CHICAGO — Four days into a fundraising campaign for 89-year-old Fidencio Sanchez, the Little Village ice cream salesman has become an international phenomenon.
As of Wednesday morning, a GoFundMe page had raised almost $321,000 for Sanchez's retirement, including almost 15,000 donations from 52 countries.
In less than a week, the effort became the highest-grossing GoFundMe campaign ever started in Illinois.
Sanchez's story has spread to Los Angeles, London and beyond, modeling the power of human kindness for audiences all over the world.
But for the nearly 600,000 people of Mexican heritage who live in Chicago, the Sanchez family's well-earned retirement speaks to a different kind of power: the immutability of an immigrant's work ethic.
"We should be thanking this man for setting an example of the resilience of the Mexican people," said Jaime DiPaulo, executive director of the Little Village Chamber of Commerce. "We don't complain, we just get up every morning and go out there to work and provide for our families. That's who we are as a people."
Sanchez was born in the southern Mexican state of Morelos, he said Monday. His wife, Eladia Sanchez, crossed the Rio Grande in 1980 without legal documents, and Fidencio followed soon after.
"I came here because ... my little daughter wanted to go to school, and we didn't have any money to give her the things she needed," Eladia Sanchez said in Spanish in a Facebook Live video recorded Saturday. "We were just poor farmers. So I told my husband I would go up to the United States and send some money back to the family."
In 1993, Fidencio Sanchez showed up at Paletas Poncho, 2513 S. Pulaski Road, a mom-and-pop ice cream store co-owned by Blanca and Guillermo Gutierrez. Sanchez offered to stock a pushcart with popsicles and sell them on the street, and he's repeated the same routine nearly every day since then, usually making around $50-$60 per outing.
"He's very responsible, very reliable, and the man just doesn't get tired," Blanca Gutierrez said with a laugh. "I think he wants to be like a tree and die standing up."
Gutierrez said she hoped the GoFundMe campaign's success would prove a larger point about the toughness of Latino immigrants, especially during a national election season that's been filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric.
"This comes as a direct message to [Republican presidential nominee Donald] Trump, who says immigrants are trying to take over, that they don't do any good," Gutierrez said.
When Trump launched his candidacy in June 2015, he singled out Mexican migrants as a prime target of his campaign.
"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best," he said. "They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [sic] us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."
After more than a year of enduring this kind of rhetoric, DiPaulo said, people like Sanchez give immigrant communities an instant retort.
"All over this country we've been called drug dealers, we've been called rapists who are taking jobs from Americans," DiPaulo said. "And here you have an almost 90-year-old man who's not even collecting social services, he just wants to contribute. Because that's what you do in this country: You work hard, and you contribute.
"Our business corridor is thriving here, and it's because of that immigrant work ethic," he added.
It's a special kind of tenacity that can get diluted with each generation that follows new immigrants, said Joel Cervantes-Macias, one of the organizers of the GoFundMe campaign.
"They just don't make guys like that anymore," Cervantes-Macias said. "There's a Mexican saying, and it really speaks to every immigrant who comes here: 'A job is like a fight. You can find one anywhere if you look hard enough.'"
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