Angelica's A-POP Blog

I work at Evergreen’s radio station and part of my job there is to put events on this massive calendar that I make every day that I come in. The first copy of it that is published is over 70 pages long and I build on it every day with new events that are added.

This afternoon before going to the Academic Fair, a member of the Vegan club came and gave me a poster about a film that they were going to be showing this week and wanted it announced on-air. I was glad to help and as she filled out the events forum for me, she started to ask me about my diet and if I was vegan or not.

The conversation slowly turned as she talked about the film. How if only people knew what happened to animals then they wouldn’t eat them. They wouldn’t agree with taking a life. How terrible slaughterhouses are to the animals…so I told her about my dad working there.

My dad came FOB from Cuba as a political refugee at the age of 18. His job in the slaughterhouse was to kill all the cows that came in, gut them, do all of the messy business before they were even cut apart to look like anything less than a cow. He was also one of the lucky ones.

My father told me that all of them were given these blades that they would use to cut the meat apart with. They wore a chest guard, apron, and would be lined up back-to-back to save room. Given that so many refugees and immigrants from around the world come and work in the slaughterhouse, its hard to communicate when someone needs to stop or how to even let someone know that you need to turn around. So, on one of these occasions, my father watched a man farther down the line from him turn around, WITH HIS KNIFE POINTED STRAIGHT OUT, and stab a coworker in the back.

Thankfully my father didn’t have to work there for very long. Fast food may seem like a shitty upgrade for most people, but it probably was what saved my father his arms, legs, and anything else that could accidentally be cut off.

As I told this story to the vegan girl before me, she gave me this look as if she was seeing the slaughterhouse again for the first time. That sure, cows were being killed for food, but the people that killed them didn’t really have that much of a choice when it came to getting a job either.

Trying to save her argument, she told me that my father could always turn around and be vegan, “especially after killing so many cows.” So I told her another story. Of my father growing up in the 80s and 90s in Havana with food being so limited that he would have to go steal and kill a pig from a neighbor in order to have food for that day. And again, it was like her eyes were opened to understanding a person’s need to live, than calling others killers for eating animals. That for some people, animals might just be their only source of food.

When I first came here to Evergreen and moved into the dorms, my father gave me the same knife he had used to kill all of those cows.

“Alright, mi hita. When I first came to this country, I used this knife to kill over 2,000 cows. Here.”

EDIT:

I talked to my dad about this post and he told me that to this day he would still eat meat, even if he had to steal it. 

~ by Angelica Perez on May 16, 2019 .