An accomplished poet, a novelist of much promise, and an editor/publisher of energy and generosity, Ernesto Padilla is currently an assistant professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield. Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1944, Padilla was the sixth of seven children of Vidal Eduardo and Tomasa Padilla, migrant farm workers. While he was still very young, his family moved to the agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley in central California. There they settled in the town of Tulare, from which they were able to travel up and down the valley, picking fruits, vegetables, and cotton. Life in the Tulare barrio with summers spent working in the fields near San Jose was not easy, but, as Padilla recalls, "somehow I didn't miss much school." Indeed, by the time he left Tulare High School, he had made his mark as a star athlete and a student gifted in...