NAPA VALLEY (California) REGISTER May 5, 2007 Calderon the toastof Cinco de Mayo By JULISSA McKINNON
Register Staff Writer There have been plenty of days Angel Calderon was so busy making sure all his residents at the River Ranch Farmworker Housing Center have eaten, he himself has forgotten to eat. Hunger arrives like an afterthought.
There are times he’s tried to explain to his wife why he spends so much time preoccupied with the lives and lots of others. Thank goodness, Calderon mused, that she is understanding.
“Instead of spending my spare time at the bar, I say I’m investing it in the community,” Calderon said with his usual soft chuckle. “We all have our vice. This is mine.”
What Calderon perceives as his shortcoming others see as a virtue. For his longtime dedication to both the farmworkers of the Napa Valley, as well as his own hometown of Timbinal in Guanajuato, Mexico, Calderon was named the Hispanic Citizen of the Year by the Napa Valley Cinco de Mayo organization.
“Don Angel is someone who dedicates so much of his time and for many years has gone above and beyond to help the Hispanic community,” said Placido Garcia, the president of the Napa Valley Cinco de Mayo group and a Calistoga City Council member.
Calderon’s outreach to farmworkers began long before he became manager at the River Ranch Farmworker Center seven years ago.
Even in his first job as a line cook, Calderon recalled keeping an eye out for newly arrived migrants in need of guidance to secure the basics: housing, a car, a job.
When tragedies struck the immigrant community, Calderon found himself collecting money needed to send the bodies of migrants home to relatives so that they could be interred in their homeland.
But Calderon’s biggest impact came after he spotted two farmworkers scramble down a steep riverbank in St. Helena one day. He followed them to discover an encampment of about 40 farmworkers living amid squalor in makeshift cardboard beds.
From that day forward Calderon became one of the most vocal advocates for safe and humane housing for farmworkers in a valley that employs thousands of them every growing season.
Because of his constant advocacy for farmworkers, Calderon would eventually be asked to manage the River Ranch center — today the most popular of the three centers.
“I see myself in every immigrant I meet. I think to myself that was me when I first arrived here,” Calderon said, recalling how the migrants he meets are culturally lost, sometimes depressed and overwhelmed by the economic needs of the families they’ve left behind.
Calderon, 54, has spent half of his life in Mexico, and half in the U.S. Sometimes people ask him which country his heart belongs to.
“I tell them the planet Earth,” he said.
Though Calderon’s family has deep roots in the Napa Valley, he never fully left behind his hometown of Timbinal.
Over the past decade, Calderon has organized grassroots efforts with others from his hometown to bring potable water to Timbinal. He has also led efforts to expand and rebuild a school that used to only go to fourth grade. Now it extends to 12th grade. But Calderon said he is most proud of building from scratch a clothing factory that employs and is owned by 100-plus townspeople.
“Before in Timbinal, when we talked about installing street lights, they called us crazy. But we did it.
“Then we talked about paving the highway. They called us crazy. But we did that, too. Now when we say we’re going to do something they don’t call us crazy. Because they know we will do it,” Calderon said.
“People sometimes just need somebody to help them take the first steps. To show them ‘si, se puede’ (yes it can be done),” he said. “We can accomplish things if we work together.”
Calderon joked that his inclination toward organizing started when he was a boy trying to get his mates to raise funds for soccer uniforms.
Perhaps it runs in his blood. His parents kept a close finger on the pulse of town life, he said, by nature of their jobs. Calderon’s father was the designated recorder of births and deaths in the town, as well as being a musician. His mother was a midwife and a nurse, and therefore often present at births, accidents and sometimes deaths.
Despite his deep admiration for his parents, Calderon left home at age 11 to live with relatives and continue his schooling past fourth grade in the nearby city of Morelia.
Calderon said he hopes that the Timbinal school he helped build will send the message to youngsters that a future can be cultivated in their homeland.
“We come to this country to work. So I ask myself why not build ‘El Norte’ right there in Mexico. Let’s build opportunities at home so that people can stop dying along the border,” Calderon said.
“The culture has always been ‘Let’s go north.’ But together we can change that culture.” |