SPOKANE, Wash. — Martin Meraz-Garcia would drive his mother to the Tri-Cities fields at 4:30 in the morning and together they picked cherries and his nose would bleed, stinging with pesticides. This made him think back to his childhood in Mexico, one of 14 children, the son of a murdered father, and how he worked shining shoes in the street until the family moved to the United States.
Martin was teased so ruthlessly his first day in sixth grade that he told his mother he would never return, and she insisted he go back, and then one day as a teen in the orchards he realized that even if he were the fastest cherry picker in the world, he would never rise out of this poverty.
He decided that day to be anything but a field worker.
And now he has a doctorate and he married his Pasco High School girlfriend, Christina Torres Garcia. She has a doctorate too, and they both teach at Eastern Washington University.
Martin is 35, Christina is 32. And they tell their stories in an almost breathless way, as if they can’t believe all that has transpired in their lives.
They are both “firsts.” Martin was the first in his family to graduate from high school, and then college, and then he earned that Ph.D.
Christina’s older brother was the first to get a college degree in her family, but she scored two other family firsts, a master’s degree followed by the Ph.D.
