Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States

Magda Iriarte

Magda Iriarte is a secondary school teacher who lives in Hickory, North Carolina , with her family. She is a close friend of Sherry Edwards, a high school teacher in Unionville, North Carolina, whom I met when she attended an NEH Summer Institute for Secondary Teachers on Latino literature that I co-led in San Antonio. Sherry took me to meet Magda and her family just as they were finishing a Sunday lunch with a large number of extended family members at a local restaurant in Hickory. Like Sherry, Magda is a high school Spanish teacher. Her husband, Rocky, and her daughter, Hanna, were part of our conversation , which took place in the kitchen of their home. magda: My father is a horse trainer who’s been in the States since 1971. We came a year after he was here. My parents are divorced, but they are still very good friends. I think that it was difficult for them to make the transition from the Colombian perception of the woman being submissive to the man. My mother came to the United States and realized that here women had a little more leverage. She’s a very strong-willed person anyway, and I think it just . . . clashed. We’re from El Huila. It’s in the valley about six hours south of Bogotá in the Llanos (Orientales). We have a lot of family in Cartagena. louis: Do you know what drove them to come over here? magda: My father was in the cattle business in Colombia, but he always had Paso Finos. He had several different farms that he managed, and the horses were the patrón’s [boss’s] hobby. He always dreamed of coming to the United States from the time he was really young. The cattle business went bad in Colombia because they started importing cattle from the United States, and a lot of the cattlemen in Colombia started suffering from that magda iriarte 64 conversations across our america competition. He had a job offer here to come train horses. I think he said that when he landed on the plane he had like $15. He came to Sparta, North Carolina, in the mountains. He stayed for a year there. At that time my parents were separated in Colombia, but when he came and he missed my mother, missed the family, he really wanted to try to work things out, and so he kept writing to her and convinced her to give him another chance. Which I guess is really good for me because otherwise I would have [laughing] stayed in Colombia and had a totally different life. We stayed maybe six months in the mountains, and then after that we move to Lexington. It was interesting because there he worked for a doctor who was originally from Colombia. A friend of his got him the job, the work visa, and had requested him to come up. So we went to this farm that this doctor owned, and the place was so overgrown you couldn’t even see the barn anymore. Our entire summer was spent cleaning that place up and making stalls. We worked there for a couple of years, and he was probably riding a horse for $33 a month. It was nothing. I was six. We struggled. He would get up at 3:00 in the morning, and to make a little bit of extra money, he would go clean the pig stalls on the neighboring farm. He would do that from about 3:30 to about 7:30 in the morning. Then he would come and he would work the horses and the farm until night. And then my mother would go to work at a factory as a seamMagda Iriarte and her husband, Rocky, in Hickory, North Carolina. Photo by Louis Mendoza. 65 the crucible of change and adaptation stress. She would sew from like 3:30 until 11:30 at night. That’s how they made ends meet their first several years. After that he decided that he wanted to go into business for himself. He had been able to get a few clients, and we moved off that farm. We really had nothing. We moved into a really big old house with no furniture. We had like maybe eight, ten horses that we had to feed that were clients’ horses. He found out that the type...