Because Someone Has to Keep the Cell Operative

“Because Someone Has to Keep the Cell Operative” is Antonio Ulises Jones’s answer to Oscar Fate’s question about why he remains in the Communist movement. Spoken after Jones recounts the disappearance and deaths of his comrades, the phrase makes political persistence a solitary duty. Its resonance extends beyond the interview: nearby accounts of women killed in Santa Teresa trace how institutions register some deaths while leaving others unidentified or effectively abandoned.

The phrase and its immediate context

Jones gives his answer after sketching the collapse of Communist life in Brooklyn. During World War II, the organization had more than a thousand members; after the war, the number rose to thirteen hundred. Under McCarthyism it fell to about seven hundred, dwindled further in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the end of the 1970s only ten remained. At the beginning of the 1980s there were four.

Jones describes what happened to the others: two died of cancer, while another disappeared without telling anyone. He can only speculate that the missing man might have gone to Florida to live with his daughter, or died during a trip. By 1987, Jones says, he alone remained. Fate asks why, and Jones replies, “Because someone has to keep the cell operative.” The short answer does not promise a revival; it names the act of maintaining continuity when a movement has almost vanished.

Political commitment in isolation

The exchange presents Jones’s commitment as practical as well as ideological. He is no longer in contact with Communist groups in the United States or abroad, apart from occasional correspondence with a retired UCLA professor, Dr. Minski. Jones says he moved from the Third International to the Fourth after Minski persuaded him. The cell he keeps operative is therefore less a thriving collective than a remnant sustained by one person’s persistence.

That persistence sits alongside Jones’s historical judgments. He condemns Stalin and Lenin, praises Marx, and attributes Marx’s temper to poverty. Asked about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of socialist regimes, he says he had predicted the outcome ten years earlier. He then sings the opening of “The Internationale” and asks whether Fate thinks it sounds like an anthem made especially for Black people. The movement’s weakened institutional presence contrasts with the continued force of its songs, arguments, and remembered history.

The cell and the work of keeping record

Jones’s line acquires a wider literary resonance beside the book’s attention to record-keeping and disappearance. The Santa Teresa killings are said to begin being counted in January 1993, with Esperanza Gomez Saldana, aged thirteen, placed at the head of the list. The narrative immediately qualifies that beginning: other girls and women may have died earlier, gone unreported, remained undiscovered, or been buried without identification. A list establishes a record, but it also exposes the limits of what the record can contain.

The handling of Esperanza’s case shows the procedures that make a death legible. Her body passes through a police station, is examined and photographed, and is later autopsied at the city hospital. The medical examiner determines that she was strangled. Yet at the police chief’s first inquiry, no one knows her identity. The case demonstrates the distinction between establishing a cause of death and restoring a person’s name or history.

Other episodes sharpen that distinction. A woman found near the dump receives no identification in the account; after an autopsy, her death is documented, but not her name. At El Chile, the narrative describes a precarious population that remains between three and twenty people, while stripping clothes from a body is likened to skinning it. In another case, an unidentified girl’s body is sent to serve as material for medical students at the University of Santa Teresa. These details do not equate the women’s deaths with the decline of Jones’s political cell. Rather, they place his insistence on keeping an institution alive beside a harsher question about institutions that fail to recognize and protect the people whose deaths they process.

A line about persistence and its limits

The phrase is both an explanation and a measure of loss. Jones’s cell survives because he continues to maintain it, but its survival is reduced to a single member and a thin connection to others. The novel’s recurring attention to names, records, and unlocated people gives that act a broader frame: persistence can preserve a trace, yet a record or institution does not by itself guarantee recognition or justice. Jones keeps the cell operative; the surrounding narrative asks what it means when other systems remain in operation but leave the dead unnamed.