A review by stephen_coulon
Taking Hold: From Migrant Childhood to Columbia University by Francisco Jiménez

3.0

Jiménez, one of the world's preeminent scholars of Mexican American studies and literature serves as a professor of modern languages and literature at Santa Clara University. He took his PhD through a highly competitive and exclusive program at Columbia University in the 1960s, a time when hispanics were all but absent at Ivy League schools, where his choice to study Mexican American lit was belittled and suppressed. The truly inspiring story here is not just where Jiménez ended up but where he began. He spent his childhood as a migrant worker in California, a child laborer picking strawberries and cotton along side his parents in blazing fields, eyes burning from crop duster pesticides, empty stomach, bleeding hands. Moving from school to school, erratically enrolled, deported to Mexico, finding a way back in, just gaining basic literacy was (and still is) a struggle for migrant workers in America. Jiménez made it "out" but never disconnected from the migrant community, spending the rest of his life fighting for our society to extend basic dignity toward the laborers we so markedly depend upon.