Thirty-Seven Years

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a mule's bell, a hillside, wind)
There is no Juan Valdez.
There is a man who was Juan Valdez for thirty-seven years.

[Verse 1]
Nineteen fifty-eight, an agency in New York
invented a Colombian farmer with a mule and a hat,
and they called him Juan Valdez, and they put him on the tins,
and the coffee growers' federation sent him round the world.
And in nineteen sixty-nine they cast a man named Carlos Sánchez,
and he did it until two thousand and six. Do that arithmetic.

[Chorus]
Thirty-seven years! Thirty-seven years of being
a man who wasn't him, in a country that adored
the man who wasn't him more than any man who was!
Thirty-seven years. That is a working life.
That is a career. That is a whole vocation
spent inside a person somebody else drew.

[Verse 2]
And he was good. He was genuinely, unmistakably good —
you believed him, you believed the mule, you believed the hillside,
he had the hands for it, he had the patience in the face,
and people would approach him in the street and call him Juan.
Not "sir." Not "Mr. Sánchez." Juan. Every time.
He said he never minded it. He said it with a smile.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And when he finally stepped down, they held auditions
and they gave the hat to a man who really grows coffee —
an actual farmer, an actual grower, a real one this time,
which is either a correction or a very late apology.
So the fake man became real by being replaced by one.
That is the strangest promotion I have ever heard of.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the mule bell, going over the hill)
Carlos Sánchez.
Thirty-seven years. Say his name.