Transcripts

BRENT WOLFE: Tony Rico was born in Southern Mexico and first came to the US 30 years ago, when he was 25. He spent a summer picking wheat and sugar beets in Colorado. The following winter, he was in El Paso, looking for a job when recruiters from a Minnesota Turkey processing plant convinced him and 30 other single men to come to the tiny town of Altura.

Altura sits in the rolling hills above the Whitewater Valley, just North of St. Charles, about 30 miles East of Rochester. Rico and the other men made about $150 a week, more than double the wages they could earn in a factory in El Paso. Work was fine but life didn't offer much.

TONY RICO: Pretty soon, these Spanish people decided to have something to drink. And they get drunk. And the white folks and Altura didn't really like that much. And after two or three weeks, they buy a car, a group of individuals, two, three Mexican people buy one car and they go raising hell in the street. And of course, the white folks didn't like that.

BRENT WOLFE: Within a couple of months, all the men had moved on in search of work in larger cities. And managers at the Turkey plant replaced them with patients from the state mental hospital in Rochester. But Rico stayed and worked his way into a job, maintaining the plant's machinery. The company rewarded him with a trailer to live in and an old Station Wagon.

In the early '80s, the plant was, again, looking for workers, so managers sent Rico to Texas with instructions to recruit women and responsible men. One of those he recruited was Magdalena Carranza. She'd dropped out of high school to work in a Levi's factory. But making jeans was hard work, and she thought she could make more money in the North. She was small and shy, and plant managers started her on an easy job, putting the gizzards in a little bag in each Turkey's neck.

MAGDALENA CARRANZA: I started peeling gizzards in a machine. And my fingers start peeling off too. I was bleeding. And so I said it was too much, so I wasn't able to do that.

BRENT WOLFE: So she was transferred to another part of the line. Like the men a decade before her, Carranza found the wages appealing, but life in Altura was lonely. An elderly couple who worked at the plant took her under their wing, and sometimes, invited her to dinner, but she still felt alien, like people were afraid of her.

MAGDALENA CARRANZA: Boy, they're looking at a stranger, really, really like aliens. [LAUGHS] They weren't used to the Hispanic people. They were used to maybe to one or two, but when they get to see more, around-- they were more a little bit holding themselves, scared a little bit of us, looking at us different.

BRENT WOLFE: Carranza made $900 in four months and returned to Brownsville to give the money to her parents. Rico came to visit her. And she returned to Minnesota to live with him for a time. They had two children together but drifted apart.

Rico married the daughter of a white farm family. Carranza eventually settled in Saint Charles on her own and loves to fill her house with friends and laughter.

MAGDALENA CARRANZA: And I have two birds, my company when my daughter's not here with me.

[WHISTLING]

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

BRENT WOLFE: Carranza is now a translator. She wears her pager like a brooch on the lapel of her dark blazer, just in case the County Health Department, the jail, or the schools need her for some quick interpreting.

Her son, Tony Rico Jr. will finish high school in Saint Charles next month. About 20 Hispanic families live there. And they've made Tony and his mother feel more at home in Saint Charles than they did when they lived in Rochester for a few years.

TONY RICO: I didn't expect to see the diversity that I hadn't seen in Rochester. And there was a diversity in Saint Charles. And to have those individuals come to my doorstep and say, we want to welcome you, it was quite a surprise. It was quite different.

BRENT WOLFE: Saint Charles has made an effort to make new residents welcome. School and city leaders worked in the early '70s with local churches to encourage Southeast Asian refugees to move to town. In the 17 years he's lived in Saint Charles, school superintendent Tom Ames has seen many residents help people of different cultures. He and his wife adopted three Korean-American children.

TOM AMES: Many individuals made a conscious decision to reach out and to help. And I think that started when the first members of the Laotian community came in the late '70s. And I see that happening to the present day.

BRENT WOLFE: Leaders, including the mayor, have helped minority students raise money to go to college. High school principal Hank Wehle teaches Spanish and often, welcomes new Hispanic students and parents in their native tongue, but there have been problems.

HANK WEHLE: Issues may not start off as racial issues. They probably start off as normal adolescent conflicts with one another. And in the process of resolving those conflicts, more people get drawn into that. And so one of our focus has been to identify that early on offer assistance through the counseling department.

BRENT WOLFE: While school officials promote harmony in the classroom, adults have to work through the issues of racism on their own. Sitting outside his home, Tony Rico Sr. fidgets with the Velcro straps of a white brace on his left forearm and recalls the vehement opposition he faced from the white farm family of a young woman he was courting.

TONY RICO: They used to call me a Black, like the other Black, all kinds of things because I'm--

BRENT WOLFE: What did they call you?

TONY RICO: Oh, they called me-- they called the Black son of a bitch. [LAUGHS] Many times, they call me that way. And I just talk it up. What can I say? Now, they are my best friends.

BRENT WOLFE: Rico broke the ice slowly over several years by sharing his tools and knowledge of home repair with the family. He and Betty Jo graves finally married. And they now have a son of their own. Rico says he's seen people change in the 30 years he's lived near Altura.

TONY RICO: Now there's a lot of Hispanic people around here. And some white folks talk to me about son in-laws in Spanish and Mexican. And they like it. Even the farmers around the area, some people are talking about in-laws already are Hispanics and Mexicans. They like it. Which when I was here, I was the only one over here, they didn't want to hear much about Spanish people. The only thing they heard in the TV was the Frito Bandito.

BRENT WOLFE: Tony Rico and Magdalena Carranza, both now a long time American citizens, say Minnesota is home. They returned to Texas and Mexico on vacation to visit family and take a break from long Minnesota winters. They talk with newly arrived migrants who complaint of discrimination in the workplace, but they say their experience is proof that in time, Latinos can find acceptance as well as economic security in rural Minnesota. I'm Brent Wolfe, Minnesota Public Radio.