ABSTRACT
Rafael Diaz works on the corner of 16th and Mission, an area of San Francisco populated with underprivileged immigrants and down-and-out natives, a place with more than its share of wheelchairs and despair, where heroin dealers deal and homeless addicts come to get their fix. In his office on the third floor of a lowrise building, Diaz recalls the experiences that compelled him to work for social justice. In the early 1990s he was a tenured professor at Stanford, a “rising star,” he says. At the same time, many of his friends were dying from AIDS. Nearly every weekend he would descend from the ivory tower and head north to San Francisco for yet another memorial. “This was the reality of life,” he explains.
