I arrived at Berkeley midyear in 1964, after graduating from San Francisco State College. Being a Mexican-American born in Berkeley and raised in Oakland, going to graduate school at Berkeley was an intimidating experience in terms of the repute of the faculty and the backgrounds of fellow students, who were from all over the country, as well as being bright, articulate and especially well read. The intellectual environment of Berkeley provided an exceptional opportunity to be a symbolic interactionist, a structuralist or a Marxist and to move fluidly among these ideologies.
