A Foot in Two Worlds:
Converging Cultures Build the American Dream by Charlie Langton,
Vesterheim’s Communications & Marketing Director
P
ete Espinosa’s maternal grandmother almost didn’t survive her immigrant journey from Norway, when the ship that carried her sank in New York Harbor. His paternal grandfather and grandmother fled the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910, a struggle that lasted almost ten years. His mother and father met during a downpour in Mason City, IA, when they took shelter in the same doorway, and their two very divergent backgrounds converged to find strength in their similarities rather than division in their differences. Pete Espinosa, a 1981 graduate of Luther College in Decorah, IA, is a retired IBM Executive and currently the CEO of Mortgage Cadence, an Accenture Company. He is a member of the Board of Regents of Luther College and the founder and owner of Pulpit Rock Brewing and The Landing Market in Decorah, IA. He serves as an advisor to Limelight Health in San Francisco, CA, and he and his wife Kari are supporters of Decorah’s ArtHaus. By any measure, Pete Espinosa can be considered a successful man, and he built that success on what two generations from two cultures passed on to him. He has kept a foot in many worlds, Norwegian and Mexican, past and present, and his life is the culmination of a quintessential immigrant story.
From Norway to Ottosen
Anna Edwards, just 13, was seven miles off the coast of New York with her family, heading for Ellis Island, when their vessel began to sink. Ship after ship went right by and didn’t stop, for it was often a ploy of “pirate ships” to lure an unsuspecting craft by feigning trouble, and then rob it. They would all drown! Just as their boat was going under, an Italian ship saved them and brought them to Ellis Island. “Our family has always had a soft spot for Italians,” Pete Espinosa says. It was 1893 when the Edwards family made their perilous arrival in New York. They had traveled from a farm near Preikestolen—Pulpit Rock— and Stavanger in Norway, and they lost everything they owned when their ship sank. “It’s interesting to think about taking everything you own and leaving a country that speaks your native language,” Pete reflects. “You can’t take everything you own by boat, you just take what’s most critical to you—but it’s the land of opportunity! There are two reasons you immigrate: You’re either not safe where you’re at, or there’s better opportunity where you’re going. It’s either push or pull. To go to a small town in Iowa, where there were other Norwegian families— that’s what you did, find familiar people who were there before.” Vol. 18, No. 1 2020
Anna and Peter Holt on their wedding day, February 24, 1904.
The Edwards family knew other Norwegian families that had settled in Ottosen, Iowa, and they went there to live, since they had nothing. Ottosen still exists—a tiny little town, perhaps just 20 people living there now—but it used to have a school and a big Lutheran church that continued to operate for over a hundred years. “They had a church service there last year as a closing celebration,” Pete recalls. “Everybody came back from all over the U.S. We took my mother, and she told some great stories about how, in those days, the men sat on the left and the women sat on the right during the church services, and the kids typically sat with their mothers on the right. In the basement we went through all the pictures on the walls and we found all the baptism certificates of the kids in my mother’s family. Even though they were born in this country and were baptized here, through the years their baptism certificates were all still in Norwegian in this little community.” Anna, the eldest of five children, married Peter Holt in 1904. The son of immigrant parents, he was born in Illinois in 1876. He farmed in Ottosen, and he and Anna lived there all their lives. They raised nine children—Mavis, Pete Espinosa’s mother, was the youngest in the family. Anna died of leukemia when Mavis was only 16, and Peter died in a car accident when Mavis was 21. 13