Growing up poor in the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras, Hector de Jesus Ruiz ’72 never imagined that someday he would be president and chief operating officer of Advanced Micro Devices.

“Are you kidding?” he said in a telephone call from his office in Austin. “I wanted to do a bunch of oddball things,” he explained. When he wasn’t playing with a rock-and-roll band called The Teenagers, he dreamed of being an auto mechanic.

Not that he lacked drive, but his humble surroundings offered humble aspirations. His family was so poor that Ruiz was born at home because his parents couldn’t afford a hospital stay. His father worked at a ranch and his mother was a secretary.

His fortune changed, however, when Ruiz was 15. He met a missionary, Olive Givin, who taught him English in exchange for housework. She also encouraged Ruiz to attend high school, which he did by walking 45 minutes each way across the border to Eagle Pass. Ruiz thrived in school, and by the time he graduated, he was named valedictorian of his senior class.

As if she hadn’t done enough, Givin paid for Ruiz’s first year at the University of Texas, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. Ruiz then pursued a doctorate in electrical engineering at Rice. Forever grateful to the missionary, he dedicated his dissertation to her.

Ruiz said he attended Rice because he wanted to do something modern in the field of electrical engineering. “Also, I heard there was a professor, Thomas Rabson, who liked working on cars, and since I liked doing that too, I thought that Rice couldn’t be that bad.”

Rabson, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, remembers Ruiz as being an excellent student. “He was probably one of the best, if not the best, graduate student I have ever had,” Rabson asserted. “I use his notebook as an example of how to keep a research notebook.”

His experience at Rice is one Ruiz will never forget. “It was the best time of my life. We felt like a family. The teachers treated me with respect and there was camaraderie among the students. It was a place where self-worth was allowed to reach a high level,” he said.

Even the maintenance workers made him feel at home, Ruiz said. In a talk he gave at Rice in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Ruiz said he thought that the Mexican workers didn’t like him because he was a student and unlike them. Ruiz took pains to avoid the workers, but one day as he sat outside, a groundskeeper came up to him and patted him on the back.

“He told me, ‘We are so proud of you, and we want you to know that. We also want you to know that we feel that by keeping this campus beautiful, we are helping you enjoy this university so that you can graduate.’”

On that day, Ruiz said he learned a valuable lesson: Those who have self-worth respect themselves and others, no matter what their social background is. He also learned that self-worth is a key ingredient for success, an idea that he would later impart to young Hispanic students.

After he graduated from Rice in 1972, Ruiz went to Texas Instruments in Dallas, where he worked for six years in the research laboratories and manufacturing operations.

In ’77, Ruiz joined Motorola as an operations manager in a semiconductor facility in East Kilbride, Scotland. He returned to the United States in 1980 to assume positions of increasing responsibility and eventually was made president of Motorola’s worldwide Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS).

As president, Ruiz faced one of the most difficult assignments of his career: to reorganize and save the struggling division. He had to make some very unpopular decisions, such as to lay off several hundred employees, cut layers of management, reduce manufacturing expenses and move the headquarters from Phoenix to Austin. The drastic measures, painful though they were, did produce results. Business analysts credit Ruiz for turning the group around and leading SPS in 1998 to sales of $7.3 billion.

Another difficult decision for Ruiz was to leave Motorola. He had worked there for 22 years and had learned a great deal as he moved up the corporate ladder, he said. But when the founder of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), W.J. Sanders III, handpicked him to be president and chief operating officer of his company, Ruiz accepted. The opportunity to head one of the world’s leading producers of microchips was a new challenge Ruiz could not decline.

Ruiz took the helm of AMD in February. “I love it. I am having a good time,” he said. “This new responsibility has reinvigorated me. I feel like I was born again.” Ruiz will need all that newfound energy to go against his main competitor, the giant Intel.

Industry observers predict that Ruiz will give Intel a run for its money. In its Oct. 2, 2000, issue, Business Week declared in a headline: “Why the Chipmaker’s Overachieving President, Hector Ruiz, Should Worry Intel.” According to the article, Merrill Lynch & Co. expected AMD’s revenues to hit $4.95 billion for the year 2000, up 73 percent from 1999’s $2.86 billion. Ruiz is expected to continue that boom by making faster and cheaper chips than Intel’s.

His accomplishments have been recognized by several organizations. Ruiz was named the 1999 Hispanic Engineer of the Year at the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference. The following year, the same group inducted him into the Hispanic Hall of Fame.

For all his glories, Ruiz is determined to remain compassionate, especially after his first wife died at age 29 of leukemia, leaving him with a four-year-old son, Hector Jr. “I treat people with utmost dignity,” he told Business Week. He later married a widow with two children.

Ruiz cherishes being a Hispanic role model. He often goes to schools throughout Texas to encourage Hispanic students to get a college education. At the talk he gave at Rice, Ruiz told a packed crowd of about 200 that success consists of three building blocks: self-worth, a good education and access to quality technology.

“But the power of self-worth is the single most important building block,” Ruiz explained. He said that self-worth stems from having strong family values. He grew up poor, but from a very early age his loving parents instilled into him a sense of self-worth.

His mother, he said, worked at night so that he could attend a private school, and she made sure that he always wore a clean shirt to school. That very simple act, he said, drew the admiration of his peers.

His father inculcated him with the idea that in order for society to progress, each generation had to be better than the previous one. “Self-worth gives you the right be respected. Without that right, it’s very difficult to make one generation better than the other,” Ruiz explained.

Education, the second most important building block for success, is seriously lacking in Texas, Ruiz said. By the year 2025, Hispanics will be in the majority, but if the educational status of Hispanics doesn’t improve, Ruiz explained, Texas will be a second-class state.

In 1999, Ruiz was appointed by the governor to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, which has a 25-year plan to rectify the educational problem. “Frankly, when I look at five-year-olds in the first grade, I don’t have the courage to tell them that they are doomed, because our programs won’t be able to help them until 2025,” he said.

“We need to say ‘no mas’ to this long-term solution. We have the resources and means to do it now,” he said.

Access to quality technology is one way to accelerate the process of providing education to the poor, Ruiz said. “Technology can close the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ It can help people move up the economic ladder.”

When his talk was over, Ruiz was whisked away by AMD’s corporate jet to California for yet another meeting. His 45-minute walks to school are long behind him, the dust cleared from his shoes. He has walked a long path to reach the American dream, and now he is soaring to greater heights.

— David Medina is a senior editor for the Sallyport and the minority community affairs director.