Chican@ Studies

Juan Manuel Galván, “A Long Road to Houston.” The Houston Review of History and Culture Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 2005): 32-34, 67-73, 82-83.

The road traveled by many men and women who cross the southern border of the United States carries countless experiences of suffering and humiliation as well as tireless efforts to provide for their families. Throughout the decades, thousands, perhaps millions of Latin Americans have abandoned their homelands and left for “El Norte,” the United States, in a quest for survival or simply for better opportunities. The stories of these immigrants share many peculiarities, one of the most salient being the struggle and tenacity to earn a living even at the cost of one’s life. What follows is one of those stories that we have heard in part; the rest is known only to those who have experienced what it is like to be an undocumented worker in this country.
This is an account of the life of my father, Daniel Galván, in his own words. His experiences are common, yet unique. While thousands have lived and worked undocumented in the U.S., few have experienced this process both before and after the Bracero Program, a guest worker program in the 1940s to 1960s, and even fewer have eventually become U.S. citizens.
Daniel Galván was born in 1937 in a village in the mountains of Guanajuato in central Mexico and lost his mother at the age of five. He completed less than one year of elementary education and at fifteen, he first crossed over the border as an undocumented farm worker to briefly pick cotton near Harlingen, Texas. In 1957, he joined the Bracero Program and for the next seven years worked off and on in the United States as a legal guest worker.
In these years he generally worked in California picking cotton and lettuce, returning to Mexico to work as a sharecropper in the winters. In 1959, he married Inés Rodríguez and started a family in Mexico, but two of his young children died of preventable diseases due to the isolation and poverty in which he and his family lived.
After the end of the Bracero Program in 1964, Daniel continued to travel back and forth between Mexico and the United States in search of jobs to support his family. From then until 1978, he worked throughout the United States as an undocumented worker once again. He picked cotton in Texas, oranges and lettuce in Arizona, potatoes and alfalfa in Idaho, oranges in Florida, cucumbers in North Carolina, apples in Virginia. Additionally, he worked for a time as a cowboy and irrigator in Idaho and an oil field worker in Texas. During these years, he also regularly visited his family in Mexico, where he worked for months at a time as a sharecropper and a tunneler on projects to build fresh water systems in Mexico City. Every trip across the border brought harsh challenges, with dangerous days walking across hot deserts and the ever present threat of apprehension by border guards.
He first visited Houston in 1978, and he began to stay there and work in service jobs in hotels and restaurants and in construction. In 1987, after 35 years of work in the U.S., he received a green card; in 1994, he became a citizen of the United States. This allowed him to bring his family from Mexico to Houston, where he purchased a home and watched with pride as his family prospered.