Blessed With an Appreciation for His Country’s Bounty

When he first came to America in 1961, David Calderon didn’t understand Thanksgiving. Truth is, it didn’t make much more sense to him than Halloween.

Decide for yourself whether he understands it now.

“It was always my dream to someday come here and see with my own eyes what was happening in this country,” Calderon, now 61, says as we chat in his Santa Ana home on Thanksgiving morning. “I always hear a lot about this country. My father used to work here for many years. He would tell stories about the United States, the honesty of the people, how you could leave your bicycle outside and nobody will take it.”

Raised by his grandfather, a Mexico City shoemaker, Calderon attended school for one year. “I started in fifth grade and ended up in fifth grade,” he says. “I had to help my grandfather because he raised me. Someone told him they would put him in jail or something if he didn’t send me to school, so he sent me to fifth grade. I flunked. I could barely read. So for the next fifth grade, something inside told me I was going to pay more attention. I had no one to guide me, to tell me. I asked (at home) how do you do addition? How do you multiply? Nobody knew how to do it. So next time in fifth grade I put in a little more attention and I follow close every word from the teacher and in a few months I became in the front row, where they put those who were a little smarter.”

But without money for books, his formal education ended.

In time, with his image of Americans as “supermen,” he brought his wife and four children to a rental home on 4th Street in Santa Ana. A carpenter and boat builder, he looked for such work but ended up as a gardener.

“In those days there was too much discrimination,” he says. “They thought you were stupid if you couldn’t speak English, that you couldn’t do anything.”

He worked on his English and parlayed his gardening job into one building new houses in Laguna Niguel. “I said (to the employer), ‘I might not be a pretty good talker, but I’m a pretty good worker. Hire me for one week or two weeks and if you see I cannot perform, lay me off completely, even as gardener.’ ”

Eventually, Calderon became a real estate agent and still works today as a broker. He and his wife have raised seven children.

It’s almost sacrilege to condense a struggle like Calderon’s to a few paragraphs, but this was supposed to be a Thanksgiving tale, so let’s get back to it.

He tells a story of his first return trip to Mexico years ago:

“I had the opportunity to go to the old country a couple times and when I came back here the first time, I noticed my feeling was that I was coming back home. I don’t feel the same when I go back to Mexico. It’s not that I don’t love the country where I was born, but it is because this is a country that deserves a lot of love, a lot of respect, a lot of appreciation. This country gives you whatever you want. When I first came here, even with the discrimination, I saw the sons had first-class treatment. We were not the sons, we were just coming to this country as guests, but little by little we acquired the same rights, the same privileges. I mean, you had to work for it. Nothing was going to be given to you for free. You had to find your own place, you had to work for it, but at least you had the opportunity.

“The difference is in Mexico, I could not talk to a politician, I could not talk to anybody, man to man. Over here, I can talk to a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, whoever. I don’t feel less.”

It pains Calderon to see people who aren’t thankful for America’s bounty. “My feeling for the country has grown, but at the same there is a lot of disappointment. Not disappointment in the country, but that people don’t appreciate this country. This is a good country but the people who are born here don’t feel what in Spanish we call patriotismo . They don’t have respect, they don’t have real concern.”

It also disturbs him that immigrants come here “to take advantage. I’m against people who come to this country just to take advantage, without respect, without love, without concern. You come to this country, this is not your home, but you have the right to make it your home. If we all do that, this country will never die.”

I mumbled something like how this would be a better country if everyone felt that way.

“Unfortunately, most people think I’m crazy,” he replies. “They say, ‘ . . . you’re not American, you’re not white. Why do you have to feel love for this country?’ Why? Because I know what it is, I’m an American citizen now, and I have respect for my country, not for what I can get but for what the country is. This is a great country, and now I’m a part of this country.”

Calderon says he could spend two weeks telling me about the country, and I have no doubt.

But just smelling the aroma of a turkey-in-waiting wafting through his house on Thanksgiving morning made it clear enough. Here was a home where the tradition of nearly 400 years of Thanksgiving has been passed down, from people speaking the king’s English to a guy with broken English.

“At the beginning, we didn’t understand Thanksgiving,” Calderon says. “We thought it was just a custom, like Halloween. We didn’t understand Halloween. But through the years, we are getting the real meaning why these people came. . . . I feel same connection. We are all immigrants.”