Honoring a Son Who Went Far

In the shadow of a golden colonial church dome, noisy schoolchildren in red and blue uniforms paraded along gritty streets Monday to embrace a native son this remote city barely knows: Santa Ana City Councilman Jose Solorio.

Never mind that his parents left for California’s Central Valley when he was 8 months old, and that he stopped returning for summer visits when he was 12.

He was, this day, a marquee celebrity, a local-boy-done-good.

Here is a man, civic leaders boasted, who lifted himself up from California’s cotton fields, attended universities and today is a successful municipal politician.

And here, too, is a man who might broker gifts for this city, whose 80,000 residents rely heavily on checks and money orders sent from relatives north of the border.

Solorio, in coat and tie, beamed, but seemed flustered by the attention shown him by the children and local leaders. At every turn, people remarked on his resume, including his master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University.

“Who likes gum?” Solorio asked the children, ages 4 to 12, who gathered in front of the outside dais at City Hall. “Well, at least I got your attention,” Solorio said. “I am hear to tell you that if you study, you can be something. You can be anything, here or in the United States ... a doctor, a lawyer, the mayor of La Piedad.... You must study. You must bury yourself in your books.”

And it was clear Monday, at City Hall and at appearances elsewhere in the city, that Solorio was an outsider in the town of his birth.

He spoke Spanish with an American accent. He wondered aloud why a street was named “November 20,” only to be reminded that it was the date of the Mexican revolution. And he was alarmed when he stepped in a puddle on a dirt road.

But Solorio and the city quickly warmed to each other. Local officials gave him a brass key to the city and a certificate naming him a distinguished citizen -- even though he was last here 13 years ago.

Mayor Jaime Mares Camarena said Solorio was probably the most successful person ever born in La Piedad.

Solorio was recognized not only for what he became, but also for what he had not become. In La Piedad, it seems, everyone either intends to move to the United States or knows someone who has. The city’s population has dropped by 10,000 since 1990, according to the census, because of emigration to the United States and elsewhere.

The exodus is even more severe in Solorio’s neighborhood of Ticuitaco, five miles from downtown La Piedad, where the population has plummeted from 10,000 to 1,000.

And for all who leave, few achieve the American dream.

“We’re lucky if they come back alive,” said Mares Camarena. “Many die just struggling to get there. Those who get in first think the United States is a panacea. That without working they can be a success, that through gangs and drugs they can get quick money. It’s a simplistic vision. It is not what Jose Solorio did.”

Knowledge of Solorio’s election to the Santa Ana City Council three years ago didn’t reach here until recently, when the newly formed Federation of Michoacanos of Orange County and Santa Ana contacted the governor of Michoacan, the central Mexican state in which La Piedad is located.

The connections between Michoacan and the United States are undeniable: 5 million residents live in the Mexican state, and 3 million live in the United States, according to Rafael Herrera, who helped form the Michoacan Federation in Santa Ana and organized the events Monday.

The governor’s secretary, Guillermo Rizzo, a former La Piedad mayor, learned about Solorio, and he was invited to make a hero’s trip home. When news of the event appeared in La Piedad’s newspaper, Solorio heard from cousins he didn’t know he had.

And on Monday, they praised him. “It is easy to triumph in your own country,” said one of his cousins, Lorenzo Solorio. “To do that in another country is much, much harder. Jose Juan had the opportunity and he took it. I am so proud that there’s a Solorio who has taken our name to the United States and made us proud.”

Said the man from Santa Ana: “It seemed like overnight, I became sort of a folk hero.”

Solorio, a vegetarian, was served a midday meal of tuna crepes with beets, broccoli and cauliflower, and while a dozen cows were herded down the street, officials lauded him and serenaded him with ranchera songs.

It brought him back to memories he had not embraced in years.

Jose Solorio visited Ticuitaco every summer until he became a teen. It was the birthplace of his grandparents, and the place where his parents met. There are 169 Solorios in the La Piedad telephone book, far more than the number of Garcias or Gutierrezes.

His mother took Solorio and a sibling from Mexico to California in 1971 to rejoin his father, who had gone ahead.

The parents, struggling farmers and unschooled past third grade, moved near Delano, where the children learned of the achievements of Cesar Chavez, and that a man could make changes with hard work.

After he graduated from Wasco Union High School in 1988, where he was student body president, Solorio attended UC Irvine -- one of five of the six siblings who attended college.

In college, Solorio ended his annual visits to Mexico and threw himself into his studies, the Mexican American student organization MEChA and midnight runs to Santa Ana for authentic Mexican food at El Gallo Giro.

Solorio was now smitten with politics. He was elected UCI student body president in 1991, and soon was meeting Santa Ana community leaders, who stoked his civic interests.

After graduating from UCI with a bachelor’s degree in Social Ecology, Solorio earned a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1995.

Returning to Orange County, he held jobs in marketing and advertising before taking his current job promoting the Orange County Transit Authority.

He ran unsuccessfully for City Council in 1996 and won in 2000, at age 29.

His successes are a source of pride in La Piedad, unlike in decades past, when Mexicans who left their country were seen as sellouts, and their clothes and Spanish, tinged with Spanglish and English accents, signaled betrayal to their homeland.

“Fifteen years ago, if we had tried to do an event like this, they would have accused us of being traitors to our nation,” Herrera said.

Today, emigres are increasingly valued. Millions of dollars are pumped into Mexico in remittances to family members, and millions more are sent to fund public works projects from so-called hometown clubs, like the Michoacan federation in Orange County.

And on that count, Mares Camarena was eager Monday to capitalize on the visit by Solorio. Accompanied by several other Michoacan natives, he showed the group an addiction rehabilitation center that is $2 million short of completion, a polluted river in need of a $3-million cleanup, and some land near Solorio’s village that, with $2 million, could be turned into a park.

The pleas of Mexican officials were not lost on Solorio. Speaking to the 13 members of the City Council and an audience of about 50 others, Solorio said that in the United States, migrants can find “glory.”

But his remarks included a warning about the reality of life in California.

“Immigrants suffer,” he warned. “They work for hours and hours in the fields and in construction. Sometimes, the boss does not pay them. In the Mexican restaurants, in the Chinese restaurants, in any restaurants, the cooks and the waiters are Mexicans. The work is honest but hard. Here in La Piedad, they can also know glory. If we put some effort in, we can sustain some families here.”

Solorio said he expects to return to La Piedad soon. On this trip, he stayed in the house where he was born. His parents have maintained it, even though they have lived in California three decades.

Solorio arrived from Santa Ana on Sunday with his wife, Roselinn, sons Diego and Michael and mother-in-law Andrea Yee, to see streets now paved, and telephone lines where there had been none. He viewed a field of agave, the plant used to make tequila; Michoacan farmers now seek to profit from the tequila shortage.

From the old home’s bedroom window he saw the concrete patio where he had played marbles and fingered slingshots during summer vacations. He reached for the branches of the tree there, hoping to find a cherimoya, the fruit he enjoyed during those years.

The patio “just keeps getting smaller and smaller,” he said. “This used to be the largest patio, where I could do everything and anything.”