His Heart Has Room for Two Countries

Santa Ana attorney Jess Araujo was an adventurous 16-year-old when he sneaked across the border before dawn one chilly morning 36 years ago. The bold teenager carried his possessions in a small bag, put on a hat and made his furtive crossing at El Paso, Texas.

But Araujo wasn’t an illegal alien heading north. He was a United States citizen heading the other way, south into Mexico. This kid’s reverse migration, kept secret from his parents on the Texas side, was just his elaborate way of landing a summer job.

It was the early 1960s--era of the bracero program, which legally brought Mexican workers for farm labor into the States. Araujo, a scrappy sophomore, had decided picking fruits and vegetables was a good way to earn money to buy himself a car. So he got in line with workers in Juarez and came back across on a bus, headed for the rich fields of Central California.

These days, Araujo drives a new Mercedes S-500. His law practice has 32 employees, including three partners and three staff attorneys. He specializes in personal injury cases, but also represents and rubs shoulders with Latino celebrities like actor Ricardo Montalban. He is an author, a part-time college instructor, an organizer of voter registration drives, an amateur guitarist, a name-dropper and a bit of a ham.

But under his professional stature and his double-breasted, pinstripe suits, Araujo still carries the marks of his upbringing on the border. On his arms, he has tattoos from his days at a racially divided high school where the Mexican students fought the Stompers, the sons of white ranchers. And in his heart, he holds an unabashed love for Mexico and a reverence for its most humble workers, gained during that summer on the migrant trail.

To me, Araujo represents the Mexican American of the new millennium, equally comfortable on both sides of the border. He is a patriotic American and a loyal Mexican, entirely unconflicted about the dual identity.

He’s a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who became a Chicano activist at Santa Ana College after his honorable discharge as a sergeant in 1969. He is a successful lawyer who proclaims the superiority of the American legal system but speaks out when the system yields injustice. He is a horseman who rides like the Mexican charro and a sailor who used to take friends on fishing trips from his cabin cruiser docked at Dana Point.

Araujo describes himself as cross-cultural because he assumes a different personality when he speaks Spanish, he told me Tuesday night after teaching an overflow class on Chicanos and the law at Cal State Fullerton. “Not bilingual, but cross-lingual . . . the full-scale crossing that you have to do psychologically.”

The duality even seeps into his sleep; he dreams in both languages.

“When you do that, you really fit in perfectly in both worlds,” he said. “That’s what you strive for. Because you love both worlds.”

Now Araujo is being honored in a way befitting his cross-cultural persona. The Legion de Honor Nacional, Mexico’s version of the French Legion of Honor, has inducted the 52-year-old Texas native as a member for his social and cultural efforts in favor of Mexico. But this is the first time that the civic group has honored someone born outside Mexico, said Araujo, who serves as legal counsel for the Mexican consulate in Santa Ana.

A swearing-in ceremony is scheduled April 2 at Cal State’s auditorium. But an impressive Legion of Honor certificate, issued last month, is already hanging in Araujo’s Broadway office. It shares space with an array of tributes and diplomas, including his 1976 law degree from Loyola University of Los Angeles and his 1972 bachelor’s degree in comparative culture from UC Irvine.

Still more duality on the walls: His license to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court displayed along with his 1996 Ohtli Award, bestowed by Mexico’s secretary of state to those who provide exceptional service and comfort to Mexicans living outside their country.

Araujo can’t comprehend the tension over Mexicans that tore apart California in the 1990s. Along the Texas border, residents are accustomed to jumping easily back and forth. At Ysleta High School outside El Paso, he and his fellow students would make a run to Zaragoza on the Mexican side, then hustle back to class.

“It wasn’t like going to another country,” Araujo recalls. “There was no need to draw lines or consider it two parts of anything. That’s why the animosity here seems so preposterous to me.”

Araujo is a baby boomer, born in 1947 to high school sweethearts Juan and Dolores Araujo. They christened their fourth son Jess Joe, in English. His parents, now 81 and 82, still reside in El Paso and live for school reunions where they still sing the fight song from Bowie High, an all-Latino campus.

Araujo’s father was a union man who worked on the railroad for 35 years. His mother inspired his thirst for learning, “everything from manners to math.” He credits her for inculcating a love for the Spanish language and his Mexican roots.

“I thank God and my mom that she knew it would embellish my mind,” says Araujo.

Araujo was in sixth grade when an accident on his motor scooter inspired him to become a lawyer. He was delivering the El Paso Times on his newspaper route when his old Vespa was hit from behind by a drunk serviceman.

The lawyer who handled the case, a future congressman popular among Latinos in the region, took young Jess under his wing, talking to him about the law and his future. When the boy won a new Vespa and a few hundred bucks in a settlement, law took on a lustrous appeal.

“This is fairness!” thought Araujo, who now drives a Harley.

Other issues would be harder to settle. In Ysleta, Araujo and his Mexican friends often felt the system was stacked against them. In disputes settled by teachers and coaches, he said, “invariably the Mexican kid loses.”

The conflicts were polarizing. His friends became misfits for rebelling and he wondered, “How do you ever harness justice here? How do you ever not be afraid?”

Eventually, he began to see the law as “a great equalizer.”

In personal injury cases, Araujo has managed to win awards for undocumented immigrants, despite arguments that they lacked legal standing in the United States because they were here illegally. He has traveled to Mexico to personally deliver cash settlements, surprising recipients who are unaccustomed to being remunerated for the suffering caused by Fate.

Some of his clients remind him of the farm workers he met during that summer as a bracero. He was so young, they called him El Baby. They taught him the patience it took to perform repetitive, stoop labor all day long. But he had to teach himself the discipline to check his anger when he overheard bosses insult his fellow workers in English, which only he understood.

“I grew to admire them,” says Araujo, who raised two children and now lives in San Clemente with his second wife, Donna, a Santa Ana school teacher. “I felt a kindred, a bonding with those guys--decent, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth men.”

In his white Mercedes, Araujo shows me the fancy stereo system that digitally displays the artists he loves--Mickey Gilley, Freddie Fender, Jose Alfredo Jimenez--and further illuminates his dual identity.

“Allegiance is such a fluid concept,” he later tells me.

Americans sometimes think of Mexico as a jealous wife thinks of her husband’s lover: “You can’t have both,” they tell immigrants who plan to stay on this side of the border.

“But we look at Mexico as a good country, the source of many of the good qualities in our nature,” he says. “We want to progress in this country, but we also want to retain our roots. Why should we have to let go of one great thing in order to acquire another one? That’s crazy.

“We want both.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.