About this sponsorship: In honor of the 60thanniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's historic ascent of Mount Everest, Patch and Grape-Nuts are teaming up to highlight those who inspire people around them to climb their own mountains. Miguel Duarte remembers the first time he saw an American police officer. He was 17 and had crossed the U.S. border illegally. Duarte noticed the creases in the American officer's uniform, so sharp they could cut a tamale. The badge gleamed like a star on a shirt as black as the night sky. He was in awe. And he was terrified. Meeting up with la policia was his nightmare. He was what has been called an illegal alien – a term he hates because it makes him feel like he landed here from Mars – and a police officer could end his American dream. "I had finished my triathlon of a border crossing, running, hiding and swimming to live in the United States," he says, joking. "The last thing I wanted to see was someone in a uniform." Today, at 42, he has become the man he feared, a rare law enforcement officer who spent more than a decade hiding from the law. He is also the embodiment of the Horatio Alger story. He was the poorest of the poor, the youngest of eight kids, who defied the odds through hard work and persistence to become an American success story. After 17 years of work in the computer industry, he got hired into one of the toughest jobs at one of the most difficult police agencies to work for. He signed on with Santa Cruz police at 36, an age when most officers are closer to retiring than to being a rookie. In five years on duty, he's become a fixture around town and in the department, a hard-charging cop, who admits he has a soft heart because he knows what it feels like to be on society's lowest rung. "The story of Miguel is amazing," said Santa Cruz Police Deputy Chief Steve Clark. "He has a life experience unequalled by anyone in the department. Miguel has had to work and fight for everything he has. His life path has forged a character in him that I wouldn't trade for anything. He brings these unique experiences to work with him everyday. All of those experiences go into the recipe of making an excellent police officer." Born in Valle, Michoacan, Duarte had visited the U.S. as a teen, working in the Salinas fields harvesting strawberries to earn money to buy the Converse sneakers and Levi's 501 jeans he saw on TV. It seemed to him like the place to live. "Growing up in a small town where you see all these people from the United States and you see them coming back to your hometown with nice clothes and cars and they have all this money and you are in your same situation – that was the attraction," he says. "The materialistic lifestyle. And then, you see all these movies, Hollywood, '80s rock like Def Leppard and Twisted Sister, girls and nice cars versus a Third World country. You want to go harvest that stuff for yourself." His town had no paved roads and only one rotary phone. "This was 1986," he says. When he was 17 his mother gave him $1,000 – a fortune for her – to pay a coyote $625 and make his way across the border with $375 cash. The crossing from Tijuana was different than the desert crossings further east. He and three other refugees waited for the sunset, played hide and seek with border patrol helicopters and waded across the water over the border. He says it was like going from the Main Beach at the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz to East Cliff Drive crossing the San Lorenzo River. "You could see some of the posts that used to be the fence sticking in the sand, but there was nothing between them. Just the illusion that there used to be a fence there. I was scared." Then he saw a big American flag, 15 by 25 feet. He knew he'd arrived. "It was intense. I thought, oh my God, we're sneaking into the most powerful country in the world right now. The fear, you're 17, you're confused. Your values come up. Right then and there I knew this was not the right thing. This is against the rules, what we are doing." But he knew there was no future for him in his small town, and he had to push back the emotions and move toward a future with promise. He made a gradual trek up to Northern California, starting in the suburbs of Chula Vista, packed into a house with 25 others and eventually heading by bus to Livermore, where he knew some people. His English was minimal and he was immediately offered the temptations – similar to Al Pacino in Scarface. People from his hometown offered him drugs and a livelihood selling them, but he wanted nothing to do with that. He wanted to work and find a career. He worked for two months as a dishwasher, then found a job digging holes for a swimming pool company, and when it went out of business, he moved to Santa Cruz, where his brother lived. It was here that he had his first turning point. His brother said he could get him a job at Togo's making sandwiches, but Miguel declined. "I knew how to cut tomatoes," he says. "That wasn't going to lead anywhere. I wanted to find work that would teach me something and give me a career." He found a job on an assembly line at the Santa Cruz software company, Santa Cruz Operations, where he worked for 17 years, not only learning English and meeting his wife, but learning everything he could about distributing products. He worked his way up the ranks of the company doing logistics, licensing and world wide distribution. When that company went out of business, he took another huge risk. He paid his way to the police academy, thinking he would try a job he would really love. He had taken courses at Cabrillo College and improved his English, and had become an American citizen, but this was a huge challenge. Most officers get hired by a police department, which pays their way through training. He put his severance money into paying for himself. "I'm not the type of person who wants to take things from people," he says. "I wanted to do this on my own. I didn't want the taxpayers to pay for my training. If I couldn't do it on my own, then so be it. But it made me push myself as hard as I could." He says he wanted to be a cop for the reasons many give: to help people, to protect the community and because it's not a 9 to 5 desk job. He says every day is different. He applied to the Santa Cruz Police Department and got hired. But there was one catch. They realized as he was doing his paperwork that he had no U.S. high school degree. Without it, all he had done would be lost. It was another hurdle, a big one. He went to the adult education program in Watsonville, where they told him it would take a year to get a GED degree, but he knew that would kill the job offer. So he bought several GED books and boned up on them for days, went in and aced the test, earning his degree on the first try. He approaches police work with the same focused intensity. On a ride-along I took with him through town, he knows every person he sees on the street, like an old beat cop who walked the streets. He's arrested them, or helped them, or listened to their stories. As we drive, he gets a call from a woman who had a restraining order against her husband and needed advice. Later, he tries to help a man who was passed out on the street. But the man didn't want help. He woke up and started swearing and making racist comments to Duarte, using a word that went out generations ago, calling him a "spic." Duarte cast a blind eye at the words. "I've heard it all," he says. "You'd have to do something a lot worse to bother me." But when the 280-pound 6-foot 3-inch man man lashed out at the officer, Duarte, only 5 feet 6 inches tall and 100 pounds lighter, subdued him with skilled martial arts training, and had him handcuffed in seconds. The toughest part of his job has been enforcing laws he once broke, he says. He feels bad when he pulls over an immigrant who doesn't have a license because he doesn't have a green card. "Coming from a country where the police are known not to be honest, I know that I have to be," he says. "I don't make the laws and there is a certain flexibility in interpreting some of them, but I can't overlook them." He's been called a traitor and offered bribes from his former countrymen. "I tell them, this isn't the old country, and they could be arrested for that here." He also does volunteer work helping fellow immigrants adapt to the U.S. and talking to kids in gangs about getting out of them. "He does that on his own time," said Deputy Chief Rick Martinez. "We don't pay him for that and he puts in a lot of his own time to mentor at-risk youth. The reasons he became an officer are above and beyond the usual ones. He walks the walk." Santa Cruz police are extremely choosy about hiring. They won't hire an officer who has smoked marijuana or done other drugs within years, but they hired one they knew broke the law. "Of course Miguel's entry into the country was concerning," says Deputy Chief Clark. "But he eventually corrected that and became a citizen. Anyone who would question Miguel's commitment to this country or the law obviously doesn't know Miguel. We are proud to have him as an officer in our department." Keep up with South Gate - Lynwood Patch Latino by subscribing to breaking news alerts, liking us on Facebook and following us on Twitter. Have an event or announcement you'd like to publicize? Submit them for free.