When 20-year-old Carmelo Padilla decided to leave his pueblo in the Mexican state of Jalisco for the United States, he had a few coins in his hand and an unshakeable idea in his mind: “I had nothing,” he would later tell his five children, “so there was nothing to lose.”
By the time he died two weeks ago, at age 75, Mr. Padilla, who spent years working at the Nunes dairy in the Point Reyes National Seashore, had led a life of stature, stability and prosperity wrought by years of quiet hard work and steady determination.
Upon arriving in Tuolumne, Calif., in 1969, Mr. Padilla found employment at Pickering Lumber Company. His firm handshake, unflinching resolve and knack for slicing logs with effortless precision earned him the nickname “El Tigre” and the immediate respect of his supervisors. With time, Mr. Padilla rose through the ranks, eventually earning about $8 an hour—equivalent to roughly $60 today.
Abiding by one of the cardinal rules for many immigrants to the U.S.—first secure a green card, and everything else shall follow—Mr. Padilla wed a friend, opening his path to citizenship and the freedom to return to Mexico to see the family he had left behind.
It was on one such trip, to attend his sister’s wedding in the town of San Miguel, that he met Gloria, a young woman who had offered to style the bride’s hair. Gloria had convinced her strict father to allow her to attend the wedding, and she and Carmelo danced until dawn. Three weeks later, as Mr. Padilla prepared to return to the U.S. alongside his brother, Jesús, he asked Gloria to come with them.
“I was so excited,” she said. “I didn’t have to think twice.”
They arranged a clandestine meeting in the plaza—3 a.m. sharp—and Gloria left home without telling a soul, carrying nothing but a plastic shopping bag of clothes. The trio boarded the bus for the three-day journey to Tijuana, then paid a coyote $40 to guide them through farmland, trekking through endless rows of broccoli under the balmy cover of night until they set foot in California.
When she arrived in Tuolumne, Gloria wrote home, asking her parents for forgiveness. But reconciliation came only after the birth of her first child, when she could extend her baby like an olive branch.
Jose Carmen Padilla Brizuela, known always as Carmelo, was born on Sep. 20, 1949 in Santa Ana, Jalisco, the middle child of 15 children born to Ampelia Brizuela and Benigno Padilla. He spent his early years on the family’s hacienda in the small village of Tecomate, set among acres of farmland that thrived in the loamy volcanic soil of his native state.
As a boy, Carmelo nurtured his own small garden, finding a kind of salvation, and later a livelihood, in the tender care of seeds and soil. But in 1955, when he was 6, his father gambled the farm away on bad horseracing bets, plunging the family into poverty and ending Carmelo’s schooling.
The family relocated to Mexico City, where father and sons hauled water for 30 cents a trip before eventually drifting back to borrowed land in the countryside. But they never escaped the cycle of debt.
As Mr. Padilla’s eldest son, Carmel, recalled, “That’s when our dad said, ‘I have to get out of here.’”
Mr. Padilla climbed into a car with his cousins to head north for America, equipped with a plan and a certain amount of cunning. “Yo fui el primero,” he said in a recording made by his son Paco, his voice like birdsong, with its lilt and tumble. “You will see, I’m going to go there to stay for a long time,” he recalled telling his brothers when they expressed their doubts.
After the lumbermill, Mr. Padilla worked at a dairy in Petaluma under Jimmy Mendoza. Then, in 1981, he, Gloria and their three children moved to a small, white clapboard house at the very end of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. It was the dairy farm on A Ranch run by Jimmy’s cousin George Nunes.
There, within sight of the Pacific Ocean, two more sons would follow, as did other family members. Carmelo’s brother Jesús, who married one of Gloria’s younger sisters, moved to the ranch with their three children, along with Gloria’s brother Ramón Franco, who lived there with his wife and five kids.
Six days a week, Mr. Padilla woke at 1:30 a.m. to milk and tend the cows until dusk. Gloria cooked at Drakes Beach Café and later at the Palace Market, where she became known for her tamales, grilled salmon and inventive chicken salads.
Their combined efforts provided for, in the words of their son Omar, an “idyllic, feral childhood” for the children, who roamed wild stretches of ranchland with few rules. They chased skunks, caught gardener snakes and toads, clambered among driftwood forts and plunged headfirst into piles of cow feed.
“When Dad finally got tired of us, he would make us walk from the ranch to Chimney Rock by way of ravines rather than roads,” said Yesenia, the eldest daughter. “It was a whole-day ordeal.”
Mr. Padilla cultivated a garden behind a row of cypress trees, with seeds from many of the same plants he had nurtured as a child in Tecomate. He raised sunflowers, cosmos and milkweed from the soil, delighting in the butterflies and bees they attracted. He grew guava plants from Mexican seeds, Sorrento lemon trees from seeds he acquired in Italy, and rows of tomatoes, tomatillos, cucumbers, squash and chard. He impressed upon his children the gentle lessons of a gardener’s faith: Anything can happen in a garden, nothing lasts, and yet something can always be made from the soil. He gardened with the same unblinded hope and unwillingness to concede that he lived by, always ready to say if not now, then later.
On weekends, while Gloria was working, Mr. Padilla would often usher his kids and their cousins into his gray Aerostar van for excursions to Oakland A’s games, navigating by instinct rather than by map. “We think he got lost on purpose,” said his son Paco, who described the impromptu detours as a chance to explore new corners.
An affable conversationalist, Mr. Padilla was known to pick up hitchhikers and chat easily with strangers on the street. Yet he was also a quiet observer. “He was the wisest man in the room,” his son Edgar said. “They always speak the least, but when they do say something, you should listen up.”
The Padilla children were expected to excel and to be stoic in their efforts. “Echarle ganas,” or “give it all you’ve got,” was one of their father’s mottos, repeated often to his five children and 12 grandchildren.
All five of the Padilla kids graduated from college. Yesenia, who became pregnant at 15, recalls the fear she felt when she told her father, but he met the news with kindness. “Oh well,” Carmelo had clucked. “You’re going to have her, and we’re going to love her.” Her daughter, Yaneli, grew up thinking of him as a second father.
Today, Yesenia works at the health clinic in Point Reyes Station; Edgar and Paco are sergeants with the Sausalito Police Department; Omar played Division I baseball and now supervises juvenile hall; and Carmel, once a wildland firefighter, drives a paving truck.
“They gave us a better life,” Yesenia said of her parents. “And we spend the rest of that life figuring out how we can pay off the debt.”
In 2008, Mr. Padilla developed an infection after stepping on a nail at the dairy, and it led to gangrene. He avoided amputation but was forced to retire, and he and Gloria moved in with Yesenia and her family in Petaluma. He soon channeled his energies into an organic farm project in Paco’s backyard.
For 12 years, he and Gloria sowed seeds each February, nurturing them until spring, when the family gathered to transplant the young shoots into tilled soil. They sold their produce to local markets, and Mr. Padilla took solace in the rhythm of the work—waiting for rain, watching water coax seedlings from the soil, and observing the garden become a wilted mystery in late autumn, buried under fallen leaves.
“He loved creating life out of seeds,” Yesenia said. “So we buried him with a packet of them. Comos and sunflowers.”