Weekend Fiestas

15 Siblings are Hispanic Family of Year

Madison, Wisconsin May 6, 2004 - When the 15 Villarreal brothers and sisters get together for Christmas, they need to rent a hall for the occasion.

"The family has gotten so big we can't fit in anyone's home. We have to rent a community center," said Maria Banuelos, formerly Maria Villarreal.

Ramona Villarreal concedes that the Atwood Community Center, where the family has celebrated the holiday in the past, is becoming too small.

"We'll have to rent the Coliseum," jokes brother Perfecto.

The Italian Community Center was big enough to hold a large number of Villarreals, who were in Milwaukee on Saturday night to accept their Hispanic Family of the Year Award.

Ramona - who teaches physical education in the River Valley School District, which includes Spring Green - filled out a questionnaire detailing her family's migrant worker history and dedication to public service and sent it back to the United Migrant Opportunity Services, or UMOS, a nonprofit social services organization based in Milwaukee.

By the time the agency mailed her back, Ramona had stopped opening her mail. Her older brother, 52-year-old Perfecto, was in the hospital, where doctors told the Villarreal family his chance of living was 50-50.

The family - 10 brothers and sisters live in Madison - basically camped out at the hospital and made sure Perfecto pulled through. Once he did and Ramona began opening her mail again, she was shocked to see her family had won the award.

"There are so many very good families in Wisconsin," said Ramona, who admits she "kind of started" crying when she read the news.

She called her brother Rolando, who said he began screaming. Maria, 51, said she began jumping. And sister Sara, 38, said she simply refused to believe it.

"I don't know why, I've never lied to her," Ramona said, surrounded by family in the spacious living room of the home she and her partner built a year ago in a new subdivision off High Point Road on the city's far west side.

When they were children in Laredo, Texas, there wasn't enough work for the Villarreal children - nine girls and six boys. So their parents took them every year on expeditions up north where there were jobs picking cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, sugar beets, cotton and tobacco.

"Tobacco and cotton work was the hardest. It was the No. 1 most painful. Not just on your fingers, but your back," Ramona said. "And you had to pick so much to get anything."

Perfecto talks about being "packed like sardines" into the trucks that would take them to the fields. As many as 50 workers would be stuffed into the back of a truck, Maria said. Sometimes on the road, shopkeepers wouldn't let them into stores to buy groceries, said Ramona, who will never forget how heartbreaking it was one day not to be able to get the Hostess Snowballs her father promised her.

"You will understand later," he told her.

"There were lots of things we didn't know," Maria pointed out.

The family would sleep as many as seven in a room and as many as five in a bed. Their mother would hang a shower curtain across the room to divide the boys from the girls, the siblings recalled.

Ramona remembers waking up one time with someone's leg across her neck.

They lived on boiled eggs and potatoes, she said.

But largely, the memories are happy. The Villarreal siblings also remember people seeing them in the fields and sometimes dropping off their used toys.

Maria remembers that as poor as they were, every Christmas her father would give each child two presents: a ball and a yo-yo. Perfecto has vivid memories of making snowmen out of tumbleweeds.

As migrants, they traveled wherever they could all find work. The children found themselves in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, South Dakota and Idaho. Some years they would attend as many as nine schools.

Of the siblings, only Ramona has a college degree. They all say they value education, hard work and "saving their pennies."

In 1967 the family settled in Wautoma, where together they took part in boycotts and marches, including a famous five-day march in 1966 from Wautoma to Madison. The Struggle for Justice march was a campaign for equal wages and better housing.

After the Villarreal parents died about 25 years ago, while still in their 50s, the siblings said they drew even closer and looked out for each other. They haven't had a death in the family since, Ramona said.

Rolando calls the family a "dynasty," pointing out that the word shouldn't only be used to describe large, rich and famous families.

"We've had a ball. We've had a wonderful time," he said. "Ramona, she is like the speaker of the House. If there is an accident, or something goes wrong, we call Maria. She calms people down."

The Villarreals place a big emphasis on teaching others about Hispanic culture. They have volunteered with the Salvation Army, cooking Mexican food for the homeless. Many family members help translate for other Hispanics so they can complete applications for work, fill out hospital forms, and put together school applications.

While in Laredo, Rolando organized an effort that bought shoes for 1,200 poor students. A few siblings come to Ramona's school district each year to help with the Cinco de Mayo celebration she organizes. Maria comes to make the tortillas.

Maria didn't have much use for school when she was young, dropping out in the third grade. But when she was a teenager still working the fields, she was told about a GED program through UW-Extension, and she came to Madison at age 16 to get her high school diploma. She recalls working at a motel, babysitting and cleaning the homes of doctors and lawyers when she wasn't studying. She spent nine years at Rayovac and now works as a machine operator at Madison Dairy. One of her siblings brags that she was the only woman there when she started.

"I like my job. I make butter," Maria said.

Maria said she has stressed education above all else to her five children. Two are at UW-Madison, one has graduated, and the youngest two attend East High School.

"The main thing is for them to finish school. If I have to drag them there I will," she said.