| In honor of Latino Heritage Month, The Capital City Hues will be publishing the stories of three Latino immigrants who came to the Madison area when the Latino community was in its infancy during the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout its history, America has been continuously regenerated by the immigrants who have come to its shores or who have crossed its deserts. Many immigrants-- legal or illegal --have pursued the American Dream and have found it. Our first story is that of Marcial Marquez who was born in Mexico, emigrated here with his mother and now works in the parts shop at Alliant Energy's Columbia power plant. Along with his wife Rosie, Marquez owns the building on Commercial Avenue near Sherman Boulevard, which houses The Inferno nightclub that is operated by their son Apollo. Anyone who has traveled south of the border into Mexico has seen young children hustling for money down dusty streets. Marcial Marquez was one of those children on the Mexico side of Laredo, Texas where he grew up. Although he didn't know it when he was young, his mother was a migrant worker who left her children with their grandmother while she went to migrant camps near Palmyra, Wisconsin to work the fields and the canneries. "My grandmother had five of her own and there were five of us," Marquez explained. "She couldn't take care of all of us, so I ended up being away making money. If my grandmother had a good handle on us, I probably wouldn't have had to go on the streets. But even if she had a good handle on us, she didn't have any money to give us for anything. It was hard." "You could see the little fairgrounds that would come and set up a little tent on the corner," Marquez recalled. "I didn't have any money because my mother worked as a migrant and my grandmother didn't have any time for us. So I had to make my own money. And your little buddies would tell you 'Hey man, let's go to the fair. I have 100 pesos.' That's like $10. My mother used to make $10 a week. And my buddy has $10 and he did shoe shinning and selling papers and doing this and doing that. I had to get a piece of that. It was the Mexican Dream." Marquez learned how to hustle for a dollar. He is quick to emphasize that he wasn't a homeless waif. He always had a roof over his head and there were always beans and tortillas to eat. But if he wanted some spending money of his own, he had to go out into the streets to hustle for it. Selling newspapers in Mexico wasn't like a home delivery route in the U.S. "In Mexico, you go into a garage and there's a bunch of kids there and you buy your newspapers," Marquez recalled. "You buy a bundle of them. Let's say you sell them for an American quarter and you buy them for 20 cents. The paper is printed by 1:30 p.m. or so and then the kids come around 3 p.m. when they open up this big hanging door. The kids just run out into the street. Everyone had their own little turf. I had ten city blocks by two square blocks. Those were my streets. You fight for that territory. You find another kid selling on your streets, you kick his ass. "Those are my streets. You can't be selling newspapers here." As in the United States, sensational headlines often sold newspapers. "It was pretty common for there to be a murder or someone to get knifed or a businessman got caught doing something illegal in the restrooms or whatever," Marquez said. "The paper would just sell like hotcakes. A lot of time, you had to go back for more. Once I would get out there, after six blocks, I would be out of papers. I would have to run off and buy some more. Otherwise if they didn't see you, they would think you were done selling and went home and then the other kids could infiltrate your territory. The other kids had their own customers to take care of too." There were other "business opportunities" for Marquez as well. "Years ago, I think little Mexicans invented FedEx," Marquez said with a smile. "Businessmen would say 'I have a package that has to go to the pharmacy. The pharmacy would be on my route and I would deliver the package if the guy would pay me. Whatever you could do, you did. When you were a kid, it was 'Get me this and get me that.' I would go to bars and if they didn't sell cigarettes, people would say 'Go get me a couple of packs of cigarettes.' You would get the cigarettes and they would give you one or two pesos. People relied on kids to do a lot of things. We had a lot of errands to do." While Marquez was supposed to be going to school, his grandmother would often lose track of him because she was trying to care for 10 children while Marquez's mother was away working. He had to repeat the 6th grade. "I had to retake my last year of high school too because of playing hooky," Marquez said. "I would go to the river to swim or smoke. This was in Laredo on the Mexican side." And then, when he started to come of age, it was time for Marquez to accompany his mother on the migrant trail. "I was a migrant for two seasons," Marquez recalled. "My brother did it for four seasons and my mother had been doing it all along." Next issue: From migrant in Palmyra to landlord in Madison |
| Immigrant success stories From the fields to business By Jonathan Gramling Part 1 of 2 |
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| Marcial Marquez (right) moved to Madison from northern Mexico in the mid-1960s. |