Upon graduating from Santa Clara University, I received a graduate fellowship to Columbia University in New York, where I met Andrés Iduarte, a Mexican professor and writer who became my thesis advisor. Following his advice to publish my work, I gathered the notes I had taken over the years and wrote "Cajas de cartón" (Cardboard Boxes), which was published in a New York Spanish-language literary magazine. Translated into English under the title "The Circuit," it was published in the Arizona Quarterly and received the Arizona Quarterly Annual Award for best story.
For the next several years, I continued my efforts to write more short stories, but teaching and administrative responsibilities left me little time for writing. Then I applied for and received a sabbatical for 1995. I devoted the entire year to researching and writing The Circuit.
In writing these stories, I relied heavily on my childhood recollections, but I also did a lot of background research. I interviewed my mother; my older brother, Roberto; and other relatives. I looked through photographs and family documents, and I listened to corridos, Mexican ballads, that I had heard as a child. I also went to different places in the San Joaquin Valley where we had lived in migrant labor camps: Bakersfield, Fowler, Selma, Corcoran, Five Points. I visited museums in those towns and read through newspapers from that era. Unfortunately, I found little or no information or documentation in those sources about migrant farm workers. I was disappointed, but it convinced me even more that I should write this book. As I gathered material, I began to recall other experiences I had forgotten with the passage of time. Looking back at those childhood memories from an adult point of view, I made a series of discoveries about myself in relation to my family, my community, and our society. I gained a deeper sense of purpose and meaning as an educator and as a writer.
My greatest challenge was to write about my childhood experiences from the point of view of the child and to make them accessible to both children and adults. I wanted readers to hear the child's voice, to see through his eyes, and to feel through his heart.
Why did I write these stories? I wrote them to chronicle part of my family's history but, more importantly, to voice the experiences of a large sector of our society that has been frequently ignored. Through my writing I hope to give readers an insight into the lives of migrant farm workers and their children whose back-breaking labor of picking fruits and vegetables puts food on our tables. Their courage and struggles, hopes and dreams for a better life for their children and their children's children give meaning to the term "American dream." Their story is the American story.
—F.J.
From Francisco Jiménez's acceptance speech for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction, 1998
Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child Page 9