We recently held a private screening of the Migrant Child Farmworkers to High-Profile Professionals© documentary at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum (“the Ath”) on the Claremont McKenna College campus. While there, we were interviewed for the Ath’s “Free Food for Thought” podcast by Natalie Chen, a CMC student and its co-director. Free Food for Thought gives CMC students a…
Geovanni Suarez is getting noticed in his hometown of Porterville, California. Today, he is front page news with the local paper – The Porterville Recorder which describes how Geo is following in the footsteps of Dr. Ramon Resa who returned to his Central Valley community to care for kids like he once was. Like Dr.…
Fernando – on thinking BIG: “I remember meeting with a former student of mine, Esteban Burchard, when he entered Stanford Medical School. I asked him what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to be a family practitioner. I told him, ‘I don’t want you to be just a family doctor. I want you…
First-generation college student and son of Mexican farm working immigrants, on his way to becoming a primary care physician in California’s Central Valley. Geovanni Suarez grew up in the small rural town of Porterville in California’s Central Valley. His pediatrician was Ramon Resa, an abandoned farmworker boy in Central Valley who became a doctor and…
Reading was key to saving Lisa’s life. Meet Lisa Ramirez, EdD.: Lisa was a migrant child farmworker who grew up in a small Texas town of 1,200 people. She faced brutal conditions in all aspects of her life – in her family, in the fields where she worked as a migrant child farmworker, and in…
We held a special private screening of Migrant Child Farmworkers to High-Profile Professionals © on July 22nd at the Hill Center in Washington, DC where six of the ten professionals featured in the film attended: Congressman Raul Ruiz, Lisa Ramirez, Fernando Mendoza MD, Ramon Resa MD, former Congressman Tony Cárdenas and Enrique Diaz. Also in attendance…
Bertha Tobias was an intern for Migrant Child Farmworkers to High-Profile Professionals ©. She is a graduate of Claremont McKenna College, my alma mater. After I read her story in the alumni magazine, I contacted her immediately—I knew the documentary would resonate with her. Migrant Child Farmworkers to High-Profile Professionals is much more than a film;…
People ask me why I made Migrant Child Farmworkers to High-Profile Professionals ©, a film about people of color who were homeless, hungry, abused, discriminated against, former child farm laborers and immigrants. What could I possibly have in common with them? I’ve asked myself countless times over the ten long, arduous and self-esteem-eroding years it’s…
By: Esteban Burchard, MD, MPH In June of 1995, I began my medical internship at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. I was one of the top medical students in my class at Stanford. As a result, I was selected as one of 42 interns nationwide to begin residency at Harvard’s BWH, which was…