When my husband was seven years old, he got his first job. The owner of the corner store in his neighborhood in Mexico City offered him a position stocking shelves and running errands. As the oldest child, he was proud to help the family.
His family moved to a rural neighborhood two years later; work for nine-year-olds was hard to come by. Knowing the family needed his help, Gil set his sights on entrepreneurship. Each day, he climbed the dirt path up the hill to the ice factory, bought a block of ice, and hustled down the hill to reach home before the ice melted. As his mother boiled guava fruit and tamarind pods into syrup, he scraped off shards of ice with a wire brush to make snowcones, which he sold on a table in front of their house.
Later, he learned to make candy. Boiling sugar and milk together until it was caramelized, he rolled the dough into balls and pressed a walnut half into the thumbprint in the middle. Before entering school each afternoon, he went door to door selling these candies, along with tiny cups of brightly colored gelatin.
Factory work paid better, and Gil entered a tile factory, along with his brother. Together, they polished and glazed thick industrial tiles and loaded them onto pallets to be shipped throughout Mexico. Gil’s brother, uninterested in hard labor, returned to school but Gil stayed at the factory until he eventually became supervisor of quality control. He was 16.
His family moved again, this time to a neighboring state. Instead of enrolling in school, Gil sold pastries and rolls door-to-door. It was a tiny neighborhood and business boomed, until grocery stores moved in and people began to buy bread as part of their daily shopping. It was time to return to factory work.
Known as “El Niño” for his young age when he entered the factory, Gil nonetheless had the responsibilities of an adult, stirring hot vats of melting sulfur to make an ingredient used in soap. The job paid well, but, “No matter how often I bathed, the sulfur impregnated my skin, and I always smelled like rotten eggs.” Even so, he spent four years there before being laid off.
As always, Gil returned to door to door sales; this time his product was cheese. Business was slow and he quickly found another job in a machine shop where he worked until the siren song of “el norte” lured him to the US. His boss lent him $150 for his passage north, and he began a new life.
Like many immigrants with no English and no papers, this new life was marked by long bus rides to work, long hours mopping floors and polishing exercise machines in gyms, washing dishes or chopping vegetables in restaurants. He spent a decade working in restaurants, even becoming part of the team sent to other cities to open new restaurants and train new workers.
“Why don’t you become a manager?’ I asked him at one point. “You know how to run every part of this restaurant.” He rejected that idea adamantly, almost angrily. I didn’t realize, and he didn’t tell me, that the paperwork required of managers was daunting to him.
Gil has now spent more than half of his life in the United States. He’s become a citizen, acquired serviceable English, and has a reputation in every job he’s held—restaurants, plumbing, construction, and maintenance—as a hard worker.
After six years in his present job, he recently decided it was time to ask for a promotion. He met with his manager, who gently explained that in today’s professional world, “You need to be comfortable with technology. You need to check and respond to emails, and fill out supply orders on the computer.” Gil nodded, embarrassed but knowing it was true. Other than Facebook and YouTube, he’d never mastered computer use. At work he relied on the handwritten list his boss gave him each morning of tasks to be addressed each day. “You need computer skills to move up the ladder,” his boss said.
That same afternoon, he went to the local adult school and entered a computer class. The following day he announced to his coworkers that he would now be sending emails and begged their patience as he learns. They applauded. He was inundated with offers to show him how to use the “shift” key, copy-and-paste, and his new best friend, spell-check.
In the world of technology, so much is new to him. Even so, he attacks learning with the same determination he used at age seven lugging heavy ice blocks to make snowcones. “It’s not enough just to be a hard worker anymore,” he says. “ As the world changes, I must also.”
