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By STEPHEN DÍAZ
written in the late 1970's

My dad had come to the U.S. about 8 or 9 months before us as a political refugee after his dad was hanged by the government troops as a revolutionary in the state of Guanajuato. After saving enough money from working in the coal mines in Colorado, he sent for the rest of my family to come to El Paso, Texas, where he was waiting for us to join him in this land of freedom and opportunity as he put it. It was May or June of 1919, and I clearly remember my reaction at the sight of this beautiful land so different from our own. It was one of wonderment and anticipation. I was about 7- years-old, but I remember how we were thoroughly processed and documented by the immigration department. My dad took us to Houston, Texas, where he had rented a house in which we lived until 1925. I remember seeing a lot of men in military uniform and I thought, "Gosh, is there a revolution here, too?" I was apprehensive until my dad explained to me that America was involved in a world war and a lot of these men were soldiers returning from overseas.

The country was in the process of recovering from World War I and it was heard that jobs were hard to find. About two or three days after we arrived in Houston, a group of people came to our house and brought us some canned food, bread, fruit, (it was the first time I ate pork and beans), food that I had never tasted but found very delicious. Some of these same people helped us find jobs picking raspberries, strawberries, watermelons, cotton, and other times we found jobs unloading railroad coal cars with our bare hands, forks and shovels.

At the end of the last day in December we heard a barrage of guns and firecrackers and people shouting in the streets: "Happy New Year," and this to me was the beginning of the "Roaring Twenties" and beyond.

Come January my parents were told that we had to go to school. I was put in the third grade not knowing a word of English. My brother Joe was put in the fourth grade. Luckily, we had some wonderful teachers who even went to our house on the weekends to tutor us.

On Sundays I would get up at 4 a.m. and go to the newspaper plant and get a big batch of newspapers and head down to the wealthy section of the city yelling, "Sunday Morning Chronicle. Hear all about it," and shouting the big news of the world. During the time I was selling newspapers a lot of "extras" came out telling about the killings among gangsters who tried to control the 'bootleg' industry. Liquor wasn't legal in those days. I remember reading about "speakeasies."

Our school was being renovated and modernized, and we were happy there until some of the students in our age group began to antagonize us calling us "dirty Mexicans." We wanted to participate and join their baseball and basketball teams but they harassed us so much that we became afraid to stick around.

Then one day I was playing catch with one who dared to be my friend. He liked the way I threw the ball so he went to the captain of the school team and persuaded him to try me out and forget I was Mexican. Eventually these same students accepted us and became our friends.

Around 1925 some labor recruiters from Michigan talked my dad into going to work in the sugar beet fields. They needed people like us because the nation was so prosperous that only the poor would work the fields. At this time, we were not desperately poor, but my dad believed them when they promised us we would make lots of money. We were to leave by train the first of May. So we packed our few belongings and went to the train station. I had notified my school the day before of our departure, and two of my teachers and some student friends were there to see us off. I thought we were going to board some Pullman cars, but to my embarrassment, they were regular "box" cars. They were equipped with wooden benches and canvas bags filled with straw as mattresses. The five days it took us to reach Michigan we ate nothing but pork and beans and dried or moldy bread. They took us to a farm near Croswell, Mich., where the owner of this farm in turn showed us where we were going to live. I think his chickens had better living conditions. He was very apologetic, but this didn't help. My whole family and I were disillusioned. The thought of what I left behind infuriated me and for a while I became resentful towards my dad, but soon realized he was victimized. I could not understand why there was so much prosperity in this nation and here we were, brought to Michigan like cattle in box cars and our living quarters were like chicken coops.

We finished harvesting the 1925 crop and my dad, my brother Joe and I went to Port Huron to look for jobs but there weren't any jobs available. It was so obvious that employers were reluctant to hire migrant workers. We ended up going through a very harsh winter helping the farmers in the area for 50 cents a day plus meals for us, but not for mom and the rest of my siblings. We banked our "chicken coop" with dirt and filled all the cracks with hay and straw.

Christmas of 1925 and New Year of 1926 were the saddest of our lives because of the cold weather, which we were not used to, and because of the meager amount of money we received after the harvest. We did not have enough to get us through the winter so we had to borrow from the farmer. During these years attending school was not compulsory outside of cities so my brother Joe, myself, my sisters Cruz, Carmen and Dora did not go to school for two years. I kept thinking of all the fun I was missing. If only we could go back to Houston! I missed two years of the Roaring Twenties, wondering what might have been, could have been or what I would be doing; little knowing that the best of them and the worst of them were yet to come.

After we finished harvesting the 1926 sugar beet crop, my dad, brother and I started scouting around for a better place to live in anticipation of next year's sugar beet crop. We visited other areas where migrant workers were housed. We learned through the migrant grapevine that farmers needed workers in Charlotte, Mich., a small town near Lansing. We contacted a field representative of that area and he arranged for our transfer to Charlotte where the sugar beet company built new houses for the workers. It was in November and we found the housing much better, but we were still very short of cash, especially after paying the farmer in Croswell what we had borrowed. There was prosperity all around the big cities of the nation, but it seemed the farmers were complaining about not making enough money. Consequently they were paying less per acre than the previous years.

In Charlotte they had an organization called the Salvation Army. At Christmas time of 1926 they brought baskets of food and fruit to every family who lived in these company houses. Compared to our Christmas of 1925, this was heaven. The company furnished us with stoves and coal for cooking and heating our two-room houses.

That following September we were ordered by the truant officer of the area to go to school. I was 15, just one year short of not having to go to school. Good fortune stepped in as our field representative found a house for us where the farmer agreed to let us live and was very close to the country school we were to attend. I don't know how, but my dad found out that the Chevrolet foundry needed workers. He went to Saginaw, Mich., with a friend and the following day they were hired as "iron pourers." Immediately he looked for a house and found one at 6th and Norman Streets and the following week he came after us. Saginaw was not as big as Houston, but big enough that it had its share of movies, a vaudeville house and a couple of night clubs. Its vices were many. Bootlegging, the "numbers rackets" and wide open gambling. My brother Joe and I went to school; he to Saginaw High, and I to Central Junior High.

In December of 1927, my dad fell ill with pneumonia and we blamed it on the filthy dirty job they gave him at the foundry. Shortly after he recovered he had a relapse. He never returned to his job. Again we had a sad Christmas and New Year. Factories and shops were running at full blast, but I was too young to be hired. Joe persisted in finishing school and graduated from Saginaw High in June of 1928, the first Mexican to do so.

There was nothing left for our family but to go back to the sugar beet fields. In May of 1928, we marched into Mt. Pleasant, Mich., where we were paid twice as much for working in the sugar beet fields as before, and so after the 1928 harvest we had enough money to come back to Saginaw and we went back to school at the end of November. My dad got a job as a railroad worker and I got a job back at the grocery store after school hours.

Then in 1929 my dad decided to go back to Mt. Pleasant because they were paying him very low wages at the railroad. We made good money during the first phase of the sugar beet crop (thinning and hoeing), but all of a sudden the roof caved in. We were told by our field representative that they were cutting our pay because the company could not sell their sugar. He told us they would pay only $7 an acre instead of $14, which they paid us last year, to take it or leave it.

I always liked to read the newspapers and I read about the stock market being in trouble and businesses closing their doors. I was 17-years-old then, but I knew something about business problems after having worked in pharmacy and grocery stores. I advised my dad to finish the harvest because I read that thousands of workers were being laid off. After the 1929 harvest, my dad was lucky enough to get his job back at the railroad through a friend.

I could not find a job anywhere, and Saginaw wasn't exciting enough, so my friend Joe Mendoza and I took a trip to Detroit. There I found what I had never seen before. They called it "Skid Row." Prohibition was still on, but in Skid Row we found places where they sold liquor as if it were legal. All the people who had problems went there to get drunk and forget them. My problem was poverty and Joe and I did get drunk. We spent what little money we had, so we asked one of the boys who was drinking with us if we could sleep in his car. It was so cold that we soon sobered up, and as soon as it was daylight we started hitchhiking back to Saginaw. It took us all day, but we were sure glad to get home.

The Christmas of 1929 was also very bleak and the New Year of 1930 was not as noisy because I guess there was nothing to celebrate about. Those who had jobs were working only two or three days a week. Those without jobs became bums, destitute and desperate. There was a lot of crime - burglaries, felonies, murders, fights, booze, and a lot of people on welfare. Yes, a lot of people became rich from about 1921 until just a few months before October 1930, which was when the bottom fell out of the stock market. But we as migrant workers never could make enough money to save or invest, so when the banks closed their doors and businesses went broke, we didn't lose anything. We just kept on working in the sugar beet fields for very cheap wages, but somehow we survived. Thus ended the "Roaring Twenties."

I had already made friends with other boys my age, but we had never palled around together before until the spring of 1930, when, as I said previously, people with no jobs became bums, destitute and desperate. That spring my friends and I had nothing to do but bum around. We frequented the pool rooms around town, learned to shoot pool pretty good and go around playing for money. Other times we would get our money together and play poker or blackjack and most of the time we came out ahead. One time I won $500 playing blackjack, so we all piled into a friend's father's car and drove to Detroit to look for "bigger game." We found instead a gang of guys who gave us a hard time. We had real good fights, and after awhile they became our friends, which was a Godsend because they showed us a lot of places where we could go have fun.

One of these places was called the "Aragon" where guys could dance with a woman for 10 cents a dance. These were called "taxi dance halls." They were a product of the "Roaring Twenties," and we spent many a day there listening and dancing to famous and well-known orchestras. Other times we would spend our time and money at several "night clubs" until pretty soon our money ran out.

Most of us would go work at the sugar beet fields every year, and we would play baseball during the summer, and in the winter we would organize a basketball team and join the "Golden Gloves" organization.

In the spring of 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt had just been inaugurated and there was an air of optimism all around. But as usual, we kept on working sugar beets. The wages began to pick up a little bit. The factory workers were now working four days a week sometimes. In the winter of 1935, I got a job at the railroad where my dad was working. I worked until the spring of 1937, when, after hearing that they were hiring at the Wilson Foundry in Pontiac, I went there and was hired that same day. Four of my friends were hired also, and so being real close to Detroit, we resumed our weekend trips to the Taxi Dances night clubs, burlesque shows, Tiger baseball games. I was very popular with girls, until 1942, when I married Esther González. There is a question I ask myself, "Would I do it again?" Yes, because everything led to having my family.

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