My dad was a general in the military during the Mexican revolution. It wasn’t easy watching my dad leave every morning to go to work. I never knew if he would really return from or not. When my dad became a general it put a lot of stress on the family. Him and my mom were always fighting or my mom was always crying when he was at work, I never understood why until I reached the age of about 13 when my older brother explained to me what was really going on.

My brother Luis told me that my dad was one of the military workers that was in support of Porfirio Diaz. Porfirio Diaz was a bad person who took away all of our freedoms and he wouldn’t let my mom or my brother vote or own land because they weren’t in support of Porfirio’s rule, but my dad was. The only reason my brother and mom weren’t beat to death was because my dad was one of the military generals that supported Diaz’s rule, and even if Diaz tried to harm the family, that’s when my dad would turn on him. That would be really bad for Diaz because my dad was one of his strongest army generals.

I always grew up in a nice home, my family wasn’t wealthy but we weren’t poor either. I found out that we weren’t poor because of my dad’s job and we weren’t wealthy because of what my mom’s and brother’s thoughts were, if it wasn’t for my dad we would all be in horrible working conditions working all day long on farms trying to grow enough crops to sell just to have money to be able to get water and even one set of cloths each.

In the 1900’s things got really bad in the government, by this point I was old enough to know what was going on. It started out people protesting against Porfirio Diaz’s rule, it got to the point where some of Diaz’s own political allies were protesting against him. Then the wars started to happen because people were trying to overthrow Diaz. Francisco Madero was the first to overthrow him. That was how my dad lost his life. My dad couldn't fight good enough for Porfirio Diaz to win the war, so he got mad at my dad and killed him. I don’t think it was fair for Porfirio to get mad at my dad, Madero had a way bigger army then him. Then once he discovered there was nobody holding him back from hurting my family he tried to come after us, we heard about it from a friend and fled to the United States. That's how I learned my English and graduated from college.

It’s been years since both my dad and Porfirio diaz died. I still hate what he did to my father, he killed an innocent man all because he was mad that he was overthrown. My brother and mom eventually moved back to Mexico but I stayed in the U.S. I didn’t want to go back to the land where most the worse years of my life happened.