José Guerrero Salazar, a Poblano at heart, is originally from Zacapala, but now a working citizen of Richmond, Texas, in the United States, where he has his own gardening services company called “Guerreros”, which even before the pandemic covered the demand than 200 clients.
Pepe, as his friends know him, tells in an interview for MILLENNIUM Puebla that he left Mexico when he was 15 years old, and although he was saddened to leave his 5 brothers and his mother, the dream of having a better life made him leave with his uncle for the United States, where he began as a worker in the fields cutting grapes, cherry, and pears. He then went on to cleaning jobs and became a Walmart employee. In 1987, Pepe obtained US citizenship, he was doing very well at work and in the afternoons he had a lot of free time, so he decided to start a gardening business with his wife and invested 20 thousand dollars: “It was an initiative that arose as an experiment. I said: ‘if it goes well, we give it and if not, we leave it’. If we didn’t try, we were never going to know and it went well for us ”.
Now Pepe has been at the helm of his company for 18 years and his quality of service has helped him gain the trust of 200 clients, including Americans, Asians, Indians and the occasional Hispanic, he proudly confesses.
José and his workers bring life and color to gardens, patios, neighborhood green spaces, and facades of public buildings more than one season a year. In addition, he comments that there are families that invest up to $ 20,000 in remodeling their green spaces, although they also do simple jobs of $ 300.
Their clients ask to remove the grown and dried grass from their patios and plant trees or flowers, whether they are petunias, nymphs, angelonia, geraniums or simply shrubs. However, the charm of Pepe’s work is to design a perfect space, combining seasonal flowers with different garden stones, create paths, decorate flowerpots or implement new ornaments and even build small fireplaces.
Among the anecdotes that this migrant from Puebla tells is that sometimes people let the trees grow very tall and over the years they produce a lot of shade, which takes away the visibility of the houses and prevents the grass or flowers from growing, so it has had to trim trees and palm trees. For this work he uses several tools, which change every year, as he argues that it is better to buy new than to make repairs, because the latter are more expensive.
Among his machinery, he owns a 48-inch tractor with a cost of 8 thousand dollars, and he also uses a fairly large Pick Up truck to load his tools and plants.
The Guerreros company is an economic support for Pepe’s family, but also for the families of his workers; For this reason, they all work with the mentality that they are a team: “The workers depend on you and you depend on them”.
“We all enter it when it is high season, during the months of May to September, we even work in temperatures of 115 degrees Fahrenheit (which in Mexico would be 46 degrees Celsius). Sometimes we have time to take pictures of before and after work in the gardens, but then we are so focused on finishing that we don’t realize it until we finish, because we have entry times but not exit times, ”he explains.
In the months with little work, which go from October to December, they place Christmas decorations both in gardens and on facades, so they can place up to 15 thousand lights in a single home. Pepe affirms that he cannot afford the “luxury of stopping working”, since he has done so for 36 years.
When the pandemic hit, Pepe caught COVID-19, but his son and wife took over the business and helped him regain his health. The Guerrero family believed that it would be a temporary confinement, but little by little they saw that the crisis worsened and affected several businesses.
“Many people lost their jobs and preferred to save their money and not use it at home, this affected a lot, because we save money, but not enough to withstand a hit of a year and a half and all savings run out.”
Now, with the vaccination and the economic reactivation, it was hard to start over, since he points out that his clients dropped by half, he was left with only 115, and he gives them a quality service to keep them.
“Many people do not trust, the governor of Texas gave the option of using a mask or not, but there are people who do not leave or hire services for fear of contagion, however we trust that everything will improve,” he concluded.
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