Ernesto Josue Díaz’s success story
By Scott Ruescher, Storytelling Associate for the Neighborhood Developers
For Ernesto, the services of MassHire Metro North, one of the five agencies that form the CONNECT constellation, were particularly useful. After applying for immigration status five years ago, he left his family, Rosibel and Angel, behind in El Salvador to get ahead in the United States. “I came here in 2017 for some of the same reasons as the rest of the Latin Americans,” he says. In El Salvador one of those reasons was the endemic gang violence that touches and destroys so many lives. Already in his early 30s at the time, he had been teaching psychology at Universidad José Matías Delgado, but he wanted to find a better place to live with his family, “a place where my kids can grow up without being afraid to die.” It wasn’t just the lingering economic effects of civil war and corruption on the job market in El Salvador, as it might be for some.
“It was not easy to leave my family behind,” says Ernesto, “but we knew I had to do it.” The opportunity was as irresistible to him as it has been for millions of others in complicated situations in Latin America, and Rosibel supported him in the ambition. The process was made easier than it is for many by the fact that Ernesto’s mother, escaping a broken marriage with her daughter, had already come here. She been living in Revere, fully documented and with social capital to boot, since 2000. “She was a single mother without any opportunity in my country,” he explains. “She made one of the more difficult choices, but there really was no other choice.” In a sense Ernesto had been planning this move since then—when he was still a teenager finishing high school in San Salvador.
Flash forward again to 2020. Ernesto has been piecing a living together in Revere driving. He’d worked in a daycare center, first as teaching assistant, then as lead teacher. He’d worked as an ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) therapist. He’d driven for Uber and Lyft. Hoping for something more lucrative, aware of his aptitude for complex technical work, and hesitant to join the droves of immigrants in work on restaurant, construction, and landscaping crews, he attended a Zoom meeting on career development offered by the Revere municipal government. “I learned about MassHire Metro North and CONNECT in that Zoom meeting,” he recalls. “By that time, I needed help not just with career development but with financial management. I had two households to support. I’d been sending remittances home to my family, as well as paying for my own needs here in Revere, including rent on an attic apartment, and I was falling into debt.”
With the help of financial coach Edily Vásquez at CONNECT and financial assistance from the Metro North Workforce Resiliency Fund, Ernesto was able to get a handle on those slippery finances. He learned how to budget his income so that he could take of basic necessities—food, clothing, shelter, and a little bit of entertainment—and set aside some savings for such expanding needs as a larger apartment that could accommodate Rosibel and Angel and the commensurate quantities of necessities. “It sounds elementary,” he says, “but the financial practices, including the credit system, are not the same as they are in El Salvador.” The double challenge of supporting two households, his own lonesome one in Revere and that of his family in El Salvador, was compounded by the process of applying for legal immigrant status for himself and his family. “There were expenses involved just in filling the forms,” he says, “but lots more in the legal fees—plus the three annual round-trip flights I had to take to El Salvador to file more papers in person.” Compound those expenses with the income taxes he had to pay at the end of each year in the States—“I made too much money to avoid paying minimal taxes, partly because I had to file as a soltero, a single, unmarried man, even though I wasn’t! It was not a pleasant surprise to have to pay a large tax bill every April.”—and we can see what he was up against. The delays in the process caused by the pandemic hardly helped matters.
Through MassHire Metro North, Ernesto was able to serve a 160-hour pre-apprenticeship, known by its acronym PACMAN*, that’s designed for Metro North residents interested in facilities maintenance or trade-related construction occupations. Not only did the “basics” courses, applicable to many different trades, cover the various uses of tools—from wrenches and screw guns to ladders and power saws; they also introduced students to workplace safety standards, customer courtesy practices, and yet more financial literacy. He learned to write a strong resume and to do an effective interview as well. A “pre-apprentice” with aspirations to go into plumbing, carpentry, or masonry would learn the same basics from this MassHire pre-apprenticeship, and so would someone like Ernesto, who had chosen to go into the cooling and heating trades—or HVAC, as it’s more commonly known, for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning.
Toward the end of the pre-apprenticeship, counselors at MassHire directed Ernesto to Central Cooling and Heating, an HVAC contractor in Woburn that serves residential communities in the Metro North region of Boston. He applied and was taken on as an apprentice and for some time now has been making the daily rounds of homes to the south in Cambridge, to the north in Manchester-by-the-Sea, and everywhere in between. “In a single day we might replace a boiler, fix a broken furnace, install a new heat pump, and consult on a mini-split air-conditioning system,” he says—"as many as four jobs a day.” Now nearing completion of his apprenticeship, he looks forward to going out on his own, making the rounds in a Central Cooling and Heating company truck, for good pay and benefits to boot.
If it seems as if Ernesto deserves some kind of award for his patience, perseverance, and persistence, all he has to do is turn in his seat at Valsos Café, on Shirley Avenue in Revere, and nod toward Rosibel and Angel at the next table, patiently waiting for the Saturday afternoon adventures to continue. “This is my award right here,” he says, nodding at his wife and son. “They’ve only been here six months. We’re moving to a larger apartment in two weeks. And there’s another son on the way—due in August.” Which will mean additional expenses to balance in the family budget to be sure, but not anything Ernesto Josué Díaz can’t handle.
