By NCI
For a long time, Erica Alfaro was looking for a book that would give her hope and show her that her dreams were possible, but she couldn’t find one she related to. Finally, she realized, “The book I was looking for, I was supposed to write.”
Erica’s parents are farmworkers from Mexico. When she was a baby, her mother was deported, so the family followed, with her father working in California and visiting them on weekends. Erica returned to California when she was 13. After dropping out of high school and becoming a mother, she graduated from college and a master’s program.
Erica’s graduation photo posing next to her parents in the fields where they worked has gone viral and inspired many others.
Her book Harvesting Dreams, which has sold over 40,000 copies and won the International Latino Book Award in 2022, is in libraries across California and is used in many schools. “I get hundreds of letters from students with my same background, telling me that my story gave them hope. Or that they were able to find themselves in my story,” she says.
Many people who want to write a book say, “Well, I’m not a writer. I didn’t study literature; I don’t have anything interesting in my story…That’s exactly how I felt,” Erica says. “What I will tell them is that a writer is a person that writes.”
She says the idea for her book came into her heart 10 years before she took the first step to write it. “That’s when I realized that I didn’t have to be perfect; my story didn’t have to be perfect. All I had to do was finally sit and do it.” She wrote the book during Covid and published the Spanish-language version in 2021. In 2022, she published a revised version in English with more chapters.
Come hear Erica talk about how she became an author and give tips to others who wish to follow in her footsteps at the Latino Book & Family Festival at MiraCosta College on April 5.
