How a teacher bought a home at 27

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for the CALÓ Newsletter.

Author’s Note:

I get inspired by every episode of On Prosperity for different reasons. For this episode, I thought it was critical to share the message of Luis Herrera’s life story. I visited him as we watched his son play soccer and I asked if he had ever shared his life story in this way and he said, “No.” I am curious about what might happen for Gen Alpha, the generation of people born between 2010 and 2024 if they did get this type of messaging in their lives. My sources at the Pew Research Center estimate that there are 5 million Latina/o Gen Alpha in California; 2.1 million Latina/o Gen Alpha in Los Angeles; and 1.6 million Latina/o Gen Alpha in Los Angeles of Mexican parents. What would happen if we supported 1.6 million children in Los Angeles so they could have such a clear path to prosperity like el Maestro Luis Herrera?

How do you identify, Maestro?

I am Mexican American. My mother was born in Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, México. My father’s family is from Durango but he was born in the United States.

Please describe your childhood home:

I lived then and now in the city of Fillmore. It’s a small town. About 12,000 are people surrounded by orange orchards. It is a home filled with my siblings. Six in total, I am the second oldest and my sister is the youngest. We are a musical family. Full of siblings, music, love, and home cooking. It was a beautiful place to be. We had a stucco two-story house with a backyard pool that was fenced in. It was a bright white house with a bright blue trim, mistakenly like the color of the recycling bins. Big front yard. An area for basketball. Our mom prohibited us from going into the pool and when our basketball would cross over the fence, the brother who hopped it would get the chancla for sure. My father was a musician but my mother played just as big a role making sure we were practicing and taxiing us to our lessons. My father’s family had a band playing son jarocho. My uncles were in the band, my grandfather was also a musician. They listened to all sorts of music from all states and they developed a deep understanding of son jarocho. During the Chicano movement, our family reclaimed our culture and developed a sense of pride. My uncles started a Cultural Community Center in La Colonia in Oxnard. My father used to tell me: “If you know where you come from, your path in life will become much more clear.” This was when there was a lot of pressure to assimilate to American culture and to not speak Spanish but my family played a big part in promoting Mexican tradition in this mixed American culture.

Since you were raised in heavily agricultural areas, was your family involved in the Bracero movement?

Yes, my grandfather was a bracero in Oxnard with citrus and in Fillmore with strawberries and chiles. Then, they made their way into the packing houses.

In that house in Fillmore, did your parents own it or rent it?

My grandparents owned a home in the lower-income areas of Fillmore and Oxnard. My parents also took on that tradition. They sacrificed a lot. I don’t know how they did it with six kids but they used “equity ladders” and made great financial decisions and ended up owning many homes in those areas. They eventually became more financially comfortable.

Where did you see yourself economically at the age of 10?

I think we were somewhere in the middle but we felt rich. I didn’t see wealth. I didn’t notice income. We were athletes. We were musicians. We had love and family. We felt like kings everywhere we went. We felt above a lot of people. We thought our food was better, our style was better, we were stronger, faster. We played better as musicians. We spoke more languages. We weren’t defined by our income and we never felt out of place. Our communities were strong. We had confidence!

When you were in high school, with all of this confidence, and this rich family foundation, did you understand that Los Angeles was the capital of the music industry?

No. We didn’t see music as an industry. Music was our identity. It was a source of happiness. We couldn’t care less about making money off of music. We weren’t trying to become famous.

Ironically, la familia Herrera is very famous for their musicianship, right?

Yes, whenever I go outside, I get stopped a lot and I get to talk to people about our music but it wasn’t by intention.

Let’s talk about when you left Fillmore to go to college at UCLA….

We were born into a UCLA family. My uncle played football at UCLA, he was a Rose Bowl champ. John Wooden visited us in our grandparent’s home in La Colonia. He wanted my uncle to play and that gave us great pride. We wore UCLA shirts. All five of my siblings and I went to UCLA. They asked my father how he did it and he said, “I didn’t ask them if they wanted to go to college, I asked them where they wanted to go to college.” When you ask that way, the child feels like you have ownership over your future. I knew that I wanted to go to UCLA. I was excited to go to UCLA. Four out of five days of the school week, I wore UCLA gear to high school. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t get accepted but that didn’t happen. We were six for six!

"My father used to tell me: 'If you know where you come from, your path in life will become much more clear.'"

- Luis Herrera

And you had culture shock at UCLA?

I was surrounded by unfamiliar faces. People didn’t speak like me. I was one of the few Latinos. My accent would cause me to get asked where I was from. And when you ask somebody from the barrio in Fillmore where you are from, that’s like you’re sizing me up and I’m claiming Fillmore. They kept asking me: “Why do you talk that way?” I was a product of my environment. I felt like an outsider. I looked different. I think I noticed that we didn’t have the same amount of money as others. I just noticed socio-economic differences. It was primarily Asian and White. Huge Persian and Armenian presence too. I noticed how people ate on campus and they had their Panda Express and smoothies. I remember my brother and I would treat ourselves to half a Wetzel Pretzel to split. We weren’t going to create debt for our family by eating like the other kids were eating.

Did you know what you were going to do after college?

When I graduated with my Bachelors, I applied for the Masters program, I Mastered in Latin American studies. I wanted to be a university professor but then when I started substitute teaching, I loved teaching. I got my credentials and I have been a teacher for the last 18 years.

Were you renting in UCLA?

For a time but since there were so many of us, my parents decided to buy a converted condominium for all the siblings to live together when we were at UCLA.

Where do you live today?

I live in a single-story. It doesn’t look like much from the outside but when you go inside it’s really clean, remodeled, hardwood floors, open layout, four bedrooms, a play attic for our kids. I live in this home with my wife, son and daughter. My mother-in-law also lives with us. I live in the same community that I grew up in and I teach at Fillmore High School. I teach Spanish 1,2,3 for non-native speakers. I purchased the home in 2011 at the age of 27. My mother got into real estate and my father got into real estate finance as a broker so we have been able to become financially stable and comfortable. I am currently close to achieving a zero debt strategy that I set for my family. I am chasing simplicity. I recently refinanced into a 15-year mortgage and I pay into the principal so I am knocking years out of my mortgage.

I’ve never interviewed anybody that had their life as clearly mapped out. It seems to me that you are very clear about your way of prosperity…

I live in prosperity currently. I understand my priorities. I understood the way of life that I wanted for myself. I live like a king already. I don’t care about a Gucci bag. My slides are from Five Below. Prosperity and wealth are in my experiences, memories, my family, my siblings that I play music with, my parents, my grandparents, the people I most value in life. I understood that there was nothing else beyond that so I am living my dream life. Do you follow my adventures on Instagram?