By Jonathan Roeder
Catholic News Service

QUERETARO, Mexico (CNS) — Through almost four decades of missionary work, American Kathy Vargas has had to suffer through threats, hardship and indifference.
In the 1970s, wealthy landowners in the jungles of Chiapas state threatened Vargas and her husband for evangelizing to indigenous groups and teaching them to defend their rights. In the ‘80s, the couple saw their Mexico City neighborhood devastated by an earthquake.

More recently, Vargas has faced a struggle to raise funds and get the government interested in a community center that teaches self-respect and civic values to thousands of schoolchildren.

She shrugged off these difficulties, however, in a recent interview in the central Mexican city of Queretaro, her adopted hometown.

“I recommend mission life, highly,” said Vargas, a Maryknoll lay missionary since the mid-1980s.

The rewards, she added, outweigh the difficulties “one hundredfold.”

Vargas, who grew up in Ohio and New Jersey, arrived in the colonial highland town of San Cristobal de Las Casas in 1970 as a Maryknoll Sister; she spoke no Spanish. She soon realized that being a nun was not her calling, however, and returned to the U.S.

But while in Mexico, she met Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, then the bishop of San Cristobal de Las Casas and an outspoken advocate of indigenous rights. He extended an open invitation to her to work in the diocese.

“I felt like I was called to religious life, but I didn’t feel like teaching school in the United States,” Vargas said. So in 1973, she returned to Chiapas, this time to work as a lay member of the pastoral team in the town of Ocosingo, where the missionaries had access to a number of the state’s indigenous populations.

That same year she married Javier Vargas, a Mexico City native who had been working in Chiapas as a missionary for more than a decade. While in Chiapas from 1973 to 1981, the couple had three children and adopted a fourth.

At the time, the state was virtually ignored by Mexico’s government, and wealthy ranchers regularly seized the best land and pushed the local indigenous groups farther and farther into the isolated, undeveloped jungle. Because of the isolation, many indigenous communities celebrated weddings, baptisms and all other sacraments together on the few days of a year when a priest could get to the village by donkey.

In addition to their pastoral work, Kathy and Javier Vargas also helped translate Mexican agrarian law into Tzeltal, one of the many indigenous languages spoken in Chiapas, to help local residents understand and defend their rights.

Wealthy landowners, who for centuries have exploited the indigenous groups, did not welcome the efforts, she said.

“We started to get a lot of opposition from the ranchers, and there were even threats on my husband’s life,” Vargas said.

One indigenous laborer was killed by a rancher after the workers filed a lawsuit demanding back pay.

“He (the rancher) pulled out his gun and he shot him, in front of 25 indigenous witnesses,” Vargas said. No charges were ever brought against the rancher, she said, adding that she and her husband helped the slain man’s widow afterward.
With hostilities in Ocosingo rising, the family eventually decided to move to San Cristobal to continue working with indigenous groups. But when the Vargas’ youngest daughter was born in 1981 with health problems, they moved to Mexico City — “from the real jungle to the asphalt jungle” — to have access to better hospitals.

In the capital, Vargas continued her missionary work. She helped organize day care co-ops for working mothers, noting that “in lots of slum neighborhoods all over Mexico bigger kids have to take care of smaller kids.” She helped organize healthy-baby clinics and put rural farmers in touch with local buyers to cut out the middleman and improve profits. She and her husband also helped with relief efforts following the Sept. 19, 1985, earthquake that killed an estimated 10,000 Mexico City residents.

But by 1993, rising crime and stressful urban life led the Vargas family to move to the colonial city of Queretaro, several hours northwest of the capital.

Vargas helped launch the Queretaro Community Foundation, which coordinates programs for public schools and gives courses and workshops on corporate responsibility.

The foundation’s largest program, “The Adventure of Life,” reaches 18,000 children ages 8-12 in more than 80 public schools. Through activities and discussion in hour-long sessions every week, teachers help children avoid drugs by building self-esteem and practical knowledge. Comparative studies show lower rates of drug use among youths that have gone through the program.

The foundation, where Vargas is a board member but receives no salary, also offers extracurricular and civic responsibility programs for children of different ages, directs courses to improve the abilities of nongovernmental organizations and advises regional companies on issues such as employee relations and environmental responsibility.

Vargas also serves as a leader for L’Arche, which administers a community home for those with developmental challenges. The group provides a permanent home for individuals that have been abandoned by their families, and residents produce goods such as bread and crafts.

Vargas said her efforts “continue to be driven by faith.”

“It’s wonderful, the mission experience, in that it strips away all of your props and all the things you could fall back on in your own culture, and it makes you very vulnerable. But the vulnerability itself is what allows you to grow into a different person.”

Reflecting on her life of missionary work, she said: “We used to laugh because most people who join Maryknoll lay missioners take a tremendous pay cut. For us it was a raise, because we never had two nickels to rub together.”

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