Ensenada to Arizona

Nine years ago I moved to Buckeye, Arizona with my family.  We did not really know anybody and the closest neighbor was about four acres down.  My mom took the liberty of making sure that we were introduced to everyone on the street, everyone being our three neighbors.  My mom actually became very good friends with this woman just down the way.  Our families became very close and to this day we still spend a lot of time together.  So for my choice of interviewee I choose our family friend, because I knew that he was not originally from the US and I felt close enough to him to ask him any question that I needed to.

We met one weekend at my parent’s home and spent some time together going over many questions that would have honestly been awkward for me to ask a stranger.  The following pages are a first-person narrative that I have composite from my notes of the interview.

         

My name is Tomas Munoz and my story begins in Ensenada, Mexico where I was born and raise for most of the childhood.  I was about eleven years old, the oldest, when my parents decided to move me and my three siblings to the United States.  My father had told us that he needed to find a better job for himself so that we could have a better life.  By saying a better life he meant that we could always have food to eat, a safe place to live, clothes on our backs and that we would not have to worry about our everyday life. 

I do not remember exactly but I believe that I was about six or seven years old when my father first left for California.  He went there first so that he could find a place for us to live and make sure that he was able to find a good job so that when we did move to the United States we would not have to worry about anything.  My father’s first job was working in a restaurant, he would wash the dishes and clear off the tables.  He told me that he hated his job and could not believe how people would treat him, but he knew that he had to work so that he could make enough money to move us there with him.

Four to five years after my father had been working in the house, we were finally able to move there with him.  My mother told us that she did not want to leave her family in Mexico and so I think that we could have moved to the US sooner then we did but my mother was hesitant to.  My feeling of the situation was that I was excited to see what our new life would be like but at the same time I was horribly scared.  I did not know what the people would be like and after my father told us about how he was treated it made me a little bit nervous, I knew that I did not really have a choice in the situation though.

Once we got into the US we moved into a house in Blythe, California with two other families, each family had their own room, so two bedrooms and a living room.  My father knew one of them from work and the other family was my father’s co-workers brother.  I actually liked living with the other families because they had children that were the same age as my brothers and I and so we never had a problem with not having any friends. 

My parents had very strong feelings about having us learn English, which I am thankful for.  My father told us that if we did not learn the language here that we would not be able to get a good job.  After working at his job for a few years, my father found himself a new job.  He started working in the local fields, doing pretty much whatever he needed for us to get by.  After working in the fields with other immigrants like himself, he began to listen to their stories and see what their lives were like for them.  He only work there for a little while before he found a job in which he could help out his fellow workers.  He was a sort of traveling salesman, I guess you can say.  He would go from field to field selling necessary items to the workers, anything from shoes to toothpaste, if you needed it he would sell it to you, at low cost at that, and he could get pretty much anything you wanted. 

He really does not tell me much about how he actually came about having this job, he just always tells me that he just knew that he had to help out his fellow men because he understood how tough it can be starting out.  The best part about my father’s job was that he loved doing it, occasional the farm owners did not like it when he came around because he would disturb the workers and make them stop working so he would often run into some problems on that end.  For the most part, things in our family life were getting better.  We got to move into our own home that we did not have to share with other families.

My mother did have a job as well when we were living with the other families, so would do domestic work.  She was a housekeeper at a hotel not to far from us.  It was pretty hard on my mother, with having four people on top of herself to take care of and then working a full time job.  She would have to come home from work and make sure that we had supper and do any household chores.  She would sometimes have to work weekends as well so we never got to spend time together as family.

My father would always tell her that once we were able to get into our house that she would not have to work anymore.  Once we did move into our home my mother worked for probably a couple years, if even that, until she was able to stop.  By that time I had a job of my own, working at the local grocery store stocking selves and making sure that everything was clean.  On occasions I would get to bag groceries but only to fill in.  I actually liked my job, nobody really gave me any trouble and it was not really difficult.  Just about all of the money that I made was for the family, my job pretty much took place of my mother’s job, so I was able to make life easier for her.

A few years down the road my brother’s started working as well, once all four of us men were working it made life at home a little easier.  Well I should actually say that it made life easier in the way that we did not really worry about money as much.  I worked at the grocery store for a few years until one day this woman came into the store when I happened to be bagging groceries.  I helped her carry them out to her car and get them all loaded when she asked me surprising question, “Do you like your job?”  I did not really understand why she would ask me that and did not really know what to say to her so I told her that yes I did.  She then told me about how her and her husband just purchased their own auto body shop and that I seemed liked a nice young man and if I ever did not like my job that I could come talk to her husband.

I did not really think about what she told me but then a few days went by and it just started to cross my mind.  So on one Saturday I went into this body shop and talked to the owner.  He told me that he was looking for somebody to wash the cars and help keep things clean, and if I wanted to I could start on Monday.  I did not want to pass up the opportunity of this new job and agreed to start on that next Monday.  I did not really know what to expect when I showed up for work that week, but I was ready to learn whatever I needed to.    

A few years down the road the owner started to open chains of body shops and opened two of them in Arizona.  I was still washing cars at that time but I also started to help the body techs with some of their work, hoping that one day I would be able to be a tech myself.  The owner then came to me and asked me if I would like to move to Arizona and help him out with his shops down there.  I actually really liked the idea of getting to move some where on my own and starting my own life.  My parents were a little upset by the idea of my moving that far away but they supported me, so within the month I was on my way down there.

Within the next year or two I was doing quite a bit of body work myself, and was no longer washing cars.  I never would have imaged that I would be moving away from my family, having my own place and having a career.  I worked at that shop for about nine years to get where I am at this point in my life.  I am an estimator now and work with a large insurance agency.  I guess that you can say that the way that I started out was out of sheer dumb luck but it was my hard work and dedication that helped get me to were I am today.  I never gave up and to this day I will never forget that even though you are starting from the bottom that only way you can go is up and so that is exactly what I did with my life.  That woman gave me a chance of a life time,  I just saw myself as a poor kid from Ensenada that had no idea what to expect of the US and did not even speak a word of English.

Life today in Arizona is very different then life was when I first came to the United States.  First off, I was young and with what was going on with my family life it’s hard to remember what was happening in Mexico.  When we first came to California there were definitely not as many people as there are now and so we stood out more.  There were many times that we would go some where and we would be the only people who were not white, and of coarse everyone would stop and have to stare at us.  The only type of discrimination that really bothered me was that people automatically assumed that I could not speak any English.  People would come up to me at the grocery store and talk slow and loud, thinking that for some reason if they did that and I did not speak English I would understand them.  Most of the time they would be straight forward and asked if I spoke English, which even right now I still have a bit of my accent, but I speak perfect English, well for what I think. 

I deal with numerous amounts of people on a daily basis, being that the industry I am in happens to cause that, and today I never have people ask me if I speak English.  It is degrading how people treat you based on the type of work that you do.  I was a young teenager who happened to be from Mexico and because I was stocking selves at a grocery store I was assumed to not be able to speak English.  Today I am a man with a career with a well know company and cannot remember that last time someone asked  me that.  When I think about it I actually get asked if I speak Spanish.