Joaquin Martinez

Family is love. Wisdom you can only inherit it if you go to school. The most wisdom you have in you as a person, the better person you’ll be and the best success you’ll have.

Joaquin Martinez

My name is Joaquin Martinez. Most people know me as Jack. I was born in Mexico in a small town that’s called Teotlalco. We had a little ranch going on. Living poorly, it was. My father traveled to the US before I was born. He kept coming back, back and forth. He went back and forth like that until I was about nine. Then my dad thought he would be back for good and that’s when he bought all these nice things like cows and horses, goats that I was taking care of.

In a small village, you have to pitch in with the activities within the family. That’s actually very good, too because it makes the family be stronger. You have these responsibilities that you have to commit to and it gets you closer. Then you begin to realize and not everything is for free, you have to actually work for it.

Things were not going so well, they decided to sell everything and move back here. I was about ten. Can you imagine yourself being in another country, complete strange country, complete stranger with no friends, other language? I experienced that horrible, horrible time. I say it’s horrible because I remember my first day of school in California, Pasadena.

I didn’t know what to do, I was in shock, I couldn’t do anything. Imagine a kid that was coming to this class that doesn’t know the language. But then there was this little girl, I think her name was Maria. She comes up to me and she says, “Do you speak you English?” I said, “No.” She said, “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know what we’re suppose to do?” I said, “No.” She said, “Well, I’m going to translate for you.” That was very nice.

Somehow I managed to learn the language. I was doing good in school. Then another tragedy happened. It was a tragedy for me because I wanted to see my parents together forever. But for some reasons they decided to get a divorce. I had to start working at fourteen because my mother couldn’t support us kids. I was being the boy, the older boy of the family, I felt like I had to step in. We are family and family has to help each other. I worked through my whole high school. Because of a hundred word English essay, I didn’t graduate from high school. And because I didn’t graduate, I didn’t feel like I was good enough and I didn’t even try to go to college.

Then I heard about my uncle who was moving up here to Minnesota. I have a brother who was four years younger than me. At fourteen years old, he was being a troublemaker. He won’t go to school; he was getting into a lot of trouble. So then I thought, he looked up to me and we’ve always been close. So I asked my mom, I said, “If I move to Minnesota, can I bring Luis with me?” We got here and we got even closer. My brother started to do okay at school. He grew into a very responsible person. Now he’s twenty-six years old, he’s got two kids and he’s a wonderful person.

My first job that I got in Minnesota, there was a gas station across the street and I kept stopping every day to get a cup of coffee or I think that was a good excuse. That’s where I met her, my wife Mary. A year later we got together and we got married and then we had Adriana, Andrea, and little Joaquin, Jr. I love them very much and I love my wife with all my heart, too.

The moral of this is when you have the chance to go to school, please go to school. It is better for you. It is better for your family. It is better for your future family when you grow older and have your own kids, family.