Interview with Joe Rosales

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      JAR Concrete   www.jarconcrete.com

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Duration: 1h 10m 00s      download MP3       Technical Data

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  This is February 17th, 8:30 in the morning. This is Homero Galicia with Mr. Joe Rosales. [This interview is part of the Paso del Norte Entrepreneurship Oral History Project.] HG: Mr. Rosales, thank you very much for giving us your time. I appreciate your telling us your story. I want to ask you if you could begin by telling me, you know, where, you know, you grew up, what schools you went to. JR: I grew up in the 1100 block of Missouri street; mostly a barrio type of an environment. That was a barrio; gangs and people that were used to do mariguana and stuff like that. I went to Lamar School. From Lamar School, I went to El Paso High School. HG: You graduated from El Paso High what year? JR: 57, I think. HG: Your father, what was his line of work? JR: My father was a carpenter. Actually he started as a janitor. Then right at the Banner building he took up carpentry there. Like fixing doors and doing carpentry work. Then he stayed there for about 15, 16 years. Since he had a big family to raise, he joined the carpentry union and became a carpenter. He was a very good carpenter. HG: How many brothers and sisters do you have? JR: I have four brothers and five sisters. We're ten together, I mean ten total in the family; ten total. HG: Your father, where was he from? JR: My father was from Durango, Mexico. My mother was from Chihuahua, the State of Chihuahua; Santo Tomas, Chihuahua, in the mountains up there where the Indians live. HG: Did they meet in Chihuahua? JR: No, they met here. My father came first than my mother. They met here in El Paso and they got married at a very early age. They were 17, 18 years old when they got married. HG: What was your father's name? JR: My father's name was Luis Figueroa Rosales. HG: And your mother's name? JR: My mother's name was Martha. Her maiden name was Pedregon. Martha Pedregon Rosales. HG: The only house you remember growing up was there on Missouri, at the corner? JR: That's basically the house I was raised in. It was a barrio. There was families that had anywhere from 5 to 10 kids, maybe 12 kids. We were all like a family out there. HG: Did you grow up speaking Spanish or English? JR: Nothing but Spanish. HG: OK. JR: In my house, there was no such thing as speaking English because my mother and my dad would not like that. We grew up speaking Spanish. In fact, I got kicked out of grade school a couple of times for speaking Spanish because my English language was not, you know, that very good. HG: By the time you went to El Paso High, though, you had English down pretty good. JR: Well, to a point I did. HG: Now, you are not the oldest. You are the middle? JR: No, I am the seventh kid in the family. HG: After high school, what did you do? JR: After high school, my father had a small construction company. I liked doing work in the concrete. He'd do a little bit of footing, I mean, a little bit of slabs and walks and whatnots. Actually I like to smell the concrete. I told my dad one day that I'd like to, you know, go and work with the concrete people. He said "fine." Then after a few years of helping my dad there, when I got out of high school, I opened up my company under the name of Joe A. Rosales. HG: What year was that? JR: That was 1957. HG: Wow! What year did you graduate from high school again? JR: 57. HG: So this was right after you ... JR: Right after it. Well I've had experience already at home work. I had experience working with my dad. When I told him, he said "Que te vaya bien hijo!, you know, it's hard out there." But he said "do you want to do what you want to do?" I said "yeah." HG: And when did you decide to do a business? JR: I don't know. I was always like an entrepreneur. Always would be picking up bottles when I was a young kid. Picking up hangers from trash cans, you know. People throw them in there. I think for every bottle we picked up we'd get a penny. Then for the coat hanger we used to get a penny also, you know. Sometimes my daddy would leave and not leave any money for my mom to buy something to make for dinner or for supper. She would ask me. So I would go out and hustle and sell bottles and hangers. I'd go down to Blond's market. I used to get three pounds, five pounds of meat for a dollar. So that started my whole thing. I used to have three paper routes. Then I cut it down to two because I started playing football. My brother Jaime would help me deliver the afternoon papers because I stayed late practicing and I'd do the morning route. Then we cut it down to two routes. Then I used to cut grass. The same people I used to deliver the paper to, I would go out and cut the grass during the summer time and do odds and ends like these. At one time in point, I used to wash the cars at the plaza garage, where all the rich people used to take their cars out there. It was like in the basement. They'd give us 50 cents per car to wash. We washed in there from 25 to 30 cars a Sunday. So I was always busy working for myself. _________________________________________________________________ For the rest of the interview transcript, please contact: Kristine Navarro-McElhaney Director of the Institute of Oral History University of Texas at El Paso knavarro@utep.edu