Familia Perez

Victor Manuel Perez was born and raised in the Coachella Valley and believes that from the very beginning, his parents instilled in him that education was going to be the only way they were going to get out of poverty. His grandparents and parents immigrated to the U.S. from "el D.F," the federal district in Mexico City, to Mexicali, where they sold tamales and newspapers to earn a living. His parents settled in Oasis, a colonia in the southeastern desert of the Coachella Valley, to work together as a migrant farm worker family. Victor is the oldest of the three siblings and he became a scholar, earning a master's degree in Education from Harvard University. Today he serves on the board of directors for the Coachella Valley School District, owns his own home and resides in Coachella with his wife Gladys (a graduate of the University of California, Riverside) and their two sons, Alejandro Quetzal and Ruben Ali.