Following the Crops

My Dunn Middle School students and I had the privilege of interviewing Raynaldo Phillip Valdez as part of an oral history project back in 2003. Grandpa Ray, as he became known to all of us, endured hard work, poverty, and hunger throughout his life, but he never shied away from an opportunity to be of service. At the time of this interview, his two grandkids were students at Dunn, and he helped us out with everything from camping trips to archeological digs, working in the campus garden every Friday. His childhood struggles might have defeated a lesser spirit, but Grandpa Ray’s kindness and optimism are an inspiration, and his life is illustrative of a fundamental but sometimes forgotten story of the West and California.

Grandpa Ray was born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1941, the 13th of 18 kids. His mother, who was from a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, died in childbirth when Grandpa Ray was 8 years old. The family managed to stay together, moving from place to place, living under a tree for a while. “We didn’t have no mom, no one to keep an eye on us. Sometimes my dad would leave to follow the railroad track, wherever there was work, so we were alone with no one to keep us in line, but we never got in trouble — there was no one to make trouble with.”

Grandpa Ray started working when he was 7, thinning sugar beets, which was difficult and tedious work, especially in the winter, hands stinging with cold. He missed too much school to ever catch up, and finally quit in 7th grade. It was hard to make friends, anyway. “The white people didn’t want to hang around with us, so we used to play by ourselves,” he said. “We didn’t mind; we were used to it.”