The New Immigrants

This story is about a remarkable man, who came here illegally, learned English, got his citizenship, bought properties and became a successful member of the American middle class. DP

A Guatemalan immigrant's odyssey to the middle class
By Jack Spillane, Standard-Times staff writer

southcoasttoday.com: Ervin Ramos remembers the day in 2000 when he purchased his first home.

It was a four-family apartment house on Ashley Boulevard that he had noticed was boarded up, but which he believed would provide him with the income necessary to make him independent of the fish houses, where he had worked long and hard for nine years.

The 27-year-old Guatemalan immigrant — just nine years after arriving in America illegally and not speaking a word of English — had both saved his money and done his homework.

Starting with only a sixth-grade education from his homeland, he had earned an American high school degree (not a GED), worked his way up into management at the fish houses, and finally achieved legal status after marrying his wife, a Puerto Rican native.

"It was very emotional for me," he remembered.

He said he dressed in a suit to go to the mortgage closing and took a briefcase in which he carried his important papers.

"I looked like an attorney.

"They saw this Spanish kid was really ready to take on the world. I was very sure of what I was doing."

The following year, Ervin Ramos purchased a second three-family investment property, and in 2003 he bought a condominium. And in 2004, he and his wife, Johanna, achieved the American dream, purchasing a single-family raised ranch on a quiet street in the North End.

It was a long way from the Guatemalan sugar-cane fields where he used to work as a temporary laborer to help his mother when he was a teenager.

He would travel to those fields in the southern part of his native country from his home in the north, but he said he could make little more than the equivalent of a dollar a day.

So poor was his family (his father died when he was 3) that Mr. Ramos remembered working in his uncle's corn fields and being paid in corn so that he, his mother and sister could eat the following day.
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