To fully appreciate the many dimensions of Nancy Stein Frappier’s contributions to social justice, we begin with Berkeley in 1969 and into the 1970s, where she became a central figure in the West Coast office of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) for seven years. Some of us who had moved cross-country felt we had found in the San Francisco Bay Area the antithesis of “the establishment” that dominated East Coast power centers, such as Washington, D.C. and New York City. California was far enough away to have its own political culture and dynamism. Berkeley was bursting with anti-establishment movements and rebellions, and we really believed that if we worked hard enough, we could achieve some measure of justice in our lifetime.
It was a fully optimistic world-view, and Nancy embodied that optimism, enthusiasm, and endless energy—both in the late 1960s and throughout her entire 69 years on this earth. Inspired to combat social and racial injustice after the 1967 riots in her native Detroit, she threw all of her energy into building various movements. Even before arriving in the Bay Area, Nancy was part of the movement to end the war in Vietnam and participated in many of the large anti-war mobilizations on the East Coast. In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, she and Jon Frappier, who had been one of NACLA’s founders in 1966, supported the student strike and occupation targeting Columbia University for its complicity with U.S. military and intelligence research abroad, as well as real estate expansions and takeovers in communities bordering the University itself. The documents that had been “liberated” from the Columbia President’s files helped inform the early NACLA booklet, Who Rules Columbia? Jon remembers Nancy photocopying some of those documents in the pre-dawn hours of the morning in April 1968.
At the same time, Nancy had become involved in other activities opposing U.S. interventionism abroad. Many North Americans were profoundly influenced by the Cuban Revolution, and saw in Cuba an example that it was actually possible to make social change and improve the lives of poor and working people in Latin America. For several years, both in New York and in Berkeley, Nancy played a central role as an organizer of the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, serving on its National Committee. One fellow Brigade organizer remembers that, already then, he marveled at Nancy’s ability to reach out and incorporate new participants. Other Brigade colleagues were struck by her warmth and commitment, and viewed her as “the youngest and in many ways, the brightest of us all.” Nancy herself went to Cuba with the third Brigade in 1970 and returned to the island in later years.
In the late 1960s, Berkeley was also being shaped by movements for equality and justice at home, and it was at a women’s movement gathering at one of Berkeley’s commune houses that I first met Nancy in the fall of 1969. That encounter sparked our 47-year friendship. Nancy had that kind of impact on many people she met and wove a special magic into her relationships. She emanated compassion and empathy for those around her. She instinctively knew how to make people feel accepted and enhanced their own sense of themselves. Through her grace, warmth, and respect, she transformed us all to be our very best. And with boundless generosity and solidarity, she supported her family, friends, and colleagues.
By early 1970, Nancy was among the founders of NACLA’s Berkeley office, where I became her colleague in 1971. She worked at NACLA-West from 1970 through 1977 as a researcher, writer, editor, and all-around staff member. Her research and writing for NACLA focused largely on the U.S. military and police apparatuses and their training programs in Latin America. From 1972 through 1976, she worked alongside Michael Klare to produce a long and very influential series of publications about the functioning of these programs in Latin America and elsewhere around the world. [For more on this, see Stuart Schrader’s “When NACLA Helped Shutter the U.S. Office of Public Safety,” in the Summer 2016 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas.]
Nancy Stein Frappier, circa 1970, as NACLA opens its Berkeley office.
Now a prominent author and professor at Hampshire College, Michael describes his memories of Nancy: “We focused on U.S. police and military aid programs in Latin America and what was then called the ‘Third World’—in many cases, producing breakthrough research on such topics as the Office of Public Safety (which funneled police equipment to notorious dictators), the Pentagon’s military assistance program, and the Army’s School of the Americas (still a target of human rights activism). It was always a great pleasure to collaborate with Nancy: not only did we make a great research team, but I also benefited, like all my colleagues at NACLA, from her innate warmth and endless good spirits.”
In addition to collaborative projects, on her own, Nancy undertook a major project on Panama. After hearing from our Panamanian colleague Marco Gandásegui and the late Spanish-Panamanian Jesuit intellectual Xabier Gorostiaga when they visited NACLA in the early 1970s, she traveled to Panama during its era of progressive nationalism under the leadership of Omar Torrijos. She wrote a special Panama issue of the NACLA Report (September 1974) that focused on the major issues of the day; these included U.S. military bases in the Canal Zone, the renegotiation of the Canal’s ownership and status (which later culminated in the 1977 Carter-Torrijos Treaty), and the uses of Panama as a financial center by U.S. economic interests—with disastrous consequences for Panamanian society.
Beyond her major intellectual talents and contributions, Nancy played a unique role in shaping the human fabric of NACLA-West. One colleague, Harlan Stelmach, now a professor and scholar at Dominican University, remembers Nancy as the one who gave him and other newcomers the self-confidence to write and publish: “It was Nancy who reached out to me, with the understanding that we could all learn from each other, regardless of our ‘credentials’.” In addition, no matter how intense the political debates within the office, Nancy maintained a civil, comradely presence— in Harlan’s words, a “softening presence.”
Because her enthusiasm was so contagious, and her organizing outreach so broad, Nancy engaged in multiple community education initiatives. She was asked to be the master of ceremonies for public events, including a major rally on September 15, 1973, at San Francisco’s Union Square, to protest the coup that had overthrown the elected socialist Allende government in Chile. And during the early to mid-1970s, she was among those central to building and maintaining NACLA-West’s ties to Latin America support groups and coalitions in the Bay Area, such as Non-Intervention in Chile (NICH), La Peña cultural center, and broad pan-Latin America solidarity coalitions.
As remembered by Fred Goff—another original NACLA co-founder, who in 1977 went on to help found and lead the Data Center for over thirty years— “one of Nancy’s contributions was to expand the reach of our work and to popularize NACLA’s research”—for example, by hosting a community radio program and by encouraging high school collaborator Joel Andreas to write The Incredible Rocky comic book about the Rockefeller family empire.That publication soon went viral and became an innovative way of reaching a broader audience.
Nancy’s generosity is recalled by Brazilian Martinha Arruda, who collaborated with NACLA-West (and is now a translator and conference interpreter for social movements and trade unions in Rio de Janeiro). She writes, “Nancy actually changed the course of my life. When I was visiting Berkeley from Washington, a mutual friend introduced me to Nancy and Jon. After a short conversation, Nancy asked me if I would like to live in Berkeley for awhile, and offered to put me up at her place. I immediately accepted her offer and had the most wonderful experience living with their family for a year.”That spontaneous invitation was typical Nancy.
One of my closest bonds with Nancy was being a woman and becoming a mother. After Nancy and Jon had their first daughter, Diana, in the summer of 1971, they soon began bringing her to the NACLA office. The first of many lessons I learned from them, for when I had my own daughter Rebecca in early 1976, was not to allow her to crawl around on the NACLA office floor, where she could pick up and swallow fallen paper clips, staples, and push-pins. When I began having contractions during an internal NACLA staff meeting, Nancy was the one who drove me home, and she was among the first to visit us after Rebecca was born. She remained an important presence in Rebecca’s life. There was never a baby or child that Nancy didn’t love—as would become clear during her later life, when she founded the “Wellness Center” at San Francisco’s Homeless Prenatal Program.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, along with many other anti-intervention activists, Nancy began prioritizing the need for profound changes within the United States. In particular, she became more focused on domestic issues, such as the rights of public sector workers, measures to curb corporate dominance in San Francisco, and opposition to California’s Proposition 13 (which limited property taxes, but led to the disastrous loss of state social services and jobs, particularly impacting the lower classes). Nancy’s talents in writing, editing, design and production— everything from newspapers to bulletins and leaflets— during these years were closely linked to grassroots organizing campaigns.
The cover of the September 1974 NACLA Latin America & Empire Report, which Nancy Stein Frappier wrote.
During the mid-1980s, she also served on the editorial and coordinating committees of a Bay Area-based bilingual newspaper covering the explosion of revolutions in Central America and U.S. interventions there. By 1987, her work extended to a Central America Education Project, which published curriculum materials for teachers. Throughout this entire period of the 1980s, Nancy was balancing political activities with a full-time job in downtown San Francisco and raising her two daughters, Diana and Emily.
In the late 1980s, Nancy and I co-edited Democracy in Latin America: Visions and Realities (Geenwood/Bergin & Garvey, 1990), a collection of articles written by leading Latin American and Latin Americanist scholars. We also collaborated on a major research article, “The Construction of Democracy in Nicaragua,” analyzing some of the Sandinistas’ contributions to Central America in the 1980s, and published in Latin American Perspectives (Summer 1990). Because I have always valued Nancy’s political and editorial judgment so highly, since the late 1980s, I have steadily asked for her comments on drafts of my articles, op-eds, and books.
During these years, Nancy served on the editorial board of the journal Social Justice. In the 1990s, she co-edited several special issues of the journal. These included Feminism and the Social Control of Gender (1990), Criminality, Imprisonment, and Women’s Rights (1990), Columbus on Trial (1992), and Losing a Generation: Probing the Myths and Reality of Youth and Violence (1997) Always the internationalist, she also participated on the coordinating and editorial committees of a project that published popular bulletins about the 1991 Gulf War.
By 1993, Nancy defined a new career path, enrolling in the Master’s program at San Francisco State University’s School of Social Work. During her two years there, aside from being a stellar student, she was on the editorial board (and in 1994-95 one of the Editors-in-Chief) of Social Work Perspectives, the School’s journal. Among her articles was one written with her daughters, “Growing Up in the ‘90s: A Family Responds to an Untimely Death.” She graduated from that program with honors and a Distinguished Achievement Award.
Shortly thereafter, in 1995, she began to work at San Francisco’s Homeless Prenatal Program, and it was here that she made her most lasting contributions from 1995 until her untimely death on May 30, 2016. HPP Director Martha Ryan has written the following appreciation:
“Nancy spent the last 21 years building and directing the Wellness Center at the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco. Nancy created a holistic system of care that supported thousands of poor and homeless mothers to deliver healthy babies. Her kind and generous spirit impacted all who crossed her path— clients, staff, community partners and students. She was an extraordinary social worker, always seeing the goodness in each person sitting before her; she never stopped trying to help parents and colleagues reach their highest potential. Nancy was firm in her commitment to health equity and social justice. While she had numerous accomplishments, her greatest was giving the most oppressed the tools and hope they needed to change their lives. Nancy’s spirit will live on through the work she began and the many lives that changed through her love and support.”
In 2015, Nancy was honored with a Community Partner Award at the San Francisco Black Infant Health Program’s 20th Annual Afrocentric Family and Life Conference, for her tireless work in partnership with SFBIHP, to improve black infant birth outcomes, and for her commitment to ensuring that all babies receive an equal start at life.
Along with her endless social justice activities, Nancy was also a role model as a mother and grandmother, and always prioritized family. When her daughters Diana and Emily were growing up, she managed to balance parenting with political work and social activism. And when Emily and Diana had their own children (Mia, Marlon, and Justice), Nancy was never too busy to drive through the Bay Bridge traffic to take them to sports team practices/events and other activities, or to celebrate any special moment with them. As Mia grew older, Nancy took her on several exotic vacations.
Within her own generation, she had a transformative impact on her two life-partners, first Jon Frappier, and during the last year of her life, Doug Davis. Nancy also had an unusual number of close friends and was endlessly generous with all of us, sharing her passions for art and music of various genres, multiple cultures, and wide-ranging other interests. Each of her close friends has many stories to recount about how she transformed us. Even after she began a several years-long battle with lymphoma in 2012, she was always there for us—and always with that welcoming smile on her face and that twinkle in her eyes.
Nancy did so much to bring justice to this troubled world and to so many individuals, families, and communities within it. Most significantly, perhaps, she practiced social justice in her daily interactions with everyone around her. The many people who knew her remain inspired by her optimistic spirit and generosity. In her memory, I would like to think, we will stretch our own capacities to fight for social justice and equality.
I owe a huge thanks and acknowledgement to Jon Frappier, Nancy’s former husband and lifelong friend, and now a recently-retired private investigator. Jon contributed many personal details of her life and read various drafts of this tribute. His own remembrance of Nancy, presented at the memorial and celebration of Nancy’s life on July 9, 2016, was published in Social Justice Vol. 43 No. 1 during the summer of 2016, along with my earlier tribute to Nancy. Both can be found at www.socialjusticejournal. org. Thanks also to Fred Goff for very helpful feedback and contributions.
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Susanne Jonas
Susanne Jonas was a staff member of NACLA-West from 1971 through 1976, and a contributor to the NACLA Report since the late 1960s. Together with David Tobis, she co-edited and wrote much of NACLA’s 1974 book on Guatemala. For 24 years, she taught Latin American & Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and received a Distinguished Teaching Award. Her most recent book, co-authored with Nestor Rodríguez, is Guatemala-U.S. Migration: Transforming Regions (University of Texas Press, 2014). She can be reached at [email protected].