To support his family, Méndez Fleitas worked as a grocer and a store clerk. Three years after his exile, his wife and six children followed him. Then 13, Méndez-Faith learned what it was like to go to bed hungry. During the next few years, she helped her father type two of his books. When he talked to her about her future, he encouraged her to study economics as a way to help her country.

While in high school, Teresa Méndez Vall spent six months as an exchange student in Michigan through Youth For Understanding. She met a junior college student who wanted to practice his Spanish. When she returned to Uruguay to finish high school and start college as an economics major, she and Ray Faith kept in touch. Nearly 40 years after their first meeting, she says, “he is still mi media naranja, literally “my half orange.”

Méndez-Faith moved to the United States after marriage and completed her bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate at the University of Michigan. In 1974, she visited Paraguay briefly with her husband and son. But because of her father’s activity in exile, she was watched closely. She vowed not to return until it was a free country. It would be 15 years before she found herself on Paraguayan soil again.

Her father’s exile continued, but not in the country that first offered asylum. A military government took power in Uruguay, forcing Méndez Fleitas into second exile, first in Argentina and later in California. In 1984, in failing health, he moved to Buenos Aires, where he died a year later.

When Stroessner was overthrown in 1989, Teresa Méndez-Faith went home again—this time as part of a Latin American Studies Association delegation observing the first relatively free elections in almost 40 years.

Méndez-Faith has continued her father’s mission to work for a fully democratic Paraguay, and her family worked toward her father’s repatriation, even after his death. In 1994, the Paraguayan president signed a law authorizing the return of his remains. But that took another 10 years to accomplish.

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