Citizenship Caps His American Dream

It was 1960, and in the middle of a Placentia cornfield Miguel Pulido was pulling weeds for $75 a week. The immigrant from Mexico had never worked on a farm and was so bad at it that whenever the farmer told him to speed up, he lopped off a few cornstalks by accident.

From those beginnings, Pulido eventually would realize the American Dream of owning his own property, and then would nearly lose it. More than 20 years later, Pulido would own a muffler shop in Santa Ana and would be fighting the city to keep it. The family’s battle, which it eventually won, convinced the Pulidos to become citizens.

“We saw that you have to be able to vote,” Pulido’s son, Miguel Jr., said Thursday. “In order to make a difference in this system and have a voice, one has to be a part of the system.”

Pulido laughed Thursday as he recalled his start in the United States. In a few hours, after 25 years as a resident alien, he and two of his children, Miguel Jr., 29, and Marisol, 28, would stand with 3,700 others at the Los Angeles Convention Center, recite a few lines about bearing arms and opposing foreign and domestic enemies and would become U.S. citizens. His son, Jose, 26, went through the ceremony Wednesday while son Luis, 25, and second wife, Josefa, 55, will be sworn in next January.

It all seemed a million miles from the cornfield, he mused before the ceremony.

Pulido had never dreamed he would be working in a cornfield. A few months earlier he had sold his car, his auto repair shop and some furniture and had left Mexico City for the border and a promised partnership in a Los Angeles auto shop.

But his partner reneged. Pulido scanned the want ads and slogged the city on foot but, without a recommendation or a command of the language, he found only rejections. He eventually wound up in Placentia.

Pulido, then 35 and working in the cornfield, felt his dreams were slipping away. But one day the tractor broke down and the farmer, Arnold Plegel, accepted his offer to fix it. After that, Pulido worked full time maintaining the farm equipment.

He was a lousy farmer anyway, Pulido said. Plegel “told me, ‘I owe you a big favor so you can work on the tractors. As a field man you’re worthless.”’

In a few months, the rest of the family joined him in Placentia, and Pulido opened up his first repair business in that city.

He lost that lease and went to work for Ace Muffler in Santa Ana, eventually making enough to buy out the owner. A while later, he also bought the property through a lease-purchase arrangement.

The former property owner, B.J. Haupert, recalled that Pulido approached him about buying the site but didn’t know how much he could pay per month “because he wasn’t sure how business was going to go. Well, I had already heard he was an honest man, so I got a lease and wrote down ‘200 or more’ as the price.

“We had been getting $400 a month, but I knew he couldn’t pay that much. Within a few months, he had upped the payment to $300 and then to $350.”

Before long, Haupert had handed over the deed and Pulido’s American Dream was complete--from a $75-a-week farmhand to the owner of a business with about $350,000 in annual receipts.

After becoming an American on Thursday, Pulido fought back tears. “I’m too sentimental, that’s the truth,” he said. “This is a big honor. It’s one of those days of your life that you will remember forever.”

In a film shown before the ceremony, former state Atty. Gen. Evelle Younger told the future citizens: “Walk precincts, carry banners. No one can stop you, and you won’t be punished.”

The lesson hasn’t been lost on this family.

Their trouble began in July, 1984, when the City Council voted 4 to 3 to oust them from the 1st Street site to make way for a $6.5-million shopping center. But the muffler shop had been completely rebuilt in 1982 to accommodate a street-widening project.

The Pulidos filed two lawsuits against the city and the developer. Then, last April, at a City Hall meeting packed with Pulido supporters, the City Council voted not to take the property.

In September, the city, the developer and the Pulidos announced that the long-running saga had finally come to an end. The shop’s facade would be remodeled and the shopping center would be built around it in what Mayor Daniel E. Griset called a “win-win situation.”

On Thursday, there was one sad moment for Pulido. At the moment he was required to give up his green card, which had occupied his wallet for 25 years, he experienced a strange reluctance to let it go.

“I felt kind of sad when I gave it away,” he said. “It was like saying goodby to an old friend.”