Shattered Dreams

In 1978, just after I graduated from college, I worked at a migrant health clinic in California's San Joaquin Valley and saw what 1960s activism had achieved. Farm workers received health services at government-funded rural health clinics, regardless of citizenship status or ability to pay, and the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, achieved through a decade of struggle on the part of the United Farm Workers movement (UFW), promised access to union representation for those who harvested the country's fruits and vegetables. I lived down the road from the UFW headquarters, a mountain retreat center known as La Paz, and the director of the union's new school for organizers hired me to teach English there.