Joe Duran was 5 years old and didn’t speak a word of English when he arrived in the Central Valley.
“I walked into a classroom where I was the only Spanish speaker,” he recalled. “There was nobody else.”
That early experience set the tone for the direction he would take in life. He learned important lessons, including how to overcome his fears and “be able to look at things and not let an environment dictate who you think you should be or what you can or cannot achieve.”