Revealing immigrant roots
Chelsea councilor recounts how his Argentine parents, who had lived here illegally, became Americans


Cristian (from left), Roy, Isabel, Vicente, and Nikolas Avellaneda in Tito's Bakery, owned and run by the family, in Chelsea. Vicente was a baker in his native Argentina. Cristian (from left), Roy, Isabel, Vicente, and Nikolas Avellaneda in Tito's Bakery, owned and run by the family, in Chelsea. Vicente was a baker in his native Argentina. (Wendy Maeda/Globe Staff)
By Maria Sacchetti
Globe Staff / November 24, 2008


CHELSEA - City Councilor Roy Avellaneda traces his political stance on illegal immigration to a pair of newlyweds from Argentina who spent their honeymoon huddled under a rug, on a cold, hard floor in Dorchester.
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His parents - Vicente and Isabel Avellaneda - arrived in America in 1970 with suitcases, winter coats, and $500. She stitched trousers in a factory; he baked bread on Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury. And for two years they lived in uneasy secrecy as illegal immigrants, like so many of their neighbors today.

Avellaneda's long-kept secret spilled out at a recent state hearing on immigration, following years of reluctance because of the vitriolic national debate on the issue. He said his family is an example of the success that might await the nation's 12 million undocumented immigrants if they are granted permission to stay. His parents are now US citizens and own a landmark bakery on Broadway.

"People wonder where my position comes from," Avellaneda said, in an interview. "There's my answer: It's my roots."

The news stunned a crowd that had known Avellaneda as a champion of immigrants' rights - he and other councilors voted last year to declare Chelsea a sanctuary city, a haven for all immigrants. But many immigrants from Central America also were skeptical o f the tall, bespectacled councilor. They view him as a member of the white elite, a college-educated politician who speaks Spanish with an Argentine accent.

"It took me by surprise," said Gladys Vega, executive director of the nonprofit Chelsea Collaborative, who knew Avellaneda's sto ry but didn't expect him to share it. "I asked a woman, 'Did you understand what he just said?' She said, 'I can't believe it. I thought he was a white guy. I didn't think he was one of us.' "

Nationally, politicians and others have recently held up their own stories to show the contributions of illegal immigrants, from 76-year-old US Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, whose Italian mother was once here illegally, to 21- year-old Henry Cejudo, an Olympic wrestler and gold medalist and the son of illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The stories infuriate opponents of illegal immigration, who say the country should not reward people who broke the law. And, they say, not all immigrants are so successful.

"There are plenty of people who applied legally who would love to come here," said Steve Kropper, cochairman of Massachusetts Citizens for Immigration Reform, which favors stricter limits on immigration. "Let's let them come first."

But in an interview at his bakery, where he has arrived at dawn for decades to work to the whirring of a giant mixer, Vicente Avellaneda said he and Isabel decided to take a shot at a new life.

"It's one of the chances you have to take in your life," he said. "I can't wait 10 years to come and work in this country."
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He and his wife were from humble families in the port city of Rosario, nicknamed the Chicago of Argentina because so many Italians - their own ethnic background - lived there.

They met while dancing to '60s rock music at a local club. She was 16, a "blond, beautiful girl." He was 18, a long-haired baker known as Tito who had been working full time since he was 14. His mother had died when he was 11, and he had to help his father and six sisters.

He managed to open a bakery with a sister, but his fortunes began to shift one day when a friend begged Tito to teach him how to bake bread. The man was moving to America and needed a trade to find work.

A few months later, the friend wrote Tito that he had found a job in America and was earning more than Tito and his four employees combined in Rosario.

"If this guy can be a boss," he recalled thinking, "I can be an owner over there."

He sold the bakery to his sister, married Isabel, and they moved to Boston in 1970 with tourist visas.

Immediately, they felt lost. An acquaintance failed to pick them up at the airport. They did not understand English. Miraculously, they ran into another newlywed couple from Rosario, who found them a floor to sleep on for two nights.

They moved into a single room on Magnolia Street, and Tito ventured to an employment agency in front of Dudley Station to ask for work. A Mexican immigrant offered to translate for him so he could apply to Kasanoff's, a Jewish bakery in Roxbury. The boss, a towering redhead, questioned how Tito could work if he did not know English.

"I said, 'I know my work,' " he recalled, his eyes bright with playful confidence, all these years later, even though he is 62 and his head is a mop of gray hair. "I am a baker."

He worked from 2 a.m. to 1 p.m. for $100 a week, whipping up batches of croissants, challah bread, and dinner rolls. He received several raises and soon was put in charge of the ovens.

But he kept his legal status a secret. Though they were able to move to a spacious house in Revere, Tito and Isabel struggled without papers.

He applied for a second job at Jordan Marsh, but the boss rejected him because he didn't have a green card. He helped start Al Capone pizzeria in Haymarket, but could not own it.

"I wanted to make the papers," he said in English, which he taught himself. "I wanted to stay here legally."

In 1972, he applied for legal residency because someone said his American-born son, Roy, would make him eligible for it.

Instead, three days later immigration officials went to their home and confiscated their passports.

A judge ordered them to go back to Argentina and apply to return legally.

When they left for Rosario, Isabel was pregnant. Little Roy, now 37, was almost 2. It took two years and help from friends before they received permission to return to United States.

In 1980, they opened Tito's Bakery, where sometimes, over café con leche and pastries, Tito Avellaneda still tells immigrant customers his story and laughs at their surprise. Many of the newer arrivals have risked far more to get here, crossing swollen rivers, paying smugglers thousands of dollars, and traversing the desert for days.

"They are hard-working people," he said. "They come over here for something because they need it."

Roy Avellaneda knew only snippets of his parents' story growing up.

He did not know one of the great ironies of his father's life: Tito Avellaneda bought the bakery's gleaming showcases from the same boss at Jordan Marsh who had once denied him a job.

All three Avellaneda sons succeeded.

Roy graduated from Babson College, became a realtor, and has been on the City Council for 10 years - the first Latino to top the ballot. Cristian, 35, is a firefighter, and Nikolas, 25, is a financial analyst.

Though Roy Avellaneda had never told his parents' story publicly, it influenced his political and business life.

Once he sold a building to a pizza shop owner, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, just because the man reminded him of his parents.

And at last month's hearing in Chelsea, as he looked into the audience and recognized the same hopes and fears his parents had, he decided, finally, to share his family's secret.

Eyes widened as he spoke, and then hands came together in applause.

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