A Grandfather Shares His Mexican Roots With 'Mijita'

The Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno has partnered with StoryCorps to record and preserve the stories of Latino families in the San Joaquin Valley. 

We’re airing excerpts of some of those conversations on The California Report Magazine. Our final conversation includes three languages (English, Spanish and Mixteco) and three generations of the Flores family: 12-year-old Angelina, her 36-year-old father Luis and her 58-year-old grandfather Julián, who tells his family about his life growing up as an immigrant from Mexico.

Julián Flores started working when he was seven years old in Mexico.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Julián tells his son Luis and his granddaughter Angelina of going to work at such a young age. “I didn’t have a chance to go to school. That’s why I can’t read.”

He also only spoke the indigenous language Mixteco. Not being able to communicate in Spanish made his job delivering lunches to laborers sometimes difficult.

“I suffered a lot because sometimes the bosses would send me to get something, and I didn’t know how to ask for it,” Julián says.

Julián first came to California when he was 16 for seasonal farm labor, picking strawberries in Carlsbad. Years later, he moved his family to California permanently.

Angelina asks her dad if he thinks their life would be different if not for their Mexican heritage.

“I think it would have been a bit different because you wouldn’t have this culture,” he says. “You wouldn’t have this history that your grandfather is telling us about, how he grew up and how he suffered to bring us here to the United States.”

Angelina ends the interview by thanking her grandfather for being from Mexico and making that culture a part of her life.

“I think it’s really special that we have all this,” she says.