<HALF MOON BAY>  After school, they hunched their backs, dropped to the dirt and worked the land — something many of their parents do every day.

At the Alvin S. Hatch Elementary School in Half Moon Bay, where half of the kids grow up speaking Spanish — in homes where the food on their tables is bought with sweat — planting a backyard garden in honor of Cesar Chavez becomes something significant.

For many of the students at this elementary school, the Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist for Latino farmworkers is a hero — someone who helped their moms and dads make a better living, one with dignity and respect.

That’s something many of the students at Hatch understand directly, said Mayra Rodriguez, an employee with the Coastside Children’s Program, which runs Hatch’s after-school program.

The majority of native Spanish speakers at the school have parents who plant and harvest for one of the Coastside’s many ranches and farms, Rodriguez said.

That’s why every Cesar Chavez Day, the children of recent migrants at Hatch hear the story of Chavez and his struggle to lift the wages and lives of farmworkers — and most of them think of their parents.

"They’ll say, ‘I don’t want to work that hard. I want to go to school and get a job,’" Rodriguez said. "Their parents want the same thing. They want them to work con la cabeza — with their heads — that’s what my dad used to tell me."

Farming was the first chapter in her American dream, and so it is with many of her students, whose parents are planting the seeds of their future. One generation works with its hands so that one day their children can work with their minds — not as farmers but as teachers, businessmen and other middle-class professions.

Rodriguez, 29, grew up on the Coast, the child of migrant workers who planted and picked flowers at one of Half Moon Bay’s many nurseries. Now, Rodriguez, a college graduate, works as a teacher at the Coastside Children’s Program, where she began volunteering at age 16.

The program caters to some 200 children, with a preschool in downtown Half Moon Bay and after-school care in the city’s three elementary schools. Focusing on the children of Latino agricultural workers in particular, the program provides kids with resources they lack at home: help with English, homework assistance and a productive way to spend after-school hours while their parents are working.

"All of us (children of farm workers) who grew up here would have loved to have something like this — it’s like a second home for the kids," Rodriguez said.

On Cesar Chavez Day, which the Coastside celebrates at Hatch every year with special activities sponsored by Americorps, the children are presented with story books about the Mexican-American labor leader and encouraged to reflect on how his life has affected more recent generations of migrant workers.

"Before, the farmers didn’t get respected and they didn’t have enough money to live," said Juan Carlos Penaloza, 10, whose mom plants flowers for a local nursery. "If Cesar Chavez didn’t do what he did, the farm workers wouldn’t have enough money to get a home or food for their families."

Some of the older kids in the program feel personally indebted to Chavez.

"If it weren’t for (Chavez), it would be harder to live," said Jesus Patino, 9. "We wouldn’t have that much money, we’d be living in a little house. He inspires me to help other people."

As for the first-graders — who planted seeds of lettuce, cilantro, pumpkins and other plants to celebrate the leader’s birthday on Monday — "they might not fully understand what Cesar Chavez was all about," Rodriguez said.

"But one day they’ll remember planting those seeds and the book they were read today about this man Cesar Chavez," said Rodriguez. "And they’ll look at this person with the same skin color and same background, because seeds of a better future will be planted in their minds."

For Rodriguez, the seeds of Chavez’s struggle have already been harvested in Half Moon Bay, where she says conditions for Latino agricultural workers and their children have vastly improved since her parents first arrived in the 1970s, she said.

Once upon a time, her parents tell her, most coastal farm- workers lived hidden, shacking up most of the week on the ranches where they worked and emerging in town only on weekends, when the men and women did their shopping, washed their clothes and returned to plant the seeds and reap the harvests for other dinner tables.

Now, Rodriguez says, there are more public services for the work force that helps sustain the coastal economy. The community, she says, is more integrated.

"We all realize that you may look a little different, speak a different language, but we all have the same dream. We all want to be happy and provide a safe place for our kids."

Much has changed since the days of virtual segregation for Latino farmworkers — "but it’s probably not enough," Rodriguez said.

"It’s like my dad used to say … it’s never really equal when you don’t start in the same place as everybody else," he said.

Staff writer Michael Manekin can be reached at 650-348-4331 or by e-mail at mmanekin@bayareanewsgroup.com.