account.” Sitting on Umanzor’s desk is the book she is currently reading, The Long Loneliness, written by one of her role models, Dorothy Day.
At around 3:00, Umanzor walks back to her apartment and does some more exercises. If it is nice out, she will go for a walk, one of her favorite things to do.
At days’ end, Umanzor says Vespers, her evening prayer. “This prayer lets me reflect on what happened during the day so I can review my mistakes and not repeat them in the future,” she says in her heavy Spanish accent. By 9 p.m., she is asleep.
Although it is a quiet life, Umanzor is happy. Born in San Miguel, El Salvador, in 1943, she witnessed first-hand the violence and terror that plagued her country during El Salvador’s civil war from 1980 to 1992, during which approximately 75,000 people died. The war was fought between the right-wing military government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of five left-wing guerrilla organizations. At the time, El Salvador had been ruled by the military with support from the country’s agricultural elite since the 1930s. Most of El Salvador’s population, however, was made up of poor farmers. In the 1970s, the farmers’ discontent with social inequalities, a poor economy and increasing political violence led to the war’s outbreak. In an attempt to quell some of the left-wing dissent, several military death squads sprang up and assassinations and kidnappings were all too common. It was a dangerous time in El Salvador for the poor, for those who supported the poor and for those working for social justice and human rights. Umanzor knows this all too well. “The greatest challenge in my life,” she says with a somber look, “has been to survive.”
After graduating with a B.A. from the Professional Teacher School of El Salvador, Umanzor received her law degree from the National University of El Salvador and worked as a lawyer for the poor. “I never was an accuser,” she says firmly, pounding her fist on her desk for emphasis. “I always was a defender, because most of the crimes over there were committed by people in poverty who would steal a chicken or a piece of fruit because they were hungry. I won my cases very easily,” she says. Many in El Salvador became lawyers to escape poverty, but not Umanzor. “I made the decision from the beginning of my life that I was going to be poor because I worked to defend poor people. Poor people don’t pay you for your work. All poor people can give you is a chicken,” she says with a faint smile on her lips that quickly disappears when she adds, “This kind of thing, helping the poor, made you a target in my country.”
Growing up, Umanzor was influenced by Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 for speaking out on behalf of the poor, of the victims of the civil war and of those whose human rights had been violated by the military government. Romero baptized and confirmed Umanzor and was a close friend and teacher—but her ties to him were especially dangerous during this violent time. Umanzor was forced to flee to the United States in 1971, 1976 and permanently in 1981 as a political exile. “When you are in exile,” says Umanzor as her lip begins to tremble, “you know you aren’t coming back. You have to accept the conditions. You don’t leave because you want to, but because you need to. We had no choice. We had to accept some difficult situations that don’t affect normal people. We struggled to survive every day.”
When discussing the war, Umanzor leans forward in her seat and her usual ebullient voice becomes solemn and quiet, dropping to almost a whisper, as if she’s afraid she will be overheard. What was especially difficult about being exiled was the fact that the rest of Umanzor’s family stayed in El Salvador. “I went back in 1993, but I didn’t know the people who were against me. When I go back to visit my mother, I spend most of the time in the house. I don’t go outside much. I am still afraid,” she says. However, despite the danger, Umanzor plans on retiring from teaching this December and moving back to El Salvador to take care of her 87-year-old mother. To Umanzor, family is everything.
Umanzor’s sister died in 1971 and her brother-in-law was assassinated in El Salvador in 1984, so Umanzor, who never had children of her own, adopted her orphaned nephews, Juan Carlos and Gustavo, and her niece, Evelyn, whom she now refers to as her children. At this time, three years after being permanently exiled from El Salvador, she was living in Tucson and teaching at the University of Arizona and she adopted a second daughter, 13-year-old Sajeevi, from Sri Lanka. Sajeevi was one of Evelyn’s classmates in Tuscon. Her parents, who lived in Sri Lanka, had arranged for Sajeevi to be married to a 35-year-old man there. “She was crying all the time—she didn’t want to disappoint her parents, but she was afraid to go back [to Sri Lanka] and get married,” recalls Umanzor.
“The happiest day of my life,” Umanzor says with a proud smile, “is when each of my children graduated from university.” Now, Juan Carlos works as a civil engineer and Gustavo is an architect, both live in Los Angeles while the two girls are chemists living in San Francisco. “They do good work. I am proud,” says Umanzor, her whole face aglow. “Education is the most important. Nothing else. Money, you can have it and you can lose it, but education stays with you until you die,” she believes. She says there was never any question about whether or not her children would go to college—in her household, it was a given.
Umanzor left the University of Arizona in 1990 to begin teaching at Saint Michael’s College, but her husband, Carlos Yoshimura, stayed in Tucson. Umanzor traveled back and forth from Arizona to Vermont, sometimes spending summers in Tucson with Yoshimura. In 2001, he had an operation for colon cancer, and Umanzor began to spend even more time away from Vermont, sometimes whole semesters. “The most difficult thing for me was to realize that he was in Arizona and there were times when I couldn’t be there. I tried to see him as much as I could. But he couldn’t be in Vermont. He didn’t like this type of weather,” she explains.
Yoshimura died in August 2008, after 31 years of marriage. “I wish I could have been with him all the time. It was difficult for me. I missed teaching when I was in Arizona and I missed my husband when I was in Vermont. I did whatever I could for him though, and I have no regrets about my decision to teach at Saint Michael’s,” Umanzor says. With Yoshimura gone, she devoted even more of herself to teaching.
Umanzor says she prefers Saint Michael’s because it is a smaller school. “I am a teacher first before a professor. There is a difference,” she says. “A teacher is a person who works close to the students. A professor is a scholar who knows the material very well. I am both, but first of all, I am a teacher. To be a teacher, you have to develop some kind of relationship with the student. To do that, Saint Michael’s better for me than Arizona.” Umanzor’s small brown eyes light up when she talks about teaching, because to her, it’s not just a profession. “[Teaching] is a vocation, like a priest or a doctor. This is something I feel very proud of and I never take for granted to be in front of my students.” Until age 13 Umanzor wanted to be a nun, but it was Archbishop Romero who her to be a teacher. “I remember, he said to me, ‘no, no, no, no, we have so many nuns. I think your vocation is to be a teacher,’” she recalls. “He then told me that when you have a vocation, ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it,’” she says, as the sound of her cheerful, high-pitched laugh fills the room.
“She is very committed to her students. She loves teaching so much,” says Joseph Kroger, professor of religious studies and one of Umanzor’s friends. “For me, teaching is life,” says Umanzor. “I can see when my students have problems or they go to sleep in class or if they have a problem in their life like if their boyfriend didn’t call. I know everything?—I can see it from their faces.” she adds. As Umanzor sorts through her mail, she comes across a graduation invitation sent to her by one of her former students who will be graduating this May. A note written in Spanish on the inside of the card reads, “I look forward to seeing you, I hope you feel great.” A smile spreads across Umanzor’s face. Umanzor has won numerous awards for teaching—she keeps a running list in her office that so far is two pages long—and in 2005, students dedicated the yearbook to her.
Although teaching gives her so much joy, Umanzor says it’s time to retire. “I’m 66 years old! I’m running out of gas,” she says, laughing. She has had a very fulfilling life spent helping and serving others. “I believe the more you help other people, the more you develop yourself,” she says. “That’s what I hope my students have learned from me. They will probably forget conjugations and the subjunctive in Spanish, but I hope they always remember how important it is to dedicate themselves to helping others.”
