José Anzaldo, star of the documentary 'East of Salinas', gets accepted to his dream school: UC Berkeley.

Walking on the streets with a backpack too large for his body frame is the first image you see of José Anzaldo, a quiet and shy kid from Salinas who was the main character in the PBS documentary East of Salinas. He is an undocumented student and son of farmworkers. The film shows what many families in the region face: the struggle to make ends meet and the challenges students, like Anzaldo, encounter at school. The documentary followed Anzaldo for three years, and showed his multifaceted emotions as a kid: the happiness of getting a new bike for Christmas, the disappointment of not placing in a math competition and the excitement of sitting in a classroom at UC Berkeley with a facial expression that says: One day I’ll be here.

Nine years after Laura Pacheco and Jackie Mow started filming Anzaldo and his family for the 2015 documentary, he was accepted to UC Berkeley. But Anzaldo’s journey to achieve this goal wasn’t easy. At 16, he had to make a tough decision: to stay in Salinas year-round and live in a different home than his migrant family to have stability and study at the same school.

Anzaldo is now 17 and a senior at Salinas High. When he was a little kid he wanted to be an engineer, but his upbringing made him reconsider; now he wants to be a social worker. He’s thinking of majoring in social welfare with a minor in psychology. Once he earns his bachelor’s degree, he plans – why not? – to pursue a master’s.

“Most of my childhood was spent with people helping me, people looking after me and I want to be able to do the same,” Anzaldo says. “I want to find more ways to be able to help, because without the people who helped me, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”

Growing up, Anzaldo and his family had to move repeatedly, sometimes into different school systems, because his parents followed the harvest season or because they could no longer afford to pay rent (they lived at different apartments, a garage and a motel room).During harsher times, they relied on help from friends and food banks to put food on the table. (Anzaldo currently lives with his girlfriend’s family.)

But he isn’t resentful about his upbringing. “I feel I needed to go through some bad times to eventually find that good opportunity,” he says.

One constant in Anzaldo’s life is his third-grade teacher Oscar Ramos, also the son of farmworkers and who has worked in the fields himself. “The reason why I kept in contact with him is because he was a very bright kid,” Ramos says. He didn’t want Anzaldo to lose interest in school, and over the years they developed a friendship.

Anzaldo says Ramos is one of his role models, and after he met him he started focusing on his future: “Without him I don’t think I would be where I am today.”

Ramos helped Anzaldo make his “game plan,” including choosing friends with similar interests, taking school seriously, asking for help when he needed it and getting into A-G courses (classes to be eligible for admission to CSU and UC universities).

Ramos is proud of Anzaldo’s accomplishment: “Every time I think about him attending Cal, my alma mater, it brings a huge smile to my face because that was his dream.”

In August, Anzaldo will start classes at Berkeley in a different climate for undocumented students. When he was growing up, it was common for high schoolers to abandon their dreams of a college education. Now, they have access to in-state tuition, scholarships and those who arrived in the country as children, like Anzaldo did, may qualify for a work permit thanks to DACA. Anzaldo himself applied for DACA two months ago, and he’s been applying for different scholarships to pay tuition.

And so far he is doing well; Anzaldo was awarded the Fiat Lux Scholarship, for underrepresented first-generation college students, on April 22.

While he gives a lot of credit to others, Anzaldo’s determination has been the fuel to achieve his goal. In the documentary, a younger Anzaldo said, “There is always a chance to do what you want to do as long as you don’t give up.”