Jose Martinez Takes the Reins as UMOS CEO: From Fields to Boardroom (Part 1 of 2)
Jose Martinez started working in the fields at age four, travelling from Texas to Montana to Michigan and back again.
by Jonathan Gramling
For over 50 years, Lupe Martinez built UMOS into a multi-state human service provider with migrants and their families at the core of whom they serve. In 2022, UMOS had $74 million in revenue and had hundreds of employees providing services in six states.
Earlier this year, Martinez announced that he would be stepping down as the UMOS CEO and that a national search would be conducted to replace him. As it ended up, the UMOS board didn’t have to look far for Martinez’s replacement. On September 1, Jose Martinez — no relation — took over the reins of the organization he has worked at for almost 30 years. In addition to his commitment to the mission of UMOS and the people it serves, Jose also has something else in common with Lupe. They were both migrant farm workers when they were young.
Jose Martinez comes from a migrant family of eight children whose base was southern Texas/ As with many migrant families, it was believed that the more hands available to do the work, the better off financially the family would come. The would first travel to Montana to work the sugar beet fields. Martinez started working in the fields when he was four-years-old.
“My dad was a big fellow,” Martinez said. “So when you do the sugar beets, you would always have two plants that are so close to one another, so you have to be careful with the hoe. If you scrape the other one, then the beet isn’t going to grow and you don’t get much sugar. You have to bend over and remove that plant that is too close to the other plant. They called it a twin. My job at four-years-of-age was every time there was a twin, my dad would have me hold the twin aside so that he could continue his hoeing. My dad worked fast. We used to do about 250 acres with
sugar beet hoeing. You would do a first round and then you would do a cleaning. We also did over 100 acres of beans. This is fast work. We worked from 4 a.m. because the son usually rises by 5 a.m. We had to be out in the fields before then. We came home about 9 p.m. That’s when the sun starts setting over the mountains. We were unlucky because we sat in a township, which was Fairview. Part of it was in the Central time zone and part of it was in the Mountain time zone. Mountain time zone means that you followed the Mountain time zone with everything that dealt with work. Anything else followed the Central time zone. That meant that for the most part, we were out early in the morning to late at night.”
The family would also migrate to Michigan to work in the production of blueberries, cherries, pickles and apples before returning to Texas for the winter.
On one of those trips to Montana, the trajectory of Martinez’s life changed when his family was introduced to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Migrant Head Start program, part of his 1960s War on Poverty. It wasn’t easy getting in.
“This wonderful lady, a social worker, came over and met with my dad and tried to convince him to allow us to go to school because I was still of age, along with my sister, to attend Head Start back then. It took a lot of convincing. When you think about our Hispanic culture, it’s the dad who says mom makes all the decisions for the home. And dads make all the decisions outside of the home. He would tell the lady, ‘You need to speak to my wife because she takes care of all of that stuff.’ And of course his wife would say, ‘Well, you need to speak to my husband because he takes care of anything that has to do with our kids go somewhere else.’ So they had her going back and forth until finally she got tired and she pulled both of them together and said, ‘Look, this program really works. Your kids are going to really have fun and enjoy it.’ My dad finally gave in. ‘You know what? What is it going to take for you stop coming this way?’ And the decision was, ‘Just say yes to try it out. And then I will stop bothering you.’ Finally my dad said yes.”
Head Start introduced the family to the value of an education, a lesson that was never lost on the Martinez family.
“My dad’s realization came when he said, ‘It makes sense that education is an important component in your lives,’” Martinez said. “And so that was now his biggest push for us. He wanted to make sure that he didn’t remove us from school. We still had to work. Anytime that we had a winter break, we were out in the fields working. When you think about things that you learn from your parents,a work ethic is one of them. The other thing that our dad always taught us was it doesn’t matter what you do. If you do it well to the expectations, then you are doing a good job. Therefore it is the quality and caliber of the work that we learned from dad and it did matter. I’m the youngest of all eight siblings. Some of us have already retired. And every job they had, they did it well. My second oldest brother was a chemist. He retired. When we talked, we talked about the work ethic and we met those expectations. It’s very different sometimes. You have to think about the fact that it was a different time and culture that we grew up with.”
Martinez’s migrant days ended in 1979 when his father died of cancer at the age of 39. And so he began a different career trajectory. Upon graduating from high school, he entered the military. An opportunity that many low income teenagers took to succeed in life and get an education.
“I signed up for the military at 17-years-old,” Martinez said. “My mom had to sign me up. And then I was off to boot camp and served my country and left when I was a non-commissioned officer. Soon after that, I enlisted in school. I took advantage of the Educational Assistance Program. Basically you took a course or courses. You paid upfront. And then if you passed a course, they reimbursed you for it. When you go to college, you are poor, looking for ways to make ends meet. They said, ‘Hey, why don’t you sign up for the ROTC Program?’ They actually pay you — I was an inactive reservist already — to go two days out of the month. Depending on when you left, your starting pay would be close to a non-commissioned officer. I had four kids and I am going to college. Where do I sign? And so I signed up for the ROTC program. I completed the ROTC program and soon after that, I was sent to Ft. Riley, Kansas for boot camp for officers. I completed in 1991 the boot camp and became a commissioned officer. I then left the military.”
Martinez worked for a non-profit and would be instrumental in building the non-profit to provide an array of human services.
“I started working in the summer program for a non-profit agency that had a summer school program,” Martinez said. “I oversaw there summer school program. Soon after that, they asked me if I would consider becoming the supervisor for the program. Another six months later, I was promoted to the program director position. This was the very first shelter facility in South Texas. It was a emergency shelter, so we worked with runaway youth. Soon after that, we added an assessment facility. And then we became a site for child protective services.”
After a while, Martinez began to burn out because every day presented new crises for the organization. And then UMOS came knocking with a new opportunity.
Next Issue: Climbing the Ladder at UMOS