SILER CITY — Mexican immigrants Margarito Parroquin and Leonila Herrera underwent 25 years of blood, sweat and tears to put three children through college and ensure they led better lives than their parents.
And so far, their labor has paid off: their two sons, Geovanni and Bryant graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with degrees in political science and sociology, while their youngest daughter, Yamil, just started attending Central Carolina Community College in Chatham with plans to transfer to UNC. She intends to study nursing.
“I’m grateful for everything they’ve done,” said Bryant, now the Hispanic Liaison’s communications manager. “And the position I am in, in my life right now, is because of them.”
Margarito immigrated to California in 1988 when he was 17 hoping to find better opportunities, earn some money and return home to Veracruz State, Mexico, where he’d intended to continue studying. At that point, he’d attended school for about 11 years — up until high school — and he’d dreamed of studying law so that he could defend the rights of others.
But then he met his future wife, Herrera, in California and started a family. They married in August of 1992.
“Having a family makes it very difficult to go back and adjust,” he said. “We went two or three times, but it wasn’t the same anymore. So, we decided to come back (to the U.S.) and stay, give our children a better chance at life here.”
They moved to Siler City in 1995. Margarito found work in hardwood flooring and on a farm, where he toiled most weekends. Herrera became a seamstress. While she bounced around different jobs, Margarito has held the same jobs since ’95, working nearly every day to provide their children with a better quality of life and the means to “become someone in this country.”
“A lot of it has to do with how you get along with them as parents, as a couple, being an example to them more than anything,” he said. “If there is not that communication, there is not that harmony and it is quite difficult for a boy to get where he wants.”
It’s been a difficult journey, Margarito said. As a young man, he had to leave behind his friends, family and studies. While raising a family, he and Herrera lived paycheck to paycheck. He rose early in the morning, worked in the scorching heat and freezing cold alike, and returned late to bed. Likewise, Herrera rose at 4 a.m. to get to work by 5 a.m.
“They said (in Mexico), ‘No, in the north, you make money.’ This is a big lie. Here you come to suffer,” he said. “At first you suffer (and) when finally you establish yourself, you begin to see your effort justified. There was a saying we had there, ‘You suffer a lot, but you enjoy yourself. You wanted America. Now get to work.’”
That’s why he urged his children to get an education.
“By having an education, you have many opportunities,” Margarito said. “As I told them when they were little, ‘Education is a key that can open many doors for you wherever you go.’ Without education, it’s very difficult.”
To drive this lesson home, he often took his children to work with him at the farm to show them “what it costs to earn a living if one doesn’t have an education.”
“Someone else tells you what to do,” he said. “You go out in hot weather, the heat, the mosquitoes, in the cold weather that we are almost in right now. (You get ready) at 5 in the morning. At 6 a.m. (you are) there with the cold, everything frozen. Going to school, preparing yourself, educating yourself, being in an office making a living in another way — it’s not the same.”
Each of the Parroquin siblings heeded that advice and achieved — or is working to achieve — what Bryant calls “the ultimate goal” for the children of immigrants: graduating college.
“(Going to the farm) kind of taught me what hard work means and what it means to be putting food on the table for your family,” Bryant said, adding: “That put a better image in my head of like, why (I should) continue pushing in school. Do I want to end up working out here in the cold, working from like 5 a.m. to 6 or 7 p.m., if not longer, or educate myself and find a better position for myself where I can actually help my family?”
It was hard to maneuver the college application process, he said — especially the application fees and FAFSA form, which he had to fill out himself — but his parents continued to motivate and support him, providing whatever they could to the extent they could.
“With no ifs and buts,” Bryant said, “(my dad) would really tell us, ‘What do you need? It might not be accessible, but we’ll figure a way to make it happen. Like, do you need a calculator? Do you need this textbook? We’re gonna get you to college, no matter what.’”
To get him and his siblings where they needed to go, his mother also prioritized their needs over her own.
“Everything she does, everything she does, she always does for her family first,” Bryant added. “It’s as simple as going to the store. She will never buy anything for her(self) to always make sure me, my brother, my sister, my dad are well clothed and well fed before herself.”
Never give up and keep pushing — that’s what he hears from them all the time.
“(My dad) sees his dreams in us,” Bryant said. “Not as far as he wants us to do what he wanted to do, but he wants to make sure that we reach our goals and our dreams.”
He holds one particular goal close to his heart: repaying all of his parents’ sacrifice and support by getting a high-paying job to help his parents out.
“I have goals ... like finding ways to help them live better, where they can, like, retire, stop working, and I can be like, ‘Yo, I got you if you need anything, like that one doctor bill, you ain’t gotta stress about it,’” he said, later adding: “I feel like the majority of life, they’ve been working and not really enjoying.”
But like many children of immigrants, that mindset puts a lot of pressure on his shoulders. Whether his parents’ efforts were worth it — that’s all on him, Bryant said.
“A lot of other kids, or people from my generation, can just lean more on their parents and have a more solidified foundation here in this country,” he said. “And whereas pretty much my only foundation (is) my two parents, and I can make or break their efforts that they put through so many years.”
Bryant felt that weight come crashing down on him when he graduated unemployed a year ago. He sent in job application after job application, only to be rejected again and again. He ended up working three months at a sawmill and spent every moment of it feeling like a “failure.”
“There were many days I would come home from work, and I would just close myself in my room,” he said. “My parents would be like, ‘Everything’s OK. Everything’s OK.’ It’s just these thoughts in my head that were like, ‘Yo, four years of college that was deemed a top-five public university, and I’m still working on the sawmill.’”
That’s why achieving that 9-to-5 office job with the Hispanic Liaison meant everything to Bryant. It was the first step toward achieving his overarching dream — support and lift up his parents as much as they’ve supported and lifted him.
At the end of the day, Margarito’s biggest dream is to see his children succeed, achieve their goals and “be good people.” And what they’ve achieved so far, he said, has made him so proud.
“Imagine what great pride (I have) to see my son graduate from one of the best universities here at the state and at the national levels, UNC — the oldest, the second (have done it) and I hope my daughter achieves it, too,” Margarito said. “(It’s) triple pride in coming from where we come from and nowadays saying: ‘No, my son’s a college graduate, so is the other and I hope to have a third.’”
Reporters Patsy Montesinos and Victoria Johnson can be reached at pmontes2@chathamnr.com and victoria@chathamnr.com.