Former migrant students Blanca and Albert Torres meet with another former migrant student, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, center.

FORMER MIGRANT STUDENTS ACHIEVING AMERICAN DREAM

As Blanca and Albert Torres sat in the White House, it hit them harder than ever that they really were living the American Dream.

The former migrant workers had come to the United States with their parents from Mexico in the late 1960s as part of the Bracero Guest Worker Program, working in the fields and sometimes living in their cars as they migrated from field to field.

Eventually, however, they graduated from Pasco High School, gained permanent residency, graduated from college and became U.S. citizens. Albert worked with Microsoft before becoming director of information technology and research & development for Pay Plus Solutions in Kennewick.

Blanca is an accounting manager for a Richland technical consulting and research firm. And together they have launched their own computer firm.

The Torreses were among 20 members of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly (RNHA) to meet with President Bush and numerous other officials at the White House to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month. Albert is an RNHA national committeeman, and his wife Blanca is Western regional representative to the national committee, representing 13 Western states.

With Pres. Bush, the Torreses were able to meet musician and producer Emilio Estefan, singer Ana Cristina, Crown Prince of Spain Prince Felipe de Borbon, and many of the hundreds of Latinos who serve in the Bush Administration, including Treasurer Ana Cabrera and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Lt. Col. Consuelo Kickbusch (retired), now an educational consultant, was named winner of the Hispanic Heritage Award 2006. Kickbusch has spent a lot of time in Washington state, working with local school districts and with the Migrant Education Program.

“It was amazing and a huge, huge honor to be asked to attend this event,” says Blanca. “It was a dream come true for me.”

“The president said all people should have the opportunity to develop their God-given talents and realize their dreams. And for us it was a great dream to go to the White House. It was very surreal to us,” Albert adds.

“I believe strongly that every child can learn regardless of the color of their skin, or whether their parents speak English as a first language,” the president said. “…When we find a child cannot read at grade level, then that child deserves extra help. … No child should be left behind. I'm pleased to report that Hispanic students in reading and math are scoring higher and an achievement gap in our country is beginning to close. We're making progress, but I assure you we will not rest until every child receives a quality education in our country.”

Albert and Blanca, who grew up as migrant farm workers, agree with the president. They now work in corporate offices by day and run their own computer business after hours. But they also find a lot of time to volunteer in the community, at their children’s schools and in the political process. But they feel strongly that people are more in need of a hand up than a handout.

 “If I were really poor and someone gave me a handout, I would still need another handout the next day. But if someone gave me a hand up, I can change my tomorrows,” says Albert.

He notes even those in society who are prejudiced against Hispanics typically acknowledge that they are hard workers.

“But we also have to work smart,” says Albert. “So we want to take that work ethic and apply it not only in the fields and in manufacturing, but also in engineering and education and other areas.”

Getting out of the fields

Albert moved to the U.S. from Mexico with his father when he was 2. At age 5 his family moved from California to Pasco.

“We would travel to the local farms for work that usually lasted a few weeks at a time.  During the early spring we would work preparing the fields by moving water lines and keeping the fields clean from weeds,” Albert recounts. 

As the apple trees were starting to grow fruit, they would thin the crop. Asparagus was one of the first crops they would harvest, followed by cherries, prunes, strawberries, grapes, pears, peaches, nectarines and then apples. 

“Most of the time we stayed in the local area, but once a year we would travel to the Wenatchee area.  We would sleep in our cars or tents in the fields for weeks at a time. The work was very exhausting, dirty, and the pay was very little,” Albert says. 

“A regular day would really start the night before when we prepared the lunch and water jugs for the next day.  We couldn’t afford an ice chest, so we would freeze a couple of jugs of water that were made from old milk containers. This way our water would remain cold at least until lunch time and we kept our food under the shade of the trees. 

“When temperatures reached over 100 degrees, there wasn’t much we could do to keep from drinking hot water. Once in a while one of the farm tractors would accidentally run over our water jugs so we didn’t have any water for the remainder of the day.  Since I was the youngest and most expendable, I was the one usually sent to knock on the farmer’s door to ask for some water for our family,” he says. 

“I found out which farmers were really nice and which ones really didn’t care for us as human beings. The nice ones would send me back to my family with a water jug or even lemonade.  One farmer told me that I could only drink from the garden hose that was out back by the dogs.

“Once in a long while we would be treated to a cold soft drink from a near by store. I remember being embarrassed to go into the stores to buy food because we were very dirty from the field. My dad would tell me I didn’t have anything to be embarrassed about because I was an honest man working an honest job making an honest living.  The only time I should be embarrassed is if I was lazy and didn’t work or if I stole something,” Albert continues. 

“The store clerks often treated us as second-class citizens and would degrade us in English, thinking we didn’t understand them.  I felt that I was in strange world because I did understand them, yet I didn’t translate what they said to my dad because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.  Once we had paid, I would make sure that I thanked them in English and made some comments about the day so they would know I did understand them but that I didn’t return the same insults,” says Albert.

Albert and his family worked in the fields for about 12 years.  His parents worked in the potato processing plants at night and the fields during the day.  Eventually his dad eventually got a day job working at a beef processing plant, and at 16 Albert began working in a Pasco department store.

Blanca’s life took a different path to the same place – Pasco High School, where she and Albert became sweethearts.

Blanca’s parents came to the U.S. through the Guest Worker Program in 1962. They worked in the fields in Virginia, Ohio and California before migrating to Washington.

By 1964 her dad had earned enough money to start his own business, a small grocery store, in Mexico. But soon thereafter her older brother, Abel Jr., accidentally started a fire that took his life and caused their sister Gracie to be badly burned. It also destroyed the family business. 

Her family returned to the U.S. again to work the crops. Blanca was born in 1970 in Pasco, and she was raised in the small town of Mesa, north of Pasco. 

“At that time my parents had worked very hard in the fields to earn enough money to buy a home and a couple of 18-wheeler trucks. Dad had started his own produce-hauling company.

Dad was living the American Dream until 1978 when the levee broke in the city of Mesa and flooded the entire town.  Everything my parents worked so hard for was gone in minutes, the house, automobiles, and their business ... again,” says Blanca. 

The Red Cross gave everyone affected by the flood a single-wide trailer to live in. 

“My childhood years I remember being raised in a ‘box’ called a trailer.  I didn’t understand why I was no longer living in a beautiful home with the beautiful back yard and swing set. Instead I was living in a box.  It was a very confusing time in my life,” Blanca recalls.

“Dad and mom went back to what they knew, picking fruit and vegetables. This was the only way they knew to earn enough money to start the business again. However, this time the children had to help,” she says. 

At a young age and through her junior and high school years, she harvested asparagus, apples and other crops with her family.  Her family’s work frequently required her to arise at 3 a.m. and work in the fields until 11 before going to school around noon. After day school, she would go home to eat, then return to night school until 9 p.m.

“My life as a young adolescent and teenager was very exhausting,” Blanca says. 

Her family would stay in Washington for the asparagus and apple crops, then migrate to Texas for the winter, where her parents would work in a factory.

But despite her difficult schedule, Blanca worked as hard at school as she did in the fields.

“I saw school as the way to get out of the fields,” she says.  

Albert felt the same way.

School a way to escape migrant lifestyle

“School was my escape from the reality of the harsh work environment and living in the east side of Pasco.  Race relations were very difficult and resulted in many fights in our neighborhood.  In school I would dream that I could be anything that I wanted to be and that I would someday work my way out of poverty,” Albert says. 

Because he had a Spanish surname, Albert was automatically sent to a portable classroom with the special education students.

“We spent most of the day reading extremely simple sentences and other remedial tasks.  My regular classmates started to tease me about being in the special education trailer,” Albert says.

In fourth grade, however, Albert was transferred to another school.

“On my first day at the new school I was asked by my new teacher which reading book I was in at my old school.  Different color books represented your reading level and, thus, your intelligence.  Since I was in front of my new class, I was embarrassed to say I was in a special education class and did not have a reading level book.  I picked a random color and said I was in the red book. 

“Everyone gasped because that was the highest reading level, and only a few kids in the entire school were allowed in that reading level.  Everyone treated my like a hero and like I was one of the smartest students to ever step foot in their classroom,” Albert recalls. 

“The teacher gave me special recognition and constantly asked me to lead the class in reading and other assignments.  Every day after school I would make sure to read all of the upcoming pages for the whole week several times over and would complete my homework for the same period.  This way I had already seen everything before everyone else and I appeared to be very smart as we learned new methods in math or any other subject,” he says.

A few months went by before he teacher received his transcripts and asked Albert about them. She presumed they had mixed up the records.

“I told her the whole truth, and she visited with the principal of the school and fought to keep me out of the trailer.  Ever since then I have been an excellent student, graduating from Pasco High School with honors, and graduating from Columbia Basin College and Washington State University, Summa Cum Laude, with a grade-point average of 3.98,” says Albert.

He and his family continued to work the fields during the summer and before school. In seventh grade a teacher noticed bruising on his back and called school officials and Child Protective Services together to discuss what they thought was a sign of child abuse.

“I didn’t understand what all the commotion was about.  Finally someone asked me if my father hit me or if I knew what caused the bruises on my back.  I started to laugh and explained that because it was apple harvest season in September and the bag of apples weighs a lot, it would leave bruises on my back.  They said that explained why the bruises were shaped like a giant X on my back,” Albert laughs.

Then when he was 16 something happened that changed his life forever.

His older sister and her husband lost their startup business.  His father helped them out by taking over the payments for an office computer they had and gave it to Albert to learn from.

He tried using it but accidentally made it inoperable.  He sought help from the store where the computer was purchased and began building a deep understanding of every component of the computer hardware and software.  He became very proficient at reading computer manuals and using the computer to solve many creative problems. 

After high school, Albert went to University of Washington for his freshman year.  By his second year he was way over his head in debt, but he found a paid internship opportunity at Microsoft and was hired to work on Microsoft Windows.

Albert had many opportunities at Microsoft to learn and to grow. He met Bill Gates twice and worked with other experts in the field. 

He married Blanca in 1991, and a few months later his father became seriously ill, requiring him to be hospitalized for over six months.

Albert and Blanca moved back to the Tri-Cities to help the family, which interrupted their college education.

Albert got a summer job helping troubled high school teens – half-time teaching and half-time working in the community, supervising the youths’ work painting senior citizen homes in the east side of Pasco.

“I was able to integrate the math and writing components they were being taught by pretending to be a painting business.  We would prepare an estimate of work and use math to solve our quantity of gallons of paint requirements per house,” says Albert.  “I showed them how to calculate the square footage of every shape in the exterior of the house.  Each paint type had different square footage coverage so we needed to make sure we had enough of each type of paint such as trim or other types.

At the end of the summer, he prepared a presented a report to the board of directors of the Private Industry Council, which provided the funding for the summer program.  There he met John Heaton, the president of Pay Plus Benefits, Inc., who was impressed with Albert’s approach to problem-solving, his communication skills and his passion.  Heaton offered Albert a job as the administrator of technology and later as the director of Information Technology and Research & Development.  Heaton also helped pay for Albert to complete his degree at Washington State University. 

And Heaton’s investment has paid big dividends back to the company.

Torreses achieve success in ‘real world’

“Since the start of my employment at Pay Plus Benefits, we changed from a bricks-and-mortar company to a complete online provider of payroll/personnel/benefits information and consolidated reporting environment. We went from servicing 100 clients and 1,500 employees to over 9,000 clients and 500,000 employees spread all across the country. We converted 40 of our national competitors to paying customers of ours.  We made the list of the Inc. 500, ranked 144^th as one the fastest-growing companies and have received many other awards,” says Albert.

Blanca, meanwhile, met a Hispanic engineer from Battelle, who came to visit Pasco’s night school students to encourage them to stay in school.  He explained what Hanford was and how he was able to get out of the fields and follow his dreams to become an engineer. 

“I was so impressed with his story I kept asking him questions about his life.  Apparently, he was so impressed with me asking questions, he came back the next day with a Battelle job application,” Blanca recounts. “He asked me to apply for a summer job with Battelle.  I was chosen to be a participant of the summer program Youth Opportunity Program (YOP).  I worked a couple of summers at the Hanford Technical Library, and after high school graduation I was offered a full-time job.  I told my manager I really wanted to go to college, so they transferred me to the Seattle Battelle branch.”

Blanca had gone to Columbia Basin College after high school, then transferred to Northwest College. 

The private Northwest College turned out to be too expensive, so Blanca returned to her old Battelle job in the Tri-Cities, working in Battelle’s accounting department.  She also returned to CBC and finished her associate’s degree.

“I discovered I had a great skill when it came to business/accounting.  After Battelle, I also worked at Numatec Inc., COGEMA Engineering, Duratek and now YAHSGS LLC,” she explains. “The special training I received for the specialized accounting software is what has propelled me to be highly sought in the different companies at Hanford.  I have not only become very proficient in the government accounting software program, I have been sought out for my experience and offered many different jobs.

Blanca is now the accounting manager at YAHSGS LLC, a technical consulting and research company focused on the protection of human health and the environment.  She is also the CFO for Cyberbackups.com, offering off-site backup systems to companies’ mission critical data. This is the company she owns with Albert.

Despite her success already in the business world, Blanca is continuing to work on her bachelor’s degree in business administration.

Recommendations to migrant students

“It is very easy to get discouraged as a migrant student, but have the patience and persistence to know that what you are going through right now is not who you are or will someday become.  Don’t be in a hurry to force change on the outside.  Work first on changing who you are on the inside, and the outside will follow,” Albert tells migrant students. 

“Learn to enjoy learning new things and new information.  Learn to solve your problems and the problems of others by breaking big problems into little, more manageable problems.  Learn from your past failures and find new ways to approach the situation rather than just giving up,” he continues. 

“Avoid temptations that could jeopardize your future.  I have found that what you know is very important, but it is more important that you are trustworthy,” Albert says.  “Success is often associated with financial areas, and trustworthiness is something that takes a lot of time to earn yet can easily be lost.”

Albert says he knows a lot of people that could have been more successful but their past now “glumes over them like a dark shadow.”  Most employers now conduct not only background checks but also a financial background check to see how trustworthy prospective employees have been. 

“If you cannot be trusted, then it will be impossible have success in many areas of your life,” he says.

“We want people to realize if they work hard, they can have their dreams come true, as well,” says Blanca. “Albert and I are from migrant families that had nothing – absolutely nothing. And we have so much now for which to be grateful.  People say, ‘You don’t understand what we’re going through.’ And we say, ‘Yes, we do understand what you’re going through. We were there once.”

“Even today we will share a pop,” adds Albert. “Back when we were young we didn’t have enough money for each of us to have a pop, so we still share everything, no matter how much we have. That’s part of our culture, that we share everything. We all drink out of the same glass.

 “We want to encourage more people to achieve the American Dream. And one of our best traits is that we are all cheer leaders. We really want to cheer people on. We want to help people taste success and then help mentor others and be a real example,” Albert says.

“For 15 years we worked in the fields, but we dreamed of getting out. But ‘Someday’ didn’t come in one day or one month or even one year,” he says.

Albert’s sister still works at a potato processing company where she’s labored for the past 25 years. When the Torreses trip to the White House was announced and they were on the front page of the newspaper, his sister took the paper to her work proudly to show her co-workers.

“She told her boss, ‘Guess what? My brother and his wife made the front page. He responded, ‘Well, who did they kill?’ And she responded that I was going to the White House to meet the president,” says Albert.

He laughs about the incident, but the story does illustrate the uphill battle the Hispanic community faces.

Achieving the American Dream

The Torreses want their fellow Hispanics to have greater opportunities to pursue the American Dream, and they want them to be more involved in the American democracy.

National studies have shown that despite the huge rallies over the past year, very few Hispanics have registered to vote, Albert notes.

He has his own theory as to why more Hispanics don’t get involved in politics.

“Compared with other groups, Hispanics have a lower percentage of home ownership. One of the president’s goals was to increase the percentage of Hispanic home ownership. Compared to the other groups that are in the high 80s or 90 percent, Hispanics were at 48 percent or lower when he took over. Now Hispanics have crossed the 50 percent threshold,” Albert explains.

“Before you own your own home, property taxes and initiatives are not as big a deal to you. When you own your own home, now you are in the mix. You start realizing these things matter and you need to show up to a presentation by the school board, for example, about a tax levy or about bonds,” he says.

“A lot of these things are tied to our home, and if you don’t have a stake in it, you’re not interested. So if the disparity is 40-50 percent, that helps explain why Hispanics are not more involved,” Albert says.

The strong economy and special housing programs are helping Hispanics get their own homes, which, in turn, has doubled the percentage of Hispanic voters, he says.

To help Hispanics in their pursuit of the American Dream, the Torreses and their RNHA group have helped set up and oversee a series of citizenship classes.

Partnering with WorkSource and Washington State University Tri-Cities, the citizenship program has provided training to about 380 people so far. 

“The citizenship classes have caught a lot of attention,” says Blanca. The program has been discussed at national meetings. The national RNHA wants to use the citizenship classes in the Tri-Cities as a model for a national effort. RNHA has asked the Tri-City Hispanic leaders to put on workshops at the national conference on how to set up such a local program.

“These classes not only help in the assimilation of Hispanic families into the American society, they also have a big impact on each family. When 600 people were recently sworn in as American citizens, they all went back and shared it with their families. It was a big event in their lives. The ramifications of these citizenship classes go very deep,” says Albert.

Naturalized citizens frequently have a greater appreciation of what it means to be an American than the average American, say the Torreses. Hispanic Americans are more inclined to serve the nation in the armed services, which now has over 200,000 Hispanics.

Education essential to success

Education is important to the Torreses, and they know it is essential to achieving the American Dream. They urge students to work hard in school, and they urge parents to get involved in their children’s education.

“I was labeled ‘at-risk’ much of my life. And it took several years for me to figure out what I was at risk for,” Albert says. “My parents only had a first- and third-grade education. When I came home with algebra, I had no one to turn to.

“But just because you have a Spanish-speaking-only home does not mean you will not succeed in life. You can rise to that challenge. My parents didn’t volunteer for anything. They didn’t even know what school I went to half the time,” he says.

Albert and Blanca now have two children of their own – Isaiah, 10, and Ezequiel, 7. And they get very involved in their own children’s education – helping them nightly with homework and volunteering at their school.

“We have been volunteers in each of our kid’s classrooms since they started kindergarten,” says Albert.  “I predominately volunteer in the computer lab sessions once a week, but we have also helped in the reading/writing programs and even helping doing crosswalk duty.  I noticed that when I enter their school my name is no longer Albert or Mr. Torres, but I am known as Isaiah’s dad or Ezequiel’s dad.”

Volunteering at school is important to his own children, he adds.

“Teachers are more likely to share more details of how your child is doing in their classroom when you volunteer,” he says.  “But the biggest bonus is that my children know that I love them and that we support them by being present in their classrooms and paying the price with our time.  Occasionally we also have lunch with them, which is also a huge treat because you can observe how they interact with others and how their peers view them, as well. I can now provide better examples when I see a teaching opportunity with them.”