Once-reluctant immigrant celebrates becoming an American citizen

<p>It wasn't Ricardo Ramos Rico's idea to come to America.</p><p>True, life in El Grullo in the Mexican state of Jalisco was a strain after his father, a teacher, died when Rico was 5. “My mother was suffering with two kids,” he said.</p><p>Even so, he felt torn from his home and everything he knew when, four years after his dad's death, his struggling mother took him and his older brother, Rene, in tow and stole across the U.S. border at San Ysidro.</p><p>“What an experience, let me tell you,” Rico said.</p><p>When he arrived in the Sonoma Valley in 1985, he spoke little English and had no idea if he'd go to school again. He might not have, had a prominent Sonoma attorney not taken an interest in him, enrolled him and admonished him often to work hard and stay out of trouble.</p><p>Rico did both. He completed high school (Sonoma Valley High Class of 1994), worked six years as his alma mater's junior varsity boy's soccer coach, studied at Santa Rosa Junior College, began a career with Clover Stornetta Farms, married a California native who shares his passion for soccer, bought a house in Petaluma and welcomed two daughters into the world.</p><p>His family was with him when the once-reluctant immigrant celebrated one of the proudest and most challenging achievements of his life.</p><p>In June, he stood in Oakland's jammed Paramount Theater and with more than 1,000 other immigrants recited his Oath of Allegiance as a naturalized American citizen.</p><p>“It was an amazing, welcoming feeling,” he said. At 35, he's eager to do something he's never been eligible to do before. “I'm very excited to vote, that's the main thing,” he said.</p><p>Though firmly and legally American, Rico said he'll always love Mexico, too, and he's encouraged by recent signs his birth country is doing better at allowing its people a standard of living that won't cause them to leave in search of a decent life.</p><p>“Mexico is so rich. It's got so much to offer,” he said. The problem, as he sees it, has been that throughout his lifetime, Mexico has failed to keep its people home because too few of them share enough of the wealth to support their families.</p><p>Rico is heartened by news that a number of forces in Mexico, among them improved opportunities for earning and education, are contributing to greatly reduced illegal immigration. If the trend continues and strengthens, he said, Mexicans “won't have to look somewhere else to better themselves.”</p><p>He believes his mother, Carmen, felt certain she had no option but to cut ties with her native Mexico and take her sons to the U.S.</p><p>She found work as a seamstress in a sweatshop in Los Angeles and asked an industrious nephew in Sonoma Valley, Jose Ramos, now the longtime vineyard manager at Hanzell Vineyards, to let her younger son live for a time with him. Rico was 10 when he came north to Sonoma.</p><p>He counts himself fortunate to have soon met Sonoma attorney and radio talk-show personality Len Tillem. Rico's cousin, Ramos, did some landscaping and odd jobs for Tillem back then and one day brought Rico along with him.</p><p>Tillem insisted on enrolling him at Sassarini Elementary School. “I marched him in and he went to school every day and learned English,” he said.</p><p>About the time Rico turned 16 and got a drivers license, Tillem became concerned that because he was an illegal immigrant, he could be stopped by police and sent back to Mexico, where he had no family.</p><p>“By then, he was as much a gringo as I was,” Tillem said. So he contacted an immigration attorney he knows and paid him to persuade immigration authorities that the teen-aged Rico deserved legal residency status because he was diligent and law-abiding and it would be wrong for him to be deported.</p><p>Rico was granted a green card, and will forever be grateful to Tillem. The lawyer said the other day, “I did a good deed to help a kid, and look at the nice thing that has happened.”</p><p>While Rico was coaching soccer at Sonoma Valley High, he got to know the girls' varsity soccer coach, Nancy Case — now a Sonoma State University adjunct professor of education. “We met out on the field,” Rico said.</p><p>They married in 2000. Then came Carmen, 8, and Isabel, 4.</p><p>In 2001, Rico took an entry-level job with Clover Stornetta. Four years ago he worked his way up into sales.</p><p>Just after he completed the citizenship process and took his oath in June, he flew East on a vacation with his wife and daughters. They hadn't intended for it to be a U.S. history tour, but Rico said it was powerful to stand at Plymouth Rock and in Philadelphia and ponder what transpired there.</p><p>He sees no problem with keeping Mexico in his heart while he celebrates becoming part of the story of his beloved America.</p><p><i>Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.</i></p>