Voices

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Voices: Alicia Gonzalez-Flores (5 minutes, 6 seconds)

AGF: I was born in a really small town in Mexico, Agua Caliente, which means “hot water.” It has about 200 to 500 people; it’s a really small town. We have one elementary school and one kindergarten, and that’s it.

My mom, she loved school. She loved it, loved it. But she was never allowed to do homework at home because my grandparents thought that wasn’t the place for a woman to be. So every morning when she would walk to school, she’d be walking to school and also doing her homework.

So we got here in 1988. At this point, I was 15. We moved to a city called Dinuba. It’s in the Central Valley, about 45 minutes south of Fresno. It’s a really agricultural town, so a lot of people who live there are immigrants from Latin America, Mexico. And a lot of them do fieldwork, harvesting seasonal crops. And during the week, I would go to high school; and during the weekend, I would go to the fields and work.

Students get discouraged; as early as middle school they get discouraged. I remember going and talking to one of my counselors and saying, “I think I want to go to college.” And so my counselor says, “Well, to work in the fields you don’t really need to go to college.” And so I just sat there. I’m like, “You’re right. Why do I need to go to college if this is what I’m going to do?”

I think once you make it into college, it’s easier because I feel like there’s a lot of support once you’re in college. But making it to college, that’s what’s hard. If you are growing up in a community where education is not valued, or where there’s just so many obstacles to getting an education, it’s really hard to break from that.

On the other hand, when you are surrounded by people who went to college and by people that value education, it’s easier for you to imagine yourself in that position. So I usually go back to my high school and talk to students. And I always tell them, “I know there’s a pressure to start working right after high school so that you can help your family. But if you go to college and if you pursue a career that you like, then you’re going to be able to help them a lot more.”

In my case, even though my parents never went to college – didn’t even finish elementary school – I think just knowing I had the support of my family and they believed in me and that they really wanted me to go to school, that was really important for me.

I remember when I was applying to medical school, that was one of the questions they always asked: “Why do you want to be a doctor?” And it was always hard for me to say, “This day, I decided to be a doctor.” In my town, we never had access to doctors. The closest doctor was like two hours away. For me, it was hard to think of doctors as real people.

So I got into UCLA and I started working my first year at a children’s hospital. And I saw that there was probably one pediatrician in the whole floor that spoke Spanish, and whenever the nurses wanted to communicate with a Spanish-speaking patient, they would ask the people that did the maintenance of the floor if they could translate for them. That always got me really upset because I’m like, “How could you not get somebody that’s prepared or that’s trained to do that?”

I think UCSF has a really big commitment to diversity and also to increase health disparities. And all the sites, or most of the sites that are associated with UCSF, are in an underserved area. And that’s what I wanted; that’s where I wanted to practice and that’s where I wanted to learn. They work a lot with farmworkers and with people in rural areas. That really motivated me, and that was a big incentive to come to UCSF.

Just knowing that at some point, some point, I will be able to apply all the knowledge that I’m gaining right now to help the people that have no access to care – dying because of things that can be prevented – that just motivates me to keep going.