Papers of Lini M. De Vries, 1910-2009

Lini De Vries was born Lena Moerkerk on July 25, 1905, in Prospect Park, New Jersey, to Elisabeth ("Betty") (De Vries) Moerkerk. A younger sister, Elisabeth, was born in 1913. Leonard Moerkerk, Betty's husband, raised Lini (a nickname for Lena), but she later learned that her biological father was Bernard Pollack, her mother's boyfriend from the Netherlands. Dutch was spoken in the Moerkerk house; De Vries did not learn English until she went to grammar school. At age 12, after graduating from grammar school, she was sent to work in a silk mill in nearby Paterson, New Jersey. Subsequently she worked in a cotton mill, a ribbon mill, as a secretary, and as a telephone operator. De Vries had an unhappy childhood and home life, and enthusiastically organized a Girl Scout troop around 1918 in order to broaden her horizons and spend less time at home.

In 1925, De Vries enrolled in a nurses training program at New Rochelle Hospital Training School for Nurses in New York. She met Wilbur Fuhr in 1926 while sick herself with rheumatic fever at New Rochelle Hospital. De Vries graduated from the program in June 1928 and married Fuhr, who owned his family's dairy business in Port Chester, New York, that same month. She mainly used the names "Lini M. Fuhr" or "Lee Fuhr." A daughter, Mary Lee, was born in 1930. Wilbur Fuhr, sickly from a bout of rheumatic fever as a child, died the next year. De Vries worked as a visiting nurse, and at the same time went to school to earn her high school degree, completed in 1932. The next year she began taking classes at Columbia University's Teacher's College toward a bachelor's degree in nursing. She moved to New York City with her daughter, and held a variety of jobs while in school. She worked as both a nurse and a social worker, including full-time employment with Margaret Sanger's birth control clinic in 1935 and 1936.

In 1935, De Vries joined the Communist Party. In January 1937 she volunteered to go to Spain with the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, which provided medical care for the international brigades and Spanish anti-fascist fighters during the Spanish Civil War. De Vries was only in Spain for a few months, but went on a lecture tour throughout the United States upon her return, in an attempt to raise funds and support for the cause.

De Vries then took a public health nursing job in New Mexico in order to expose her daughter, who suffered from rheumatic fever, to a warmer climate. From 1938 to 1940, De Vries worked for the San Miguel County Public Health Demonstration Unit, traveling to small villages of Mexican-Americans who spoke little English, teaching public health, performing nursing duties, and setting up training programs whereby school teachers could learn to teach public health ideas and methods to their students. After Mary Lee's health worsened, De Vries found a job as a maternal health consultant with the Department of Public Health in Puerto Rico. She then became the administrator of the Works Progress Administration Health Service for the island. In Puerto Rico, De Vries met Louis Stoumen, a traveling photographer 12 years her junior.

World War II provided an excuse for De Vries to move back to the United States, where she first worked for the Federal Works Progress Administration, overseeing public health programs throughout the southeast. She then moved back to New York City, and completed her nursing degree at Columbia University in 1943. After graduation, she took a job as Director of Epidemiology in Chicago's Venereal Disease program. She married Louis Stoumen in New York City in January 1944; De Vries began to use the name "Lini Stoumen." Mary Lee's health was deteriorating again, so the family moved to Los Angeles. De Vries worked in the Venereal Disease Control Section of the Los Angeles County Health Department, and then was Supervisor of Medical Services and Nursing for the Agricultural Workers Health and Medical Association of Southern California. De Vries and Stoumen's daughter, Toby, was born in 1946. The couple separated in 1948 and divorced in 1949.

Beginning in 1938, De Vries was tailed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) due to her Communist Party membership and her work in the Spanish Civil War. Her employers were continually contacted by agents, the Bureau gathered information on her whereabouts and her friends, etc. In 1946, De Vries agreed to talk to the FBI, hoping to put to rest their efforts. She denied being a member of the Communist Party and refused to tell them the names of any friends or Party members. In 1948, De Vries was publicly outed as a Party member by Elizabeth Bentley, who wrote several tell-all articles and a book about her time as a Communist. When her job with the Agricultural Workers Health and Medical Association of Southern California was over in 1948, De Vries found it extremely hard to find work due to Bentley's assertions and the continued FBI harassment. She learned her name had been put on a blacklist distributed to employers. Mary Lee started college at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1947; and was planning to attend Barnard College in the fall of 1949. Feeling unable to financially support either Mary Lee or Toby, De Vries decided to move to Mexico in December 1949. She did not need a passport to travel there (her passport had not been renewed after her time in Spain), and Mexico had offered itself as a refuge for Spanish Civil War fighters.

Upon arriving in Mexico, De Vries (who began to use the name "Lini De Vries" around this time) lived in Cuernavaca, and supported herself and Toby by nursing and teaching English. She moved to Oaxaca in 1952 and taught English and public health at the University there. In 1956, she became Director of Health Education for the Comisión del Papaloapan, a public-works program in the Papaloapan River basin in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz. Most of the inhabitants of the region were indigenous, spoke little Spanish, and desperately needed access to modern health care. De Vries visited villages and schools, assessed conditions, and taught teachers and villagers basic public health measures to improve their lives. Several times a year she conducted teacher workshops (centros pedagógicos), where teachers from many villages would learn how to incorporate public health messages and teaching into their classrooms. De Vries wrote plays that teachers and their students could put on to teach each other and others in their villages about topics such as germs, the circulatory system, fertility, etc.

In 1957, De Vries moved to Jalapa, Veracruz, to teach at the Universidad Veracruzana with noted anthropologist Gonzalo Beltran. She taught public health to anthropologists and medical students, and established a summer school for foreign students at the university. In 1963, she returned to Cuernavaca, where she established another summer school for foreign students at the Universidad de Morelos. She was named director of that school the next year. In 1967 she founded the Institute for Mexican Studies, primarily meant to educate foreign students. She then became involved in Centro Intercultural de Documentación, or CIDOC, an institute founded by noted philosopher and anarchist Ivan Illich. De Vries was assistant director of its Institute for Contemporary Latin American Studies. She was later involved in other educational opportunities in Cuernavaca, mainly those involving foreign students and participants. These included the Instituto Fenix de Cuernavaca, and Cemanahuac, an educational community where De Vries was dean of students for a time. De Vries often taught classes on Mexican history as well as public health. In addition to teaching, De Vries opened her home as a guesthouse, and ran a small shop in which she sold Oaxacan crafts to foreign visitors.

De Vries wrote an autobiography which was published (in various versions) in both Spanish and English. El Sótano ("The Cellar"), recounting her life from childhood through 1925, was published in Mexico in 1959 by the Universidad Veracruzana's Ficcion series. The same publisher brought out España 1937 (Memorias), an account of her experience in the Spanish Civil War, in 1965. In 1969, CIDOC published De Vries's The People of the Mountains: Health Education Among Indian Communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, which described her work with the Comisión del Papaloapan. Another volume, describing De Vries's life in Mexico from 1949 to 1962, was published in 1972 in English in Mexico by Minutiae Mexicana as Please, God, Take Care of the Mule. This won the Book of the Year award in Mexico, and was translated into Japanese (along with a section on the Spanish Civil War) in 1974. A complete volume, describing her life from 1905 through 1962, was published in the United States in 1979 by Vanilla Press as Up From the Cellar.

In 1962 De Vries became a Mexican citizen by presidential decree, in honor of her work with the Comisión del Papaloapan. She was an active member of her community in Cuernavaca, and a member of the board of directors of the Museo de Cuernavaca. She was finally successful in being granted a visa to enter the United States in 1970, and she returned several times after that. Lini De Vries died on March 27, 1982, of several strokes following surgery, in Ridgewood, New Jersey. She is buried at Fair Lawn Memorial Cemetery.