Raquel Arias, onetime San Joaquin Valley farmworker and the teenage “Queen of the Slice Belt” at the local peach cannery, has gone on to become one of the most distinguished physicians in the state. At 42, Dr. Arias is a top surgeon and associate professor of gynecology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, co-director of USC’s Breast Diagnostic Center and a recent appointee by Governor Wilson to the Medical Board of California, the elite agency that oversees licensing and discipline of the state’s doctors. At the time she became a gynecologist, there were few woman gynecologists in California, and even fewer homegrown Mexican-American doctors.
	Arias’ remarkable progression from her isolated rural childhood to the highest ranks of medicine was made possible by affirmative action programs-so many of them that she can’t begin to remember them all. It was “a patchwork of state and federal programs,” she says. “Everything available.” For her and so many others, Arias says, “affirmative action is a way of reversing history that can’t be reversed any other way.” And what a seesaw history it was: Arias’ mother was, for all practical purposes, an orphan who raised herself from the age of 8 following her mother’s early death and the abrupt end of the U.S. bracero farm labor program. The termination left the girl and her father stranded on different sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. She eventually married and divorced, and with no money, education or training, Arias’ mother became a nurse’s aide in a convalescent home at minimum wage of about $1.25 an hour. The family settled in Traver, a tiny, unincorporated community in Tulare County, six miles from Kingsburg, where Arias attended high school.
	Arias shone academically. In high school, she was placed in classes for the mentally gifted and got nearly straight A’s. Her teachers, she says, “were my heroes. They seemed to have everything that I aspired to.” The isolated girl dreamed of the only two careers she could imagine: “I could see a teacher; I could tell what a teacher did. I could see what a nun did; it seemed pretty good. Those were my two choices, so I thought, well, I’ll be one of those things.” But she had no idea how to get from high school into anything besides agricultural work. At the time, Arias says, “it appeared to me that somehow going to school was going to be the way to get out of where I was. I didn’t know how… I read a lot, and it appeared to me that there was just something about education that appeared to be the dividing line between the people who died at 40-I mean like the rest of my family… the people who work in the fields, they don’t live very long-and the other people,” like the professional parents of her school friends who lived in houses with sidewalks. But she had no role models, and no map for what came next. High school, she says, “was the end of the earth—that’s where the earth ended.” Meanwhile, in the summer and after school during the spring and fall, she worked in the fields-harvesting fruit or tying up vines-and in the packing sheds. The field work was especially dreary. “It is so unbelievably hot. The dust. The peach fuzz. The insecticides. The chemicals… It’s almost unbearable. To get a job in the packing shed, when I was finally old enough to get a shed job—I was so glad, even though you’re standing in a line just turning nectarines over.” Still later, Arias got her first job at Kingsburg’s peach cannery. It was a well-paying position and an unrivaled opportunity. “If you get a cannery job, it was gold. Everybody in your whole family would talk about it. It was like”—and here she lowers her voice to a whisper—“‘She’s got a cannery job!’ Unbelievable luck, unbelievable fortune.” Young Arias was “a whiz at slices”—culling bad peach slices on the moving belt. “Good hands,” she says-surgeon’s hands, though that never occurred to her at the time. She worked the midnight shift, with most of her wages going into the family pot.
	Arias hadn’t given any thought to applying to college. But one day, unbeknownst to her, Roberto Rubalcava, a tireless recruiter of Hispanic students who at various times was head of the Economic Opportunity Program (EOP) and admissions director at UC Santa Cruz, came through Kingsburg on one of his circuit-riding recruiting trips through the small towns of the Central Valley. As Arias tells it, Rubalcava considered it his personal mission to get smart Chicano students out of their rural isolation and into the universities and professions about which they knew nothing. Arias recalls that she didn’t meet Rubalcava on that visit because “he went to the career counselors, and they said, ’Our Mexicans don’t want to go to college, they want to stay here.’” Rubalcava left application forms for UC-Santa Cruz with the counselors, and one of those applications was passed to a teacher in the mentally gifted program, who handed it to Arias and insisted she fill it out. She did, but she wasn’t happy with the result and stuffed it into the spoon drawer. Weeks later, her teacher inquired about the application and insisted she put it in the mail. Mailing the application, Arias says, was “like throwing a bottle into the ocean. I didn’t know what I was doing.” She didn’t even bother telling her mother about it. And then, in the mail, seemingly out of the blue, came “a big, fat, gigantic envelope” containing applications for scholarships and grants—“and, by the way, congratulations, you’re accepted.” So, in the fall of 1973, at the age of 16, Arias climbed into a VW with a map to Santa Cruz, her bike, and whatever other possessions would fit. “I might as well have been from another planet,” she says. “I had never seen a crosswalk when I got to Santa Cruz. I’d been in an elevator only once, I’d never been inside a movie theater.” She’d also never used a checking account, and for most of her college career she cashed her financial aid checks and kept the money in her underwear drawer. Arriving on campus, Arias met other incoming EOP students and staff who would become her friends and her family, her academic advisers and her career counselors for the duration of her college days and beyond. Arias and her fellow students never fully understood the mysterious mix of programs that financed their education. For a time, they were so worried about how to meet their obligations they went to Skid Row to sell their blood until Rubalcava assured them that such extreme methods were not necessary. For the next two summers, Arias returned to Kingsburg to work at the cannery, where her talents were legendary. People used to gather around to watch her single-handedly work a slice belt that normally was run by three or four women. She made $3.75 an hour-three times her mother’s wages-and at the end of one summer actually moved up to “a man’s job.” It was unprecedented. The Mexican Americans on campus were imbued with a overriding sense of social responsibility to their community. The prevailing ethic, says Arias, was: “We have got to become the [Chicano] professionals for the state, the whole state. We have a seething mass of people who don’t have doctors, lawyers, teachers, and that was our job-to try to fill those jobs.”
	After graduation, Arias went on to UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health where her area of research was how to deliver medical care to underserved areas by getting students who could relate to those areas into medical schools. Similar concerns led the State Legislature in 1987 to establish the Minority Health Professions Education Foundation. That program has now dropped “minority” from its title and has been targeted by the governor’s office for legislative action to remove its statutory focus on minorities. The concerns that led to both Arias’ research and the state foundation were renewed by a 1996 report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers concluded that “Communities with high proportions of black and Hispanic residents were four times as likely as others to have a shortage of physicians, regardless of community income.” The study, citing statistical evidence that black and Hispanic doctors were far more likely to practice in those communities, concluded that “Dismantling affirmative-action programs, as is currently proposed, may threaten health care for both poor people and members of minority groups.” After Berkeley, Arias entered USC’s School of Medicine. The Volkswagen had given out, her resources were depleted, and when she arrived at the airport her only possessions were the clothes on her back, a paper bag “like you put penny candy in” and a toothbrush. “Whatever I had was in that bag,” she says. “I didn’t even have a purse. I had nothing. Nowhere to stay, no clothes, nothing.” She received a one-year “Exceptionally Financially Needy” grant given by the federal government and three years of financing by the National Health Service (NHS), which requires service in underserved areas in exchange for its assistance.
	When she finished her residency at USC in obstetrics and gynecology, Arias was ready to fulfill her NHS obligation, seeking out a post in an underserved area. By amazing coincidence, a classmate called to her attention an opening in Merced. “Ever heard of this place?” he asked her. The opening was at the Childs Avenue Clinic, a poverty clinic serving many migrant workers-and many of Arias’ own relatives. The doctor who interviewed her concluded by asking her why she thought she was right for the job. “Well,” she replied, “I don’t think anything could be more rewarding than working in the clinic where my own mother receives her health care.” The doctor was stunned. “Your…mother…is…here?” “Yes,” Arias replied, “you’re her doctor.” Arias got the job, for which it seemed that all of her past had prepared her. No one was prouder than the people she grew up with. In three hard-working years at that rural clinic, the young doctor delivered far more babies than any other doctor in the county-including her cousin Rosa’s son. Her reputation spread, and professionals who had never before gone to the poverty clinic now went there as paying patients so they could be treated by the renowned new woman doctor. Arias loved the clinic and misses it still. Finally, she says, she felt as if society was “getting something” for all the assistance she had received. “They were getting my best, the best I could do.” Professional advancement ultimately took Arias back to Los Angeles and USC, which has one of the biggest and best ob/gyn clinics in the country. There, she balances teaching and surgery, patients and Medical Board, county hospital and private practice, clinical and administrative duties. It’s a busy and rewarding life, but Arias still takes time out to recall the boost she got from the affirmative action programs that made it all possible: “I certainly realized that I was benefiting from society’s largesse, but I wasn’t quite sure why.…I felt like I owed everybody something, and I was determined to pay it back. I just wasn’t quite sure who to pay it to. I wasn’t ever sure of where it came from. I guess what I figure I’m doing now is paying the cosmic bank.”