John Florez was 10 years old the first time he saw his father cry. It was a summer day in El Paso, Texas, in 1942. Florez was little and he was sick, too, with a fever. So he was helpless for several reasons in addition to the main one, which was that he had not yet learned how to fight discrimination.
Florez and his parents and his older brother and sister had tried living in Mexico for a year. But now, because John had an infection and needed to see an American doctor, the family was returning to Salt Lake City.John remembers the train ride and how miserable he was, even with the windows down to let the hot wind blow over his warm face. When the train stopped in El Paso, his father hurried off into the station to buy the children a sandwich and a cool drink.
John's father came back quickly. He told his family that the people at the lunch counter refused to sell him anything because he was a Mexican. And then he cried.
John Florez did not stay helpless for long. He grew up to be an influential man. People listened when John Florez spoke - not just people in Utah but in Washington, D.C., and other places as well.
Florez was a young man during the 1960s, during the decade when U.S. cities burned and leaders were assassinated. For the first time, in the aftermath of inner-city riots, businessmen - men of privilege - were willing to sit down with leaders of the minority communities. They were willing to talk about poverty, about jobs and education, about working together.
And Florez was there - with a master's degree in social work and experience in organizing Salt Lake's first Community Action Program - to accept a position as field director with the National Urban Coalition. He traveled the country, bringing together diverse communities in each city he visited, making sure the conversations would begin.
Florez became an agent of change, as were many others of his generation. Within his family, as well, Florez's generation was the one that knew the most change. He and his brother and sisters are bilingual. Yet their mother never spoke much English, and most of their children never learned Spanish.
John and his siblings don't claim to have a perfect understanding of their parents' lives. Sometimes they think they understand even less about the world their children inhabit. Still, they are the bridge. In them, two cultures meet.
John Florez sits in his sister's living room, looks at photos and reminisces. "Remember how our mother always wore a sweater and an apron over her housedress? And sometimes with a pair of argyle socks?"
Florez's sister, Rebecca Florez Alvera, nods and chuckles. Alvera and her husband, Ben, live in a tidy and quiet home on a tidy and quiet street in Rose Park. As the evening progresses and more relatives drop by, the living room grows louder with laughter.
John and Rebecca's younger sister, Delores Garcia, comes in, carrying apples. Later, Garcia and Alvera are going to make empanadas. Then one of Alvera's daughters-in-law drops by, all dressed up and just off work. And then the Alveras' 18-year-old granddaughter, Danielle, comes in. She, too, carries apples.
"We are talking about our mother," Danielle's great-uncle John explains. "You are lucky your mother is not like ours was. We had to let her say a blessing over us if we wanted to travel as far away as Murray. If we were going to go to Ogden, we were on our knees for a long time while she prayed."
Florez's parents were both born in 1898 in Fresnillo, Zacatecas, Mexico. They married young and headed for the United States, at their parents' urging, sometime around 1918.
When Florez tells the story, he mentions the Mexican revolution, saying his father was with Pancho Villa and that's why he needed to leave the country. When Alvera tells the story, she says her parents came to the United States to find a safer life for their children.
Perhaps they were both, revolutionaries and new parents. On one point about their parents' early life, John and Rebecca agree: Their parents, Incarnacion and Reyes George Florez, had 12 children, and the first nine of them died.
Some of the Florezes' children - including two sets of twins - were stillborn or died in infancy. Some grew into robust childhood before succumbing to diphtheria, measles or whooping cough.
When Incarnacion and Reyes first came to the United States, they followed the ripening crops, finding work in Idaho and rural Utah for several years. Eventually Reyes got a job with the railroad.
John and his older sister and brother, Rebecca and Rey, were born in Utah during the late 1920s and early 1930s. They grew up during the Depression, living with their parents near the railroad tracks on the west side of downtown Salt Lake City. They lived in a boxcar.
Their parents made the boxcar into a home. There was always food on the stove, and everyone who stopped by - whether it be a priest or a hobo - was invited to share tortillas and beans.
The children were never afraid of the hobos, Alvera recalls. "They were human beings." The homeless men always offered to work for their supper, and their mother always declined, Florez says. "She'd say, `No. Hungry. Eat.' " They'd remember her and repay her generosity, six months later, when they passed by again, bringing cheese or eggs. "Or silverware from the Hotel Utah," Florez says, laughing.
Reyes made the boxcar more comfortable by running an electrical line from the rail yard and a water line from Burbidge Coal Co. across the street. The family heated their water and their home with a coal stove.
Incarnacion kept the house spotless and planted flowers and vegetables. Florez remembers cinders raining down on their yard every time a train passed by. But still his mother's garden flourished.
The family expanded when the Florezes adopted 1-year-old Delores, the child of a friend who died of pneumonia. She was as babied and overprotected as if she were their natural daughter, Florez says.
His father was, above all else, a hard worker, Florez remembers. During the Depression, Reyes realized there were men standing in line to take his job, and he began to fear what would happen to his family if he were fired. As an insurance policy, in those days before the advent of Social Security numbers, he took on two shifts. He worked one shift under the name of Reyes Florez and the other under the name of George Martinez.
Both parents harped on the importance of education. First Rebecca, then Rey, then John spent a miserable year or two at the beginning of elementary school, as they struggled to learn English. Alvera can remember only one teacher who took the time to teach her English words.
When they came home discouraged, their mother sang and rocked them and cheered them with stories of the beauty of their native culture. Their mother, the children agree, was an incredible optimist. Her Catholic faith buoyed her every breath.
John Florez's son, Gregory, remembers his grandmother as more than happy. "She was peaceful. She had an almost zenlike approach to life. She lived totally in the present, and each chore she performed, whether it was sweeping or weeding, she was totally immersed in it."
She was a frail woman, but a powerful woman, he says. Gregory believes her power came from love. His grandmother spoke very little English, but he knew her heart from the way she stroked his forehead and smiled into his face. And when he skinned his knee and she knelt beside him and covered his scrapes with rose petals and chanted something sweet and soft, then he felt her affection more deeply than ever. "I think she was a healer," he says.
Many people thought she was a healer. In Hispanic communities throughout the West, Incarnacion Florez was known to be a curendera.
Ferol Benavides wrote about curenderas in general, and Incarnacion Florez specifically, in the Utah State Historical Quarterly in the fall of 1973. She describes a way of caring that has no parallel in Anglo society. A curandera is part folk psychiatrist, part lay minister and part naturopathic physician.
The origins of the curenderas date back to the the origins of the Mexican culture: to the Aztecs who understood the uses of plants that grew around them and to the Spanish who introduced Catholicism and European methods of medicine. Incarnacion Florez, like 19th-century curenderas, used herbs as well as theories about the balancing properties of certain foods. She also prayed to certain saints. Florez always said, "I will pray for you, but God is doing the healing."
A curendera helped people find comfort in a strange country. John Florez says there were no words in English to translate the subtle feelings of his culture. His mother understood mal ojo, which translates as "evil eye," but which has more to do with feeling jealous or out of balance because of greed. His mother understood empacho, which translates as "surfeit" and which Alvera says can best be described as the feeling you get in your stomach when you eat something not well-cooked, perhaps too doughy.
In a new country that felt unloving, hers was a gift of love. Incarnacion Florez always sent people to the doctor if she knew she couldn't help them. Of course there were no Hispanic doctors in Utah until the mid-1970s. Her patients could get antibiotics from the Anglo doctors but not much understanding.
Rebecca learned her mother's recipes for chili verde, mole, tortillas - for everything her mother made except her cures. By the time she was grown, her mother had stopped performing her medicine around her daughter, saying, "I can't do these things around you because you don't believe."
"I can't help it," Alvera would reply, with assurance. "I am a modern person." But the older she got, the more she began to value the old ways, and the more she wished she understood her mother's herbs and prayers.
As for Rey and John, their lives also diverged from their parents'. They worked their way through college, and Rey became an accountant and John became a social worker. Their mother died in 1968. She was proud of her children, but didn't live to see them accomplish all they were destined to do.
At John's prompting, Rey ran for and was elected to the Legislature. The year was 1978, and he was the first Hispanic ever to serve. Rey was re-elected in 1982. But a short time later, he died of heart failure. His wife, Bobbie, was appointed to finish his term.
Meanwhile, at about this time John Florez was teaching college and was the head of the equal opportunity office at the University of Utah. Along the way he became a Republican. Sen. Orrin Hatch named him to the staff of the U.S. Senate's Labor and Human Resources Committee. So Florez went to Washington, D.C. Later he was an administrator in the Department of Education, and with the Department of Labor, and he was on the President's Commission on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
His sister says she is glad her father lived long enough to see John's success. Reyes often said, "Who would have believed a son of mine would go to Washington. Maybe he'll be president."
He never became president, but he did receive a key to the city of El Paso once when he visited there. Florez recalls the irony of the moment. He was in the office of the mayor, a man who was also a wealthy businessman, a man who prided himself on not letting Hispanic students speak Spanish in their schools. "The problem in our city is these Mexicans," the mayor told him. "They want to stay Chicanos. . . ."
Suddenly, Florez says, every hostility he'd ever felt came back to him. The way he and his brother had to sit in the balcony at the movies in Salt Lake City. The way the sales ladies in the stores watched him, when he was a little boy, as if they thought he was going to steal. The way the people of this very town had made his father cry. "It took all my social work training, all my professionalism to tell myself, `This man's racism is not your problem. Remember, the community is your client.' "
It sounds like the all-American fairy tale: Little boy raised in a box car grows up and goes on to glory in Washington, D.C.
But that's only part of the story. John Florez' parents taught him that life is made up of valleys as well as shining summits. They taught him to accept his lot, no matter how difficult. "Be it for God," his mother always said. When she would hear of a tragedy, when someone in her family had pain or grief, when she thought of the loss of her own babies, "Be it for God," she would say.
Incarnacion Florez was sad when John and his first wife got a divorce, just as he was saddened by some of the decisions his own children have made - especially one daughter, whose adolescent rebellion embarrassed and hurt him.
Florez says, "My family's attitude is that you let your children know about it when they do something you don't like. But it is their decision. You accept their decision and you don't look back. You don't abandon them. This is when your true love comes through."
At this point, state legislator Pete Suazo doesn't feel any love radiating from John Florez, even though Florez was once his mentor. When Florez was a teacher and Suazo was a student at the University of Utah, Suazo says Florez taught also him everything he knows about community organizing. "He taught me you must be a good listener. Yes, you have to have a goal, but the process is important. You have to work in partnership. He taught me you have to involve people from the group you are representing. Never, never, never think you are doing something for them."
When Florez became a Republican, he asked Suazo to join him. Suazo says he couldn't do it because he came from a blue-collar Democratic family, because his values were their values. So he declined - on principle.
But Florez says he became a Republican on principle, too. Many Democrats told him their values were the values of the community, and by abandoning the party he was abandoning his people. Florez disagreed.
So Florez went to Washington, and when he came back he found himself disagreeing with the same local leaders he'd been disagreeing with before he left. Florez didn't attend the Cesar Chavez awards banquet this year. He has differences of opinion with the people who run La Raza and with those in the Governor's Office for Hispanic Affairs. He says having such an office gives the illusion someone is doing something for the Hispanic community.
Suazo says without such groups he doesn't see how Hispanics will have any voice in government. "In the old days, John would have been willing to negotiate. Now he just draws a line. I guess I just don't understand John anymore," Suazo says.
But John Florez would say he hasn't changed a bit. He began life as a radical and a radical he remains. "Dismantle that program," you can hear him say, at any public meeting you might choose to attend. "Do away with it!" The sentence he says more than any other is this: "They aren't doing a damn thing."
The way Florez sees it, our agencies are failing because the unemployment rate among Hispanic youth runs at 20 percent, because Hispanic and black children are overrepresented in the juvenile detention centers. And what good is the education system if half of all Hispanic youngsters aren't graduating from high school? "We have a whole industry grown up around the idea of `drug prevention.' It's not working, but we never dismantle it."
Recently, at a board meeting of Utah Legal Services, Bar Commissioner Florez sat surrounded by lawyers and judges. There were other community activists at the meeting, too. They attempted to figure out how to change their focus next year, when their funding will be cut by one-third. Florez took the opportunity to speak up for inclusion.
He said, "The consumers of these services have to be at the table. We need to ask them what can be cut." And later he suggested using the clients, rather than volunteer lawyers, as intake workers. "Why don't we hire the poor?"
When John Florez reflects on three generations of his family, he says, "This is what I saw with my father. I became more and more aware as I got older. He could take a lot of crap, himself. But he didn't want to see the same thing happen to his children." As for Florez, it hurts him to think about what his parents' generation endured.
Florez knew his father could lay a track as straight as any man could. But he was destined, always, to be the straw boss. The foreman's job automatically went to a white man. "And he never complained," Florez says. He says his father knew his place, just as the elderly black people Florez met during the 1960s in Central City knew their places. "They never complained."
He doesn't think the younger generation of Hispanic leaders complains enough. He trots out his favorite sentence, "They don't do a damn thing."
And so John Florez complains about the state of the modern world. And as he does so, he gives voice to frustrations from another time. When he speaks, Florez gives voice to a man who couldn't even buy his children a sandwich, a man who couldn't do a damn thing even though he wanted to.
John's wife, Diane, knows him to be the most tender of men. His four children live in four different states, but he keeps in touch with them and his grandchildren through fax, she says. He faxes messages of congratulations to his grandchildren about lost teeth and good report cards. He faxes reminders to his children when Father's Day is approaching.
Theirs is a modern family, in some respects, and a traditional family in others. When their 5-year-old grandson was diagnosed with leukemia recently, his mother began the cycle of modern medicine by driving him to a large city every day for treatments and his grandfather John began a cycle of prayer, lighting a candle for him at Mass every day, as his own mother would have done were she still alive.
As a family and as individuals, sometimes working together and sometimes arguing like all families argue, members of the Florez family have been in their new country for almost a century. They have not seen an end to the discrimination their their parents faced, but they have seen life become much more fair for their children, John Florez says. Still, there are things he misses about the old days, things his family and the entire community misses.
Even as Pete Suazo says John Florez is growing too impatient - thus accusing him of having a life out of balance - Suazo says his own life is out of balance. He has insomnia, he says. He says he wishes John Florez's mother were still alive because he knows she could cure him.