Meet Richard Gonzales
Latino staffers at NPR share their family stories of perseverance, sacrifice, and hard work to achieve the American Dream. These stories are defined by universal values of pride, hope, and an endless determination to help shape the new American landscape.
My great-grandfather, Narciso Avila, came to this country in the early 1920s with his wife, Antonia, and her two sisters from Michoacán, México. They wound up in Richmond, California, just east of San Francisco, where my great-grandfather found a railroad job. After several years, my great-grandmother is reputed to have said she wanted to return to México. Narciso objected. “I received no respect in México. I receive no respect in the United States. But at least I can feed my family here,” he said.
During the Depression, my dad, Larry, grew up fatherless in the rough bayside town dominated by Standard Oil. Racism was no stranger to Mexicans who had to pass as Portuguese to get a job at the local oil refinery. The reward for speaking Spanish at school was a sharp rap on the knuckles.
“The reward for speaking Spanish at school was a sharp rap on the knuckles.”
My father returned from the Korean War in 1951 after seeing heavy action in the battle at the Chosin Reservoir. His luck changed when he met my mother, Catalina Salvatierra, at a USO dance in her native San Diego. Perky, million-watt smile, she traced her roots to the Mexican states of Baja and Nayarit. As a teenager in WWII, she was a Rosie the Riveter in San Diego’s aviation industry. Ever the patriot, mom was outraged by the 9/11 attacks. She called me on the phone a day later: “Mijo, do you think the President will call everyone into service? Because I’m ready to work!” She was 75 years old then.
My parents raised five kids in Richmond from the fifties through the eighties. There were only six Mexican-American families in our ghetto neighborhood. The Black Panthers had an outpost two blocks from my junior high school. Dad became a War on Poverty activist, organizing the burgeoning Mexican-American community on the other side of town. He put his kids on picket lines at grocery stores to support the striking farmworkers. Being a leader and celebrity in the community would cost him his marriage.
By the time I departed for college in 1972, my mother was left with four kids and a stack of food stamps. She got a job at a local Salvation Army clothes store where she worked for more than twenty-five years, clothing her family in the process. She’s watched the neighborhood transition from working class white, to African-American, to now increasingly Latino. Today, she’s the matriarch of the block whose home is faithfully defended by her neighbors whenever they perceive a threat to her well-being. She disarms young boys by looking them straight in the eye and saying, “Good morning, young man!”
In the eighties, my dad founded a group that provides bilingual, bicultural mental health services for Richmond’s expanding Latino community. It’s called Familias Unidas and it celebrated its 30th anniversary last year.
I’m fortunate that both of my parents are still alive. My siblings and I never stop talking about their divorce, growing up in the ghetto, and the comfort of second-hand clothes.
