ASSOCIATED PRESS

January 18,2009

 

Texas farmer, Mexican fieldworker reunite in Pacoima after 51 years

 

PACOIMA, CALIFORNIA -- A Texas farmer who aided a lost Mexican field worker and sponsored him for U.S. citizenship 51 years ago, will be reunited with the former fieldworker, relatives said Saturday.

Samuel Perez was separated from a bus hauling Mexican workers with temporary U.S. work permits near an isolated west Texas farm town in the 1950s. The lost and hungry worker knocked on a farmhouse door seeking work, and the farmer, Clarence Martin, of Friona, hired him.

Martin taught Perez English and citizenship skills. After becoming a U.S. citizen, Perez married and moved to Los Angeles, where he raised a family.

The farmer and the former field hand will see each other for the first time in a half century Saturday in Perez's Pacoima home, said Perez's son, Samuel Perez Jr.