I actually saved $300 because I thought it was going to be that expensive. Back then I had no money. I went to City Hall and applied for the name so I can have a license: the Dog Psychology Center. And it ended up costing me fifteen dollars. Just like that. Nobody owned the name, and you didn't have to be a psychologist to own a title like that. You can't call yourself a psychologist, but you can call places [psychology centers], so that was very empowering. I ended up with $285 back, which allowed me to buy Pampers® for André [his son] and formula and all that stuff. [He laughs.] That was a very proud day for me to have a title for my place, even though it was in South Central Los Angeles, a really beat-up place, a place where people said, “Nobody's going to come to South Central because people get killed in South Central.”
But months later, dogs from Beverly Hills started arriving in limousines to my place! [He laughs.] Having Nicolas Cage as a client, who lives in Bel Air, helps! One day his butler called me and said, “Mr. Cage would like to meet you.” And I didn't know who Mr. Cage was until he said, “Nicolas Cage.”
“OK, very good, I am available tomorrow. I would like to come and evaluate the situation….” So I did, and he had a pack of dogs. Most of the people, let's say 85 percent of my cases, are about aggression, especially when you have a powerful breed like a Doberman, Rottweiler, German Shepherd, or pit bull. He [Cage] had already called the other professionals, and there was one guy left and he's in South Central, so you might give him a try. [He laughs, then playfully.] “He's in South Central; he knows how to handle aggression. Don't you worry about it!” More than anything, you train the people. For the most part, their time is invested in other areas and dogs are more for affection purposes, so normally when I finish training the people, it helps.
Some early clients were Redman, who was really a hot commodity. He was a rapper and he helped me in the rap community, and Jade, in the hip-hop community. In the actor community, producers like Barry Josephson helped me, and Roman Phifer helped me in the NFL community, and someone in the NBA circle, and the billionaire circle—and so you've got all these amazing people who are successful, but they have trouble with their dogs or a lot of trouble with their dogs, and everybody has a circle, and once somebody lets you in, the networking begins. And to me, it's always about being truthful, having integrity, and that's how you create the loyalty of your clients….
I saw my mom again after I got my green card. I got the green card five years after I married Ilusión [1997], and I got my citizenship last year [2009]. My mom came here because she wanted to meet my son. You know, my mom never had a passport in her life, never flew on a plane, but she got a passport and a visa and she came. She came alone. And I remember we had like thirty minutes of letting it go. She's just pure love, and I understand sacrifice because of her. At that point, I hadn't seen her in eight years! I mean, she definitely raised a very strong human being. And she was proud of me….
Soon after that, I went back to Mexico for the first time since I came here. I went back and I ate everything. [He laughs.] No apprehension—I was going back home. I wanted to see my family; I wanted to see the ranch. We flew. We didn't go through Tijuana. To go through this border [at the airport] [sighs in relief] and have it [my passport] stamped was like [laughs heartily], “Wow! So you're saying I don't have to run?” [He laughs.] But I still see them [Border Patrol agents] in uniform and will get nervous even though I have papers in my hand, you know? It took a while, a few trips for me to get over that: that I don't have to run, I don't have to hide, I don't have to feel uncertain about the uniform. It's sort of a Pavlovian response; they trained me well! [He laughs heartily.] Now when I'm at the airport and security people see me, they bring me all the way to the front. I cut the line, and they say, “Will you help me with my dog?”
The TV show happened as the result of an interview I did in 2002 with the Los Angeles Times, and they followed me for three days. At the end, the reporter asked me, “What would you like to do next?” And I said, “I would love to have a TV show.” The newspaper story came out on a Saturday, and by Monday a whole bunch of producers were outside the warehouse in South Central Los Angeles—the very place where people said nobody's gonna come! [He laughs.] That's where the TV show was born: South Central Los Angeles.
So I said to the producers, “One of the things I want you to do is walk through the pack. And the pack is going to evaluate if I can work with you or not.” [He laughs.] “The pack will growl. The pack will walk away from some people. The pack will give them their back, and that means you can't work with me.” Well, one of the producers walked through, and the pack came to them, and we've been together ever since.
You can always count on the dogs. As I said, I'm a man of instincts and a man of faith. That's how I jumped the border: all those angels given to me by God—the divine intervention, the divine help. So gratitude is always how I begin each day. I begin with prayer, and I always pray around dogs because they always believe what you believe. Sometimes you can pray around people, but they don't believe what you believe, so they're blocking your prayer! But you can always count on the dogs because when the dogs are around me they're my anchor, so you just go into an automatic state of mind and you're not in conflict; you're just clear. And that's what I want to bring to people's lives: that when you are with a dog, conflict should not be in your being, and a life without conflict has joy, has happiness….
My number one hero is my grandfather, who taught me never to work against Mother Nature. But also Oprah because she is a true American Dream. She comes from a poor background, abused background. She knows how to deal with uncertainty and has the respect and loyalty of the American people. Even though she's a black woman in America, she pretty much rules the world. You're talking about somebody who has a really bad background and made the best out of it. She won against all the odds. That just shows you that the willpower of a human being has more importance than the lack of knowledge of a person.
The proudest moment for my dad—that “My son made it!”—was when I was invited to the White House in 2006 because he's a politician at heart. My dad works for the oldest political party in Mexico, so when I was invited to the White House, Mr. Bush was there, and I was right next to the king of Spain, and all these amazing people were in the front row a few feet away from Mr. Bush. But when I first arrived at the White House, everybody formed a line. But everybody has to be checked, so I went in front of the line passing all these important people and everybody's like, “Who's this guy?” And I heard a Secret [Service] agent say, “That's the Dog Whisperer. Don't you see the show?” That was an amazing experience. I gave Mr. Bush a “Pack Leader” hat and a “Pack Leader shirt,” and he sent me a letter thanking me.
I love that quote from Mr. Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That is a true pack leader, you know? Because in the dog world, the pack leader is not there for himself. He's there for the pack, and so that quote of Mr. Kennedy is so animal-like, so instinctual-like because it's all about service. That's the state of the divine, and that's to be enlightened: that you want to help the world to get better in some shape or form, and that whatever your situation in life, the situation with everything is just your growth. The point is that you understand that things happen for a reason, and you find what the reason is, you act on it, and move on. You live in the moment, and you live calm-assertive, like my grandfather. He's no longer with us, but he would have given me the simplest solution for anything—and it would be like: “What? It's that simple?” Yeah! Life is simple. We make it complicated. It goes back to that. The human loves to complicate things. The intellectual loves to complicate things, and emotions sometimes get in the way of you seeing logical simplicity and really taking advice from anybody.
I'll tell you a story. One day I was in New York, and I was walking with my brother. We had finished a nice Italian dinner, and then I see this homeless person with dreadlocks, and he said, “Hey, you! You're
the Dog Whisperer!” [He laughs.]
“How do you know?”
“I watch TV! You're really good!” [He laughs.]
And the first thing that came out of my mouth because he seemed so happy was, “So how do you stay so happy?”
And he said, “I go with the flow.”
The next day I get to meet a billionaire, and this guy owns cruise ships and casinos, and I said, “Sir, you seem very happy. How do you stay in that state?”
And he said, “I just go with the flow.” [He laughs heartily.] But going with the flow doesn't mean you let people push you around. That's not what they're saying. It's just that you don't fight things that are happening. You go with the energy. Like my grandfather always said, never go against Mother Nature.
He came to America alone. He came to embrace the American Dream that so many people talked about back home in his village in Mexico. Carlos was twenty-six years old when he left his wife, mother, and young son. He crossed the border illegally with the help of a coyote. Once across, he journeyed north to a small town outside Sonoma, where he got a job at a vineyard as a migrant worker earning eight dollars for a twelve-hour workday. He eventually learned English and got a better-paying job in a lumber mill, earning more in a month than he did in Mexico in a year. It took more than seven years before he was able to get his green card and bring his wife and son to America. Today, Carlos, at age forty, a devout Catholic, lives happily in northern California with his family. He recently became a US citizen, but his greatest pride is his son: “my papi, my Pedro,” he said. “Pedro is going to college now and working hard to make his dreams come true. He wants to be a lawyer and one day help other Mexicans who immigrate here.” He paused. “We miss Mexico sometimes,” he said, “but we are happy here, thank God. Will we return one day? Maybe. Just not today.”
My young son, Pedro, was five years old and he just kept crying. It was the day I left Mexico. I was about to begin my journey to America to find a new job and a better life. I had been a laborer, a construction worker, but the company I worked for closed and I couldn't find work. I desperately needed money to support my family. My mother ran a small bodega {store], but it didn't bring in much money. All four of us lived out back in an apartment. I wanted my son to have a good education and maybe one day go to college, which was never a possibility for me. I wanted to give him a good life. I did not want my boy to go through what I did; which is why I decided to come to the United States. When I was little, I sold food on the street so my family could eat. My father left us when I was little. I was an only child.…
One afternoon my wife, Rosalinda, and Pedro were at the bodega with my mother. Nobody said anything. They knew. I bent down to my boy, my papi: “I am going to America, but I'll be back soon, don't worry.” Pedro had tears in his eyes. “But why?” he asked and gave me a big hug. I felt like my heart was going to break. A short time later, a friend of mine came by with an old pickup truck and drove me about 250 miles to the north. I had cash with me and the name of a person, this coyote I was to meet there….
We met at a small run-down motel a few miles from the California border. The coyote had many people living in this horrible, dirty, tiny room waiting to cross. Many of them were there for weeks; some, months. He told us not to go outside until it was time to leave. He said it was for our safety, and he warned us. He said there were a lot of dealers, a lot of drugs, gangs, and people had been murdered, robbed, disappeared, and if we went outside there was nothing he could do to protect us; we were on our own. But some people didn't care, and they took a chance, even if it meant smoking a cigarette…. I stayed in that room for eight straight days, imagine! We slept on the floor. There were cockroaches everywhere. The toilet didn't work. I will never forget the smell. It was not something I can describe. There are no words for what it was like. As if that weren't enough, everyone was going crazy, so some people would sneak out at night.
I remember one young girl—she was so sweet, so pretty, dark hair. Maybe sixteen, seventeen—practically a child. Her name was Carlita. Me and some of the older ones in the group sort of looked after her like a parent. Well, one night Carlita went out for a cigarette. She had been gone quite a while, maybe a couple of hours, and we started getting worried. Then, later that night, we could hear screams, the voices of men. I moved to the door to go after her, to save her, but some of the others held me back. [He pauses, emotional.] I never saw her again….
We walked across the desert into Arizona. We traveled at night. It took three days to cross. We were sore, hungry, thirsty. At one point we didn't have a drink for nearly two days, but we just kept going, kept walking. We ran out of water because the coyote said not to carry too much with us because he said it would slow us down. Of course, he made sure there was enough water for him. He wouldn't share it either, the bastard! And a rich one, too! It cost me more than $3,000 to cross….
There were fourteen of us. There were lots of rattlesnakes, scorpions, heat, dust. And when it rained, lots of mud, so it was slow going. You had to be careful where you stepped. One bite from a snake or scorpion and you're gone like that [snapsfingers]. I could see the lights of the American Border Patrol off in the distance. The coyote told us that many like us did not make it, and there was no reason to doubt him. In fact, at one point, just off the trail in a ditch, I saw what looked like the entrails of something covered with black flies. Thousands of black flies. It could have been a cow or a dog,—I wasn't sure—until I saw what looked like a human skull and bones in the dirt. So apparently we were not the first to come this way and I remember thinking, “This loco. This is crazy. I wish I had never come.”
Once we made it across, we had to lie down in a van. The coyote's brother drove, and we finally got some water. It was a long drive, many hours to the north of San Francisco to work in the vineyards. We were known as the mojado, or the illegal ones….
When I arrived, my English was very poor but enough to get by. I wanted to go to school to learn, but I had to work all day, and they were long days. I did this so I could send money back home to Rosalinda and my mother. I would study English in the nighttime after work, and there were several others. It was a group of us: the workers, the mojado. We used to meet in the basement of a small mission church. It was sort of a like a Bible study group except we also learned English. A local woman who once lived in Mexico translated back and forth into Spanish. She taught us. She was a good woman. In her fifties. Her name was Zulma. She gave us books to read, but more importantly, she gave us hope. And then the years passed—and I learned and I worked, I prayed, I wrote letters. I sent money back home. This was my life for a very long time.
Many of the mojado—the ones in our church group, anyway—returned to Mexico. They were not happy because the life was too hard. We lived in shacks on the outer fringes of the vineyard fields. There was some electricity but no plumbing. No running water for showers. We had to go to a communal building for that. And the bedsprings were rusted and the mattresses filled with mold. One friend of mine got sick. He had no money for a doctor, much less medical insurance, and he said, “I do not want to die in California. I want to die in my country. I want to die in Mexico,” and he went home. For others, they never intended to stay anyway. Their plan was simple: come here, work, make the money, take it home, and hopefully take enough where you can set yourself up somehow. For the ones that stayed, like me, Zulma helped us get green cards….
It took me over seven years to raise the money to bring my Rosalinda and Pedro to America. By that time, my mother had passed. The last time I saw her was the day I left Mexico to come here. But the day I saw my wife and boy again, that was a day! My family was together again. Pedro had become a big boy now, almost thirteen years old, and Rosalinda looked like an angel. Beautiful. This was the greatest day of my life. [He pauses.] My next one will be when Pedro graduates college. He wants to go to law school. He said he wants to help others come here, the way he wishes someone had been there to help his padre.
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br /> She came to America to escape a bad marriage and start a new life. Her dream was to get an education, but her background went only as far as primary school. Relying on domestic jobs to support her, she passed her high school equivalency exam and finally, at age fifty, earned an associate's degree. That same year, 2007, she married her second husband, with whom now she lives happily in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. In 2009, she earned her bachelor's degree in English education and is working toward her master's to become a teacher. “I am very happy that I came to America,” she said. “I can honestly say that my life began at fifty when I graduated college.”
I left Trinidad because I was in a very bad marriage and I wanted out. The children were old enough where they could take care of themselves, and I thought it was time. I am from India; my grandparents are from India. My great-grandparents went to Trinidad as indentured laborers, and then my grandparents followed. My grandmother was born in India, but my mother was born in Trinidad. So we've had two or three generations of our family in Trinidad. So Trinidad is my home, not India.
I was married for twenty-five years. Yes, it was survival of the fittest. I have three children, three girls, but when I got married, he had two children that came to live with us, and they were the cause of the bad marriage. It was like I had no say and they had all the say in the marriage. They became the bosses. I felt like the slave. Indians are very obedient and humble, and they take care of their home and their family. I got married to someone who is not Indian. He was African: a black man from Trinidad, which was a no-no in my culture. So as far as my family was concerned, I was dead. I thought they would have softened up after a while, but they never did until I left for good.
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