Employee Resource Group Excellence

Introduction: The Milli Vanilli Syndrome

My Personal Connection to Employee Resource Groups

The city of Matamoros in Mexico seems like an odd place to point to as the origination point for this book that eventually was destined to be titled Employee Resource Group Excellence. Matamoros is a city in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. It is located on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

Matamoros is the birthplace of my father, German. My father is the oldest of eight children, all of whom were born and raised in or near Matamoros. When my father reached the age where he could work, he would go across the border to work in Brownsville, Texas. It is in Brownsville that my father eventually met my mother, Janie. Janie is Mexican American, but she is a United States citizen, born in Texas. After a short courtship, German and Janie married and settled in the city of Lubbock, located in the panhandle region of Texas.

Lubbock is the city where I was born in 1969. My memories of Lubbock are rather vague, as we lived there only until I turned four years old. Our family, along with my aunts, uncles, and cousins, used to travel to the Midwest every year as migrant workers. We would go to cities like Traverse City, Michigan, to work the cherry fields and Wahpeton, North Dakota, to help with the sugar beet harvest. We eventually settled on the west side of St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where I grew up and spent my youth during ...