Community

My Introduction

I didn’t grow up anywhere near California’s agricultural valleys. My childhood unfolded in Western Pennsylvania during the 1950s and 60s, in a small town where the Sons of Italy was just a couple of blocks from the Dutch Club, and the White Eagles and everyone more or less knew each other’s grandparents.

I wasn’t surrounded by first-generation immigrants, but it seemed like every other friend had a grandparent who still spoke with an accent and had stories of arriving in America. I remember one day in particular. I was sixteen, walking home from high school with my friend Tom. We saw his grandfather tending the garden, tomatoes gleaming in the afternoon sun. Tom introduced me, and his grandfather, not recognizing my last name, asked with curiosity, “Who are your people?” I gave him my Irish grandfather’s name. His face immediately brightened. He told me my grandfather had given him his first job in America, then taught him enough English to do it. It was a short conversation, yet more than sixty years later, it’s as vivid to me as ever.

My own life has since crossed many borders. I’ve roomed with a Colombian in college, served across Europe, Asia, and South America in the Air Force, and with the NASA. In my late thirties, I put down roots in Southern California, working and teaching in a vibrant immigrant community for nearly forty-five years. I fell in love with one of my students and, these days, find myself the immigrant living in a small mountain town in Jalisco, Mexico, working on my Spanish and never really rolling my R’s.

Over the years, I have learned that the foundation of a community has little to do with paperwork or the accent you bring to the table. It’s about neighbors being there for one another, lifting each other up, passing along opportunities, and sharing dignity and hope. That’s what connects me most powerfully to the next story.

My Commentary on Dean Florez’s Article

Dean Florez’s story about Rodriguez Street struck me with its honesty and humanity. While we may have grown up in distant places and different decades, the pride and endurance of hard-working immigrant families is a thread running through both our experiences.

Dean writes not just about memory and belonging, but about what is being lost right now under policies designed to inspire fear and division. His neighborhood, his community, could have been mine, yours, anyone’s. The rituals, the resilience, and the strength in the face of hardship are what make America feel like home.

What Dean details is more than policy gone wrong. It’s the current US administration’s deliberate, cruel choice to turn power against people who built this country and who continue, every day, to uphold its economy and spirit. Reading his words, I’m reminded that each statistic represents families like Tom’s, like mine, and like the one I’m part of now, here in Mexico.

His story deserves to be read in full. I offer it here with gratitude and with hope that it will move you as deeply as it did me.

“Before the raids, there was Rodriguez Street

By Dean Florez TBC 7/16/25

I grew up as a child on Rodriguez Street in one of those tiny agricultural dots on the map of California called a “Mexican Colony” outside of Shafter. We didn’t call it that back then. It was just home. A dirt-packed stretch on the edge of town where the air was thick with the scent of tomatoes and cotton and the early morning clatter of lunch pails being packed. Before sunrise, the street would hum to life. Pickup trucks rumbled to the curb, and men and women — none born here, all belonging here — would climb in and disappear into the fields.

These were my first memories of America.

Most of my grandmother’s neighbors lived in trailer backhouses or sunbaked tract-like houses with sagging porches, and yet the community they built themselves was proud. Even in poverty, there was no shortage of dignity. The kids wore hand-me-downs to school, but their parents made sure those shirts were pressed and clean. My grandmother’s friends would gather to make tamales in bulk, not just for Christmas but for quinceañeras, funerals, graduations. The ritual was a kind of protest — rooted, rhythmic, refusing invisibility.

And right next door, as fate would have it, were the children of the landowners. Sons and daughters of almond kings and grape barons. They played on the same football teams, shared lockers, competed for valedictorian. I learned to straddle both worlds: Spanish and English, colonia and suburb, the hand-hardened labor of the fields and the air-conditioned calculus of ambition. From that divide, I climbed — first to UCLA, then Harvard, and, eventually, the State Senate, where I proudly served for over a decade the very valley that raised me.

Nobody — nobody — ever asked for what is happening now.

We didn’t ask for raids at dawn, rifles drawn, helicopters overhead, families split in half. We didn’t ask for Marines on city corners or farmworkers — good people — dying in custody. We didn’t ask for federal agents sweeping up teenagers on their way to school or churches canceling baptisms for fear of ICE surveillance. And yet, this is what I’m seeing now, right before my eyes. This is the new reality unfolding in the place I’ve always called home.

I think back to that block on Rodriguez Street, to the Spanish-speaking woman who made her kid’s school lunches while packing her husband’s for the field. Her grandchild is now a nurse at our local hospital. Her son runs a trucking company. None of them had the paperwork back then. But they had purpose. And faith. And they gave more to this state than they ever took.

What’s happening now — these Trump raids — aren’t about law and order. They’re about fear. They’re about the performance of power. They are theater draped in uniforms and delivered at gunpoint. This isn’t about securing borders — it’s about breaking the spine of a people who helped build this state one field, one roof, one child at a time. It’s about making the invisible vanish in plain sight.

You want to feel the loss? Walk the streets of Los Angeles. The flower vendors who used to line the corners outside the cemeteries — gone. The buses that once groaned with the weight of workers and mothers and grandmothers — now run half-empty. Car washes are shuttered, laundromats quiet, and the hum of commerce in neighborhoods like Westlake has dropped to a whisper. Even the check-cashing places have pulled down their gates.

And out in the fields — where the sun used to rise over rows of lettuce and bell peppers and almonds — there is silence. Rows of crops without hands to pick them. Half the workers never returned after the raids. Some haven’t left their homes in weeks, skipping medical appointments, skipping paychecks, skipping life. They know the knock might come at any hour.

That fear now lives in every shadow, every alley, every church pew.

And the cost? It’s not just human.

It’s written in the ledgers of California’s economy. Nearly $300 billion — 9% of our state’s total economic output — at risk if this continues. Agriculture, construction, hospitality, food service: all fraying at the edges because the very people who make those industries run are being hunted. A quarter of the farm labor force, gone in a whisper. Sixteen percent of construction GDP, poised to collapse. Eleven percent of our small businesses — owned and operated by undocumented entrepreneurs — threatened with extinction.

This isn’t some distant policy fight. It’s on your table. It’s in the price of your strawberries and the shortage of workers building your homes. The men and women who fed this country during the pandemic, who braved fire seasons to harvest crops in N95 masks and ash-covered fields — those are the same workers now being dragged away in handcuffs.

They told us this wouldn’t touch us. That it was about “bad hombres.” But more than 90% of those taken in these raids have no criminal record. None. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, the parents at school pickup. And yet they’re being pulled from parking lots, church steps, and even legal check-ins with ICE — disappeared not for crimes, but for being here.

The cruelty is the point. The spectacle is the message. The outcome is our food chain unraveling. Our construction sites abandoned. Our children afraid. And yet the architects of this crackdown insist they’re protecting America.

I know what protection looks like. I saw it on Rodriguez Street — mothers guarding neighbors’ children, workers sharing meals when paychecks ran dry, field hands lifting each other through heatstroke and heartbreak. That was community. That was America.

And it’s worth fighting for.”

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect on these stories. I hope Dean Florez’s memories resonate with you as much as they did with me, and that my own journey adds another thread to the tapestry of experiences that define what community truly means.

Our shared history is built on the everyday acts of kindness, resilience, and the unbreakable bonds we form with one another. In a world that too often spotlights division, these stories remind us of our common hope and dignity.

Join the Conversation

If this story moved you or sparked new thoughts, I invite you to follow me here on Medium. I regularly share personal reflections, powerful stories from others, and insights drawn from my experiences living and working alongside diverse communities. Let’s keep these important conversations going; your voice and perspective are always welcome.

The US authoritarian state is not the society in which we grew up. It does not represent who we are. Speak up like Dean Florez has, or consider joining me in small posts on a blog or your social media of choice. Just don’t remain silent.

Follow to stay connected, and feel free to comment or share your own story below!

To follow Dean: https://www.facebook.com/deanflorez