"Pedro Gonzalez was one of the first P'urhépechas to leave his home state to travel to the U.S., looking for work. Over the three decades that followed, he was joined by thousands of others. He was the community's first president, before Ortiz. Today he's 60 years old, and lives in a trailer at Duros with his wife Dorotea Gonzalez Fosar. In an interview, he recounted the history of the P'urhépecha migration that created the Duros and Chicanitas camps: I grew up in Ocomichu, Michoacán, which is a P'urhépecha town. When I was growing up, nobody knew how to speak Spanish. When you asked them something in Spanish while they were working in the fields they would run, because they didn't understand what you were saying. You suffer when you don't know the language. My father wasn't P'urhépecha, though, just my mother, so he taught us Spanish when we were young. I first came to the U.S. in 1979. When I first arrived in Riverside I didn't get a paycheck for two weeks. We survived off tortillas and oranges. We were working in the orange fields, and ate them for every meal. Someone lent us a couple of dollars and we would buy a package of tortillas. We need to help each other, even when someone just needs a dollar. I just felt like crying back then, not knowing what to do. Today in Duros or Mecca you can practically go anywhere and speak P'urhépecha with anyone. It wasn't like that when I got here. I didn't have anyone to talk to. I lived with an African American man in Palm Springs for two months, and felt very lonely. Nowadays the younger generation says our memories of what we suffered are not real and exaggerated. That makes me feel bad. We walked two nights and two days crossing the border back then. Now it costs about $1,500, even as much as $3,000 to cross the line. You have to work for more than two or three months to earn that much. It used to be that you didn't have to pay another person to help you cross." Get the Story:
HOW THE P'URHEPECHAS CAME TO THE COACHELLA VALLEY (New American Media 1/12)
Join the Conversation
