While other youngsters spent the hot summer months riding bicycles or visiting local swimming pools, Isaac Cardenas worked under a blistering sun, pondering a future that would include college and a house with air conditioning. His parents, both migrant farm workers with no more than a sixth-grade education, longed for a better life for Isaac and their other children. That vision — and their willingness to look beyond their prescribed circumstances — offered the encouragement the five Cardenas children needed to pursue the education that would take them away from grueling fieldwork forever.

Today Cardenas is chair of Cal State Fullerton's Chicana and Chicano Studies Department and strives to instill that same vision in Orange County's migrant farm workers and especially their children.

"When I was growing up, my parents always emphasized the importance of education," Cardenas says. "But our family was the exception, not the rule. Survival is critical for these families. They're not thinking of education; they're hoping to earn enough so their families can eat. So they can put gas in the car. So they can replace shoes that have grown too small for their children's feet."

Each summer on the day after school let out, young Cardenas and his brothers and sisters would join his parents in a caravan of migrant workers traveling from state to state, field to field.

"But no matter where we were in September, my parents would make sure my siblings and I were back in time for school. We lived in Texas, and we would usually get a ride back with friends. We'd often end up staying with these friends until our parents showed up a few months later, after the harvest was in."

"The children show up to classes, and they're already behind," Cardenas notes. "They have nobody to help them at home. Often, the parents can't read or speak English, and many are illiterate even in their native language. The children are embarrassed to be so far behind and sometimes can not or will not ask for the help they need. Slowly they begin to withdraw… until they just stop coming to school." Thus the cycle of poverty and illiteracy is perpetuated.

Cardenas would like to see that cycle stopped. To do so, he not only has to reach the students, but their parents as well. This means working with high school students to make sure they stay in school, essentially planting in their minds the early seeds that get them thinking about attending college.