Mexicanos in Oregon: Their Stories, Their Lives

Testimonio by Lorenzo Rubio

96 Mexicanos in Oregon Testimonio by Lorenzo Rubio This testimonio is composed from excerpts of an interview conducted by Mendoza and Gonzales-Berry in 2009 at Lorenzo Rubio’s office at the Hillsboro Sheriff’s Department where Rubio is a crime prevention officer. The interview was conducted in English with smatterings of Spanish. The excerpts were selected, transcribed, and arranged by the authors. I was originally born in Mexico, in a little town near Juarez. We came to the U.S. when I was about two or three years old. We moved to Texas, around the El Paso area. We lived there until I was five. Then we moved to New Mexico and we were in Artesia, New Mexico, until I was sixteen years old. The work there was mostly farming. A lot of alfalfa, cattle, that type of thing. We lived in a ranch for many of those years and when my stepfather and my mother separated, we decided that we were to come to Oregon for the summer, just to work for the summer because of the strawberry farm owner here. His name was Ron [Mr. Rubio did not provide a last name], I think he is still alive, you probably have heard about him. He sent some recruiters down to New Mexico to recruit families to come to Oregon for the summer to pick strawberries. They would bring the families up here and would send them back when the work was over. There were some families already here. These families were from Texas. On top of that Juanita, the wife of Ron, era mexicana. She lived in the same town, in Artesia, and I went to school with her brother, who was my age. So we knew the family and did not think that anything fraudulent would happen. We figured, well, we trust this family. So they recruited about twelve to fifteen mexicano families. Mostly everyone was from Texas or somewhere in Arizona. When they were down in Artesia, they showed my mother a picture with a little river or creek and they showed a guy fishing. It was a really nice picture in that setting, so my mother liked it. I just had gotten my driver’s license and did not want to come for the summer and leave my friends. So I came under protest. The oldest was my sister, who at the time was eighteen. I was sixteen. We had three other brothers—two were developmentally challenged, so my mother had that stress. We arrived here in two school buses. It took us about four days to get here. Of course the buses were full of people. You can imagine, we had six in my family. There were not enough seats for everyone. Some people had to ride 97 THEIR STORIES, THEIR LIVES Testimonio: Lorenzo Rubio standing because it was so packed. They told us that the money that we spent on the trip for food, they would reimburse us. It took four days. Back then there were no Arco or BP stores. It was only a gas station and they had some potato chips or a coke—that was the extent of the food that was available to buy. Every once in a while the bus would stop in a town or a city and we would have a decent meal but these were very few and far between, and the school buses were old and broke down a few times, but eventually we made it. North Plains was the little town we landed in. When we saw the shacks we were so disappointed, my mother especially. We got down from the buses, and we got a shack assigned to us and then the food was given to us. At that time the Department of Agriculture had food that [they] gave to the workers (canned meat, cheese, and peanut butter). We recognized what kind of food it was [welfare commodities] and thought this is not what we expected! But having no other options, we settled in. There were four bunk beds, so we had to make do. The little shack was probably five or six by ten and it had a little stove-top (a gas burner) and that was it. It was really a hardship for my mom thinking that we were to make some money and all was to be tax free. We were told that if we stayed up to the end of the picking season, we would get a...