Chapter 2
Struggle and Gifts
I have told the bus story to countless groups, and people always come up to me afterwards to tell me how much hearing that story mattered to them. Many tell me they have a bus story of their own. Maybe you do too.
As a kid from the wrong side of the opportunity divide, I can tell you that there was only one thing that mattered to me: I wanted to get off the bus. I wanted the same opportunities that I saw all around me. That was my struggle.
Struggle is painful. Whatever our individual circumstances, we all understand struggle as part of the human condition. It can be demoralizing and defeating when you make a mistake or simply become stuck and don’t know where to turn. It’s publicly humiliating when you can’t hide your failure from others. Nonetheless, my advice for anyone with the courage to do so is to make struggle your best friend. Although it’s uncomfortable, it’s the most honest and revealing measure of progress toward becoming the leader you desire to be.
To understand my journey with struggle, I would like to tell you a story about my dad.
In the spring of 1954 my dad, Jorge, waited in line at a reception center in northern Mexico as he had been doing every spring for years. There were millions more like him across Mexico, waiting day after day to be selected as a bracero. Braceros were manual laborers, their name coming from the Spanish word meaning “one who works with his arms.” The Bracero Program was an agreement between the United States and Mexico that began in 1942 and continued until 1964. It was created to supply temporary labor to the United States, offsetting worker shortages during World War II.
While millions waited, only 300,000 were chosen to become contract workers that year. As a teenager, my father had set his heart on joining the military, but family hardships had made it impossible. After missing that opportunity, he was determined to become a bracero. He had to wait for nine years, but my father was finally selected.
As a bracero, my dad performed long hours of backbreaking work harvesting produce throughout the western United States, leaving his wife and young children behind in Mexico for months at a time. Enduring harsh conditions, he earned less than $1 an hour. Though he always tried to protect me from knowing the worst of his experiences, I know now that housing and sanitation were typically substandard (if not squalid) and food was inadequate—conditions that violated the braceros’ contract agreements. But that didn’t seem to matter. Treatment of laborers in the field was often brutal.
During the last days of his life, my dad told me that the day he became a bracero was the day he won la lotería—the lottery. Knowing what he had been through, I was more than a little confused by his words. I would have expected anger at the deprivation, ill treatment, and low wages he was forced to endure. But my dad had a different perspective. His mother, my abuelita, was rescued off the streets after being orphaned as a baby girl. Growing up in Chihuahua, mired in intergenerational poverty, my dad’s single-minded aim was to end his family’s cycle of impoverishment. He would offer his own children something more than he had. There was no sacrifice too great and no condition too harsh for him to bear when it came to providing for us.
In 1964, my mother, Martina, and my brothers and sisters immigrated to the United States with my dad when the Bracero Program ended. I joined the family four years later and was the first sibling to be born in the United States. My parents settled in southeast New Mexico, where my dad worked on a sheep ranch. We lived in a small two-bedroom home filled with love but very few luxuries. Of the thirteen kids in our family, I was one of the youngest.
From an early age I grew accustomed to waking at 5:00 a.m. to work, whether in the fields with my siblings as a migrant farm family or with my dad in our small ranch community. Working before and often after school was our way of life.
Every spring my family left school in April and headed to Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. We harvested onions, potatoes, and pears and weeded sugar beet fields. By September, we were back in school, wearing the new school clothes we bought with money we earned, trying to catch up on the lessons we had missed. As a young child, I began working to contribute to the family. I would still get time to play and roam with my younger brother Ed, but work eventually evolved to six days a week and ten hours a day in the cotton fields of New Mexico and Texas as I grew older. What was normal for me seemed as if it was normal for everyone.
By the time I reached junior high, though, I was aware that while my hardworking parents were doing their best, the difference between our family and others around us was plain to see. Though I never felt ashamed, I was very defensive of what others might know or say about us. When my mom sent me to buy milk, I hid behind the grocery store dumpster and only went in to buy what we needed right before closing so no one would see me pay with food stamps. When I stood in line for school lunches, I devised a comical routine of distracting the kids around me so they wouldn’t notice the attendant checking my name off the free lunch list. It was a game of saving face, which I played in order to make our family look the same as everyone else’s.
It wasn’t until I was eighteen, in the Army and three weeks into boot camp, polishing my boots by flashlight at 11:30 p.m., that I began to re-evaluate my upbringing. Surrounded by members of my new platoon, I found that most of the others were unprepared for long hours of drills, the sergeant’s demeaning profanity, and the systematic breakdown of everything we thought to be true about ourselves. As everyone around me that night complained about waking up at 4:30 a.m. to start the next torturous day of training, I realized it was not that different from the life I had lived at home. I had already endured years of labor in the fields, rising before dawn. I had already encountered blatant racism, and I was already accustomed to living without material comforts or much free time.
That night it occurred to me that what I had already experienced was as tough as what I would face in the next few months. For the first time, having struggled early in life was turning out to be an advantage. It felt like a gift not to worry whether I would make it through basic training. I never questioned whether I could handle the grueling physicality and mental strain demanded from new recruits. I simply needed to draw on the persistence, strength, and resilience I already had.
I was grateful for the sacrifices my parents had made, but it took longer to internalize that my dad—a humble, powerful peasant—had accomplished his goal for our family. Even though it didn’t feel like it as a kid, he had succeeded in providing opportunities for his children that were never available to him.
Eventually I began to study in earnest what struggle had taught me, why I should be grateful for it, and how I could apply the lessons it offered. In each case, struggle gave me a gift. I realized that I could often look back to an event from my past to find the clarity I needed. When I found myself facing a new challenge, my life experience could provide a new story and a crucial lesson to add to what I knew.
Years later I called Mr. Teague to share the life-altering impact of that moment of altruism on the bus. I shared the inspiration I drew from that experience to pay forward his kind act. He was deeply touched. A few days later a note arrived from him thanking me for the call and admitting it had brought tears to his eyes. He told me that my call made him feel that his life had mattered.
Many people have told me that they see themselves as that kid on the bus; they remember how it felt to be invisible. Even more people tell me about becoming the generous, observant person who notices a kid being left out. You might offer something as simple as listening to their story and taking the time to recognize them for who they are. We never know how a single kind act might alter the day—or the life—of a struggling kid who crosses our path.
