Foundation: Birria and Tacos are my Comfort Food

My parents emigrated from Mexico to work as migrant field workers in the US. They worked incredibly hard to provide me with a great education. After graduating from Stanford, I joined Google as an early employee and in the last 15 years have started a few tech companies and become an active angel investor. Getting more Hispanics into tech and supporting them as tech entrepreneurs is important to me.

During Hispanic Heritage month, I am going to write an article per weekday about my experience growing up between Mexico and the US - and my experience as a Latino in tech. Posts: 1

My parents are from a small town in Mexico called Juchitlan - it's about 2 hours from Guadalajara, the capitol city of Jalisco. It’s basically a bedroom community for the US agriculture and manufacturing industry. The official population is about 5,000, but as seasonal workers leave for and return from the US, it shrinks to a couple thousand and swells to almost 20,000 by the Christmas season.

Before our daughter was born, my wife and I visited Juchitlan. It was important to me for her to see and appreciate the place where I spent formative years.

My family was part of the seasonal workforce. In April we would leave Juchitlan and arrive in Oxnard, California where my father picked lemons and strawberries until June. Then we would move to the central valley of California (From Modesto to Gridley - depending on the year), where my parents would pick peaches, nectarines, walnuts and then in September/October we would move to Oroville Washington to pick apples. Sometimes we would move back to the central valley for a few weeks and then back to Oroville for the end of the harvest. But by early December, we were always back in Juchitlan Mexico. This was the case except for my first Apple picking season. 9 months after being born, my parents were getting ready to move to Washington, but they were unable to organize childcare - so an aunt flew up from Mexico and took me back to Juchitlan. My mom was visibly distraught by my absence, and the owner of the apple orchard told her that the following year, she should bring me and if needed, she would take care of me while they worked.

My first language was Spanish, but by three, I started to pick up English by watching TV - mostly Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, but also Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Dallas (with my folks of course). When we were in Washington, it would sometimes be so cold, that my parents preferred to leave me in the trailer watching TV (Am sure that some of you think that CPS should’ve been called - but I can assure you that during Covid, many kids were left alone because their parents needed to work) - so I watched a lot of TV - A LOT OF TV.

But when we were in Mexico, it was completely different. Mexico meant freedom and family. In the States, my parents worked all day, every couple of weeks we would move to a new city, we would get up at 5am to head to fields and we rarely saw family. While in Juchitlan, we had a home and, because it was a small town, there was a community of friends and family that looked out for each other. The days were punctuated by my playing basketball with my uncles, visiting my grandmothers, always being annoyed that everything was closed during the mid-afternoon siesta and in the evening playing tag or riding my scooter around the town square. Life was marvelous.

Once I started school, we settled down in Oxnard, California. My mom went to the local community college to become more employable. My dad would eventually do the same, but that first year, he still left for almost a month to pick apples in Washington. I remember when he left, he told me that he would have a layover in Las Vegas - and I told him to play the slots so he could win and make enough money so he could come back immediately. He didn’t win.

I spent a lot of time with my parents in the early years - before my brother was born - and before we settled down in Oxnard and I learned the following which have been formative lessons:?

• Family is everything. My parents would do and still do anything and everything for their family.
• Everything is possible with hard work. A year after my parents decided to settle down, they teamed up with my aunt and they bought a house in a school district with a good school.
• Success is a team effort. Although there were certain things like changing the oil or fixing the washing machine that my mother never did, my dad shared 100% of the household chores with my mom. He cooked, he cleaned, he swept, he ironed just as much as my mom did.?

Given the amount of time I spent in Mexico in the early years, and the life that I’ve built in the US makes me feel solidly Mexican and solidly American.?