Café a bright spot in west Valley community

Aspiring doctor puts med school on hold but finds many ways to help an ailing Mendota.

Published online on Wednesday, Apr. 08, 2009

The roomy coffeehouse is replete with the usual trappings: expensive espresso maker, oversized sofas, enticing pastries, a customer in artfully torn jeans typing on her BlackBerry.

It's flourishing in Mendota, a west-side farming town of fields and struggle, bitter poverty and too little water.

The first customers through the doors of D'Amici - it means "of friends" in Italian - early each morning are farmers, though they complain to 25-year-old owner Sam Rubio that the TV is on CNN. They prefer Fox News Channel.

Adult GED classes are taught here. The promatores - a women's service club with roots all the way back to Mexico - plans charitable works at these tables. The Mexican and El Salvador community planning committee just about lived here during the month they were readying the big bash they threw in the parking lot last September.

But the most faithful patrons are the high school students. Most are children of farmworkers, living in apartments and houses filled with many families. For them, the coffeehouse is somewhere away from chores and chaos.

They come for coffee and homework help from Sam, who taught science at the high school last year. He pesters them to prepare for the SATs. He provides Internet access and lends them his old laptop to take home when they have papers due.

He coaches the high school wrestling team, is organizing an effort to clean up two city parks, started a weightlifting club to keep some of the boys busy after school, helped students paint murals at the airport and has taken groups of students on outings to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, San Francisco and camping - experiences they'd never had. He's twice taken students to Sacramento for rallies seeking help for the water-starved west side.

Stepfather Raul Angel, always droll, calls Sam "the laziest man in Mendota."

Note Sam's coffee mug. It boasts: UCLA School of Medicine. He was accepted after he graduated from California State University, Sacramento, three years ago. He plans on starting medical school in 2010. But his hometown became an unexpected detour.

This sits uneasily with Sam's 52-year-old father, who started as a farm laborer at 16, worked up to farm manager and expects all of his eight children to leave the fields of Mendota in the dust behind them.

Sam describes a typical phone call.

Father: "There are leaves in the yard that need raking."

Son: "So? I don't even live there anymore."

Father: "Well, it's not like you have anything else to do."

His oldest brother, 29-year-old Augie Rubio, already is a doctor. Moved straight through from Mendota High to University of California at Davis to medical school at UCLA and is three months shy of finishing a residency in Fresno.

"Augie, he pretty much set the standard. It's not every day someone from here becomes a doctor," says the redundantly named Angel Angel, also known as No. 5 (the eight siblings often refer to each other by number of birth order).

"Augie parted the Red Sea and we're all supposed to follow. It's annoying. But it's right."

Sam, No. 4, says his brother and father are exactly the same.

"Hard work. That's all they know. Just do what you have to do. But sometimes I think they kind of get me. Once, I saw a photograph of my father on a motorcycle with long hair. He won't talk about it."

Augie says the difference between Sam and his father and older brother is field work.

"My dad and I worked in the fields. We moved pipe in 103 degrees. Sam has always had indoor jobs. So we tease him that he's soft," he says.