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

Efrain and Francisca Marinez

Juan Marinez introduced me to his parents, Efrain and Francisca Marinez, at their home in East Lansing, Michigan. Originally from South Texas, they came to the upper Midwest in the late 1920s as migrant workers. As one of the oldest Latino families in the region, the Marinezes had been instrumental in making change in the area as they stood up for their rights to own a home and have fair working conditions. francisca: Nacimos en México, pero nos criamos en Tejas. [We were born in Mexico, but we grew up in Texas.] louis: ¿En qué parte de México? [In what part of Mexico?] francisca: Piedras Negras yo nací y él nació en Cuatro Cienegas, Coahuila. [I was born in Piedras Negras, and he was born in Cuatro Cienegas , Coahuila.] juan: How old were you when you came? francisca: Cuando yo vine aquí, tenía como cuatro años. [When I came here I was four years old.] louis: Did your parents ever tell you why they decided to come? francisca: Well no, porque mi papá agarró trabajo aquí, so se trajo a mi mamá para acá. [Well no, because my dad got work here, so he brought my mom.] efrain: At that time the border was open. Then they started putting a lot of stuff, a lot of red tape, and made it impossible. In the ’30s, the immigration department was worse than it is today. There was a lot of people deported, people in bunches, a lot of people born here that were deported. efrain and francisca marinez 217 internal migration louis: When did you first come to Michigan? efrain: I came here very, very young. We come here in the twenties, and I was probably five years old. Those years, those years don’t count. [Laughter ] My father brought us here from Texas. He was a young guy. He liked it here. We all worked in the beets when I was seven or eight years old. They didn’t let the gabachos [white kids] work in the fields; they force them to go to school. But us? Shoot, in those days they got the kids like me out of school to go and work on the sugar beets. Sometimes I think back and I say, “Golly, it was worse than the Germans.” They just did whatever they wanted to us. My dad was very liberal; he didn’t ever let people push him around. We had our own car. It was an advantage, so he didn’t have to depend on the sugar beet company. Efrain and Francisca Marinez in their home in East Lansing, Michigan. Photo by Louis Mendoza. 218 conversations across our america louis: You all went back and forth to Texas? efrain: Yes, to Crystal City. Some years we didn’t go back every year. We stayed here because we had no money to go back, and a lot of people, they would do the same thing. When I was a kid, I used to know a lot of people born in St. Paul, Minnesota. I used to work not too far from St. Paul in a small town called Buffalo Lake. It was very lonely. The people who worked there were very nice, but not all the people was like that. louis: So when you stayed in the winter, what kind of work would your dad do? efrain: Nothing. Whatever little money we made was for food. We had to freeze. We lived in the company trailers. We had one of those heaters in the middle, and me and my brother, we used to go and pick up coal around the railroad to heat the trailer. It was hard. A lot of people came from Mexico on the train and stayed because they didn’t know English, and they didn’t know when the train went back. louis: When did you get married? francisca: In 1944, but we knew each other since we were little. efrain: We didn’t have it so bad, but there were a lot of people that had it really bad, and my dad always liked to help people. louis: Since you would go back and forth to Texas, did you think of Texas as home? Or did you think of yourself as having two homes? francisca: He still wants to go back. efrain: Once the kids started to come, I and Francis have to...