n 1981, playwright Luis Valdez formed Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista, the site of one of the first California missions and also the setting for some scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. However, teatro campesino (farmworker theater) had started much earlier, in 1965.

Rose Sellery grew up in Venice, California, at her parents’ ceramic studio, located across the alley from a brothel, where crayons, paper, and clay were her toys. As she got older, she managed the family’s ceramics factory in downtown Los Angeles, learning how creativity, labor, and scale intersect. A relationship eventually pulled her north to Santa Cruz just before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. For someone who had arrived knowing no one, the damage left from the quake showed how shared vulnerability could form a human connection.