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To call Enrique Martinez a tough guy is an understatement. Few have climbed from where he once was—the barrios of Mexico City, where he was literally a homeless street urchin—to a bright, comfortable, RE/MAX Realty Partners office in Morgan Hill, where he now enjoys a successful real estate career.
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A journey of that magnitude tends to insulate a man in emotional armor, but Martinez, 56, is hardly without feeling. Whenever he shakes hands with a first-time buyer and says, “Congratulations, here are your keys,” the emotions come flooding back. He understands what it means, and how it feels, to realize a dream.
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He was a boxer once, a 16-year-old amateur who toiled as a sparring partner for pros, but he was a fighter long before that. Enrique “Ricky” Martinez grew up on the outskirts of Mexico City protecting his siblings from schoolyard bullies and absorbing regular beatings at home from his angry and abusive father.
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His goal, even as a boy, was to honor his mother, Annamaria Pacheco, who had toiled in Mexico as a servant from the age of 6 or 7, with no formal schooling, and never learned to read or write. That was a secret he discovered the first time he asked her to sign his report card.
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His own focus, from that day forward, was to pay attention to his teachers, study hard, and achieve. Few students graduated from his high school. “There was no hope, so most kids quit,” he explains, but Ricky earned his diploma at 16.
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He left home without a plan the following day, moving onto the mean streets of Mexico City, where he slept on sidewalks and ate from garbage cans for nearly a year.
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He also drank (a habit he’d picked up at age 10) and fought until his aunt—his mother’s sister—found him and took him into her home.
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“She had a beautiful family. My uncle was a great man. Their kids were very nice with me,” Martinez recalls. “But I felt like I was in a jail. I wasn’t their son. I didn’t belong. So, I stayed for two or three months and went back to the streets.”
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Martinez wasn’t yet 17 when a man approached him on a street corner after watching him fight. He was good, the man told him. He had fast hands. He used his feet like a boxer, and didn’t kick like most street fighters. The man had a home where he housed other fearless boys like Ricky— fed them, clothed them, gave them a warm place to sleep, a hot shower, and taught them how to box.
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“We became sparring partners for professional fighters—basically, we were punching bags—and that’s how I started,” says Martinez, who bears a long scar along his left eye from his boxing days. “I learned the moves. I learned how to have quick feet. He always taught us, ‘keep your hands hot, your feet hot, and your head cool. Don’t ever get angry or upset in the ring.’”
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Martinez was ready to turn pro, himself, when a sparring partner broke his nose so badly that one nostril closed and infection set in. He also lost his sense of smell which, despite undergoing corrective surgery years later in the U.S., he never recovered.
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As a teenager in Mexico City, he moved from one temporary job to the next—factory work with American companies. He also worked a night job, selling liquor through a slot in a door.
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As a 19-year-old, he traveled to San Jose, where he moved into a house with six others. He had no money, no job, no prospects and didn’t speak a word of English, but kept a roof over his head by cleaning the house, cleaning cars, cutting lawns. Payment usually amounted to lunch.
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“I helped a man cut a lawn one day and he gave me a sandwich—bologna on Wonder Bread. It tasted wonderful,” Martinez says. “There are things you never, ever forget. I don’t ever forget where I came from. I don’t ever forget my mom, my dad, my grandma … and I’ll always remember that sandwich.”
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He gravitated toward jobs that didn’t require him to interact with English-speaking people, working as a night janitor (for free at first, to learn the skills), a dishwasher at an 24-hour restaurant, a busboy, a cook, a kitchen manager. He began to see a connection between speaking English and achieving greater success, and took English lessons.
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Ricky was determined to make it even if it meant his home was a rented storage shed behind a house.
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“The owners had a large, mean dog and I remember having to bring the table scraps from the restaurant home in a bag and as I approached the side gate, throwing them to the dog as I ran to the door of my shed,” he says.
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He worked double shifts—9 a.m. to 11 p.m. most days—slept four or five hours, then went back to work. On weekends he made a long trudge to a local flea market where, for lunch only, he helped an old man clean toilets.
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In his mid-20s, he became friendly with a waitress at the restaurant who was paying her own way through San Jose State. Like Ricky, Linda Frank had emerged from a broken family with a determination to better herself.
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Though he was still just getting by, Linda saw potential—something that perplexes Ricky to this day.
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“She’s the one who straightened me out, big time,” he says. “Little by little, the partying stopped. But I didn’t quit until our son was four or five, and I realized I wasn’t a very good father.
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After a stint as a driver for a seafood company, he was hired by Whole Foods, where he became a grocery manager, supervising a crew of 35, then traveling to newly opened venues in the Bay Area to help set up other stores.
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When the grocery business interfered with family, Martinez began to explore new possibilities, setting his sights on the lofty goal of obtaining a real estate license.
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“I knew it would be very difficult,” he says. “I didn’t have a friend in real estate to ask, ‘What about this … what about that?’ I didn’t know the language very well—and I’m still learning today. But I promised myself I would give myself a year, study every day, three hours a day, with books, and videos, and TV.
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“Most people who become Realtors grew up here speaking the language. They went to school here, all the way through high school and college. Their parents might have been Realtors,” Martinez says. “I’d look at those people and think, ‘Why them? Why not me?’ But I can breathe, I can see, I can move … I see people with no hands, or no legs, who are doing better than me. I knew if I worked hard, I could accomplish my goal.”
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When Martinez learned in 2004 that he had passed the real estate exam on his second try, the tough guy felt his past flooding back.
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“It was a huge day for me,” he says. “I’m not a weak guy—I’ve been through so much in my life—but I cried. I cried because of my mom.”
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As parents, Linda and Ricky vowed to make any necessary sacrifice to give their children a good education. They enrolled both at Valley Christian High School, one of the top private schools on the West Coast. Michael, now 27, went on to graduate from UC-Santa Barbara, worked with special education children in San Francisco, then obtained his license as an Emergency Medicine Services professional. He currently lives in Ohio, where he’s studying to become a nurse. Twenty-five-year-old Amy graduated from San Jose State with a degree in hospitality management and works for Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara.
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Their mother, Linda, overcame her own hardscrabble beginnings to obtain her master’s degree from San Jose State. She works in social services for Santa Clara County.
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Ricky loves his job as a real estate agent, particularly that moment when he helps others achieve their own dreams. He, himself, became a homeowner for the first time in 1986, and never forgot the feeling.
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“When the agent handed me the keys to my own home, and said ‘congratulations,’ I couldn’t believe it … I couldn’t believe it was real,” he says. “In fact, as strange as it sounds, I was afraid to unlock the front door—it just didn’t feel right—so I actually slept outside that night. I slept beside the front door, in a sleeping bag.”
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Martinez’s eyes well up when he considers how far he’s come with his life, and what it took to get where he is. His own beginnings remain a part of him.
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“When I see homeless people, it breaks my heart,” he says. “It hurts me to see them, and I feel emotional because of the life I’ve had. I never forget that I was once where they are.”
We became sparring partners for professional fighters—basically, we were punching bags—and that’s how I started. I learned the moves. I learned how to have quick feet. He always taught us, ‘keep your hands hot, your feet hot, and your head cool. Don’t ever get angry or upset in the ring.’
