CHAMPAIGN — Antonio Cortez spent his working life picking lemons and onions for minimum wage, joined by his children in the summers to make ends meet.

A farm laborer from Mexico and later California, he had no formal education but made sure his children did.

On Sunday, the youngest of his 10 children will walk across the University of Illinois Assembly Hall stage and receive her doctoral degree, the first in their large extended family to do so.

Antonio Cortez, 84, will stand by her side. Rufina Cortez asked him to take part in her Ph.D. "hooding" ceremony, along with her adviser and a niece.

"For me, it's my gift to him," Rufina Cortez said last week. "This is a big sacrifice, not having me around all these years when I've been away at school. This ceremony is for my family. They deserve it."

At one time, it appeared this day might never happen.

When Rufina Cortez was applying to the UI, her father suffered a stroke while traveling to visit his sister in Mexico. He was deathly ill, and Rufina Cortez considered postponing her plans.

"I didn't know whether he was going to survive," she said.

But he improved, and she moved to Champaign-Urbana in 2004 to pursue her dream of a doctorate in education policy studies.

She had earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California-Santa Barbara and then worked on recruitment and retention programs for Latino students there. One project, funded by the Kellogg Foundation, brought together nonprofits, community colleges, local schools and the university to improve the pipeline of Latinos in higher education.

She later developed a summer academy at Scripps College for inner-city high school girls to expose them to a liberal arts education.

She came to the University of Illinois to study with Professor Antonia Darder, a highly regarded scholar in education and cultural studies, who became her mentor.

Her research draws on her experience as a first-generation Latina graduate student and her family's values of hard work, education and community.

Her dissertation examines the experiences of Latina doctoral students at public research universities by looking at their backgrounds — hometowns, schooling, class, political identities and drive — with the goal of shaping future educational policy and resources for first-generation Ph.D. students. Just 0.04 percent of the Ph.Ds awarded in the U.S. go to Latinas, she said.

But rather than look at deficits these women had to overcome, she examined the attributes they brought to the table as well as the resources that supported them.

"One of the things you find in the Chicano/Latina community is a very strong building of community, a sense of belonging," she said.

Rufina Cortez, who grew up in Oxnard, Calif., was the only one of her siblings born in the United States.

Her mother, also named Rufina, was born in Mercedes, Calif., in 1926 but moved back to Mexico with her father and siblings in 1933 during the Great Depression, under pressure from the U.S. government. She completed first grade in California and attended school for a few more years in Mexico, but never finished elementary school.

Antonio Cortez had no formal education and was home-schooled in Mexico by his father. But he and his wife are both quite literate and "very smart," Rufina Cortez said.

Antonio Cortez first came to the U.S. in 1956 under the Bracero program, which allowed Mexicans to work here temporarily. He and his wife moved permanently to California in 1968, as legal residents, to pursue a better economic life.

The younger Rufina was born a few years later. Her family was very poor at first; her parents, in fact, left three of their children behind in Mexico with an aunt so they could stay in school while the older children joined them in the fields.

Like many Latinas, Rufina Cortez started picking strawberries with her mom and sisters in the summer at age 14, to help pay for her clothes and school supplies. She remembers people yelling "wetbacks" and other racial slurs at them from passing cars.

"I remember knowing at an early age that education was going to be a way I escaped much of that," she said. "I knew my family worked hard and sacrificed a great deal. We deserved better than that."

She traces her passion for social justice to that time, noting that her father once introduced her to civil rights activist and farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez.

She said her father, who retired at age 62, is proud of his work and sees it as "contributing to the success of this country. My father loves this country."

The job allowed Antonio Cortez to buy a home and send his children to school. All of her siblings finished high school, and several have gone on to college or attained short-term degrees. Most of her 30-plus nieces and nephews will earn college degrees, and some are planning graduate studies.

"I recognize that I made minimum wage, but with the support of all our sons and daughters we were able to make a decent life," Antonio Cortez said last week. "I am thankful to God and to this country because it provided us with jobs so we can succeed and move forward."

Rufina Cortez isn't his only child with an advanced degree. Her brother Alfredo, who was educated in Mexico, earned a master's degree in computer science and taught math at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before becoming a successful businessman.

Rufina Cortez said her parents didn't always understand her studies, but they have supported her even though they came from a traditional culture where women didn't leave their parents. Her mother once told her, as they cooked together in the kitchen, that she would have taken advantage of the same opportunities if she'd had the chance.

"It was very powerful for me," Rufina Cortez recalled. "My love for learning and for bettering myself and our family and our community comes from them both."

Her mom, also 84, was unable to make the trip to Champaign-Urbana, but 15 relatives from California and Arizona will be at today's ceremony, along with a family friend. Her father has been packing since Monday.

"For him to be alive to share this is something I don't take for granted," she said.

The day is "muy importante" to Antonio Cortez as well, he said in a phone interview from California translated by his daughter. He said he is proud and excited for her, especially since he was unable to pursue his own studies. He said he wished he could have provided more help to his older children, but the economy in Mexico was difficult.

"Your mother and I gave them as much schooling as we were able to provide," he said.

"For me, it's very important to be there with you for your ceremony," he told his daughter. "The family as a whole is proud of you."

Niece Paulina Cortez, 25, who is in nursing school, will also assist with today's hooding ceremony, representing the next generation.

"If it wasn't for my family — father, mother, siblings, nieces and nephews — I would not have gone this far," Rufina Cortez said.