Tuesday, September 14, 1999

Patriarch has passed down life's lessons

   Angelita Alvarez needs only look to her two grown daughters to know that some of the most valuable lessons the family has learned have come from her own father, 84-year-old Manuel R. Lopez.
   Lopez never attended a day of school but spent his adult life encouraging his children and grandchildren to strive for more. It paid off with Alvarez's two daughters, who earned college degrees in architecture and home economics; other Lopez grandchildren have followed suit.
   How Lopez was able to exert such influence, says Lopez's son, Manuel, is ingenious. Manuel Lopez, 55, is a college graduate and juvenile parole officer with the Texas Youth Commission.
   Rather than trumpet the virtues of schooling, admonish them when they didn't feel like attending classes or issue ultimatums, the elder Lopez steered his progeny toward the road of education through simple storytelling. The stories took all who listened to the labor of fields, where the amount of cotton, onions, carrots and cabbage picked determined the wages a person or, in many cases, families earned.
   "My father has always had a unique approach to things," says Manuel Lopez, who notes that his father's stories always drive home three basic principles: dependability, honesty and respect.
   'The original troqueros'
   The senior Lopez got his first taste of migrant work at the age of 13, following his own father to crops in the Texas Panhandle. In those years, he says, few Hispanic children who grew up on ranches attended school. "The ones who did were the ones whose parents spoke English."
   After marrying and starting a family of his own, Lopez and his brother, each owners of 2-ton bobtail trucks, used their assets to find niche work as "troqueros."
   "They were the original troqueros, the farm labor crew leaders," says the younger Manuel Lopez. "Nowadays, the troqueros we know are the guys who drive the 18-wheelers."
   Every day, at the crack of dawn, the senior Lopez was driving through the neighborhoods, picking up 100 or so field workers and transporting them to the fields. There, he was in charge of weighing what the laborers brought in and documenting in a ledger the wages they were due on payday, which was every Saturday. If life wasn't hard enough, he had to be mother and father to his young family of six when his wife was sidelined with tuberculosis.
   Valuable lessons
   Much has changed in Manuel Lopez's lifetime. But constant is the value of what he learned as a young boy, lessons his children now go out of their way to instill in their own offspring.
   "My father taught us never to be ashamed of where we came from," says Alvarez, who labored as a migrant worker during her teen-age years. "He told us we were part of the cotton industry, not the most glamorous part of it but nevertheless a part of what others took and then turned into what we all use.
   "What my father did and what we did wasn't for nothing. Sometimes I make my kids cry when I tell them their grandfather's story. But they listen and learn."
  
  
 

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  © 1999 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.