Rita Gondocs was 11 when she came to the United States from Budapest with her mother and twin sister. She remembers the shock of humidity that washed over her that summer of 1988. They soon moved into a studio apartment in Edgewater, and her mother worked days as a cleaning woman and nights at a Hungarian restaurant to pay for her daughters to attend a Catholic school.

My mother grew up in a family of farm workers and started working in the fields when she was only 6 years old.