College Bound: Migrant's Dream Nears
LYNDEN, Whatcom County - Juan Baldovinos plans to go to college this fall. Like many Lynden High School seniors, 18-year-old Juan is mailing applications for grants and scholarships.
But there the similarity ends.
The prospective accounting major is a migrant farm laborer.
His application responses give a glimpse of the differences.
Spare time? ``My leisure time has been spent helping other Mexicans, who can only speak Spanish, deal with daily happenings.''
Goals? ``I'm going to be able to make enough money to give my parents everything they never had.''
Baldovinos, with a 3.38 grade point average, is scheduled to attend Central Washington University in Ellensburg at a time when the average migrant worker's education stops before ninth grade and fewer than 10 percent graduate from high school.
He speaks for illiterate migrant families cheated out of wages. He translates for Mexican students at school, oversees the family's business transactions and reads scripture during the Mexican Mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Lynden.
Baldovinos labors in the farm fields after and often before school. He's worked seven days a week since age 12, sometimes illegally before that. He studies until 10, 11 or later every night, and prods his younger brothers to follow.
``He's had nothing handed to him,'' said Lynden berry farmer Marv Enfield, Baldovinos' employer. ``He's gone after everything he's
achieved and he's usually achieved everything he's gone after.''
Juan Gomez Baldovinos was born on Oct. 20, 1971, in Santo Domingo, a cluster of 40 homes five hours north of Acapulco, Mexico.
The village had no doctor, store, electricity or car.
Children wore no clothes, no one wore shoes, water came from a hole and Juan's father, Amador Baldovinos, cultivated his eight acres with an iron plow drawn by two donkeys. His children sowed the corn kernels and stepped them into the soil.
With a bountiful harvest, some corn was sold for staples or to put the children through school.
Baldovinos' mother, Josefina, baked tortillas in an adobe oven. The family ate cornmeal and beans.
``Anything cheap,'' Baldovinos said.
In 1977, as life grew more marginal, Amador, without education or cultural understanding, entered the United States alone to find work to support his family.
Amador took odd jobs mostly in California, mailing back what he could. Work drew him north once to Toppenish to pick asparagus.
Alberta, the oldest child, begged to join her father, and the destitute family acquiesced. Juan, then 10, also pleaded to go.
Alberta walked over mountains into California with 16 other undocumented immigrants. Juan, for $200, accompanied a Mexican-American woman and used her son's identification.
When Amador Baldovinos and his children reunited that August night in 1981 in New Hall, Calif., Alberta greeted her brother with his first fast-food hamburger.
``I threw it up,'' he said. ``I couldn't eat any of the food.''
Stable jobs were sparse in New Hall, so after Juan finished the school year, the three joined a migrant family in a labor camp on a Toppenish asparagus farm.
That first season was good, and father and daughter sent $2,000 to bring the rest of the family north. Josefina led her children to New Hall, and Amador paid a friend to drive them to Wapato, where he rented a house.
``Now we were all together,'' Juan said, with a jubilant laugh. ``That was a real happy time.''
The next June, a recruiter for Jake Maberry of Lynden visited the family and offered wages and free housing to pick strawberries and raspberries in Whatcom County.
``My dad liked that part about no rent,'' Juan said.
After berry harvest, the family returned to Eastern Washington with $2,500 to put down on a $23,000 house they still own in Zillah.
``That's when I started getting into the paperwork, translating for my parents,'' he said. ``To tell you the truth, we didn't even know what we were doing. I was only in fifth grade. They were big words and I didn't understand them.''
Baldovinos still reads the mail and handles all transactions. When required, his parents sign with an ``X.''
The Baldovinoses cut asparagus in Eastern Washington in the spring; picked strawberries, raspberries and blueberries in Whatcom County in the summer; picked apples in Eastern Washington in the fall; and returned to prune, tie and plant raspberry canes here in the winter.
Juan Baldovinos started thinking of college and a job as an accountant so he could lavish his parents with luxuries.
To beat the heat, work in Eastern Washington often begins at 3 a.m. and goes until noon, making attendance at a regular school impossible. The Baldovinos children attended an evening school in Mabton with other migrant children.
The school offered less than a full load of courses, so each winter Baldovinos added two home courses to his complement of six classes at Lynden High School.
After school, Baldovinos weeds blueberry bushes and sets guide wires for raspberry canes. His work over, he plans for college or focuses on his family and their needs.
``I've been handling things all the time,'' Baldovinos said. ``I really feel bad that I haven't taught one of my brothers a little more (about family affairs). I'm going to have to do that.''