a day ago
From the fields to the rigs: How Ray Lopez became Stanford GSB's voice for the American Dream
As a young teenager, Raymundo Lopez would cover his face whenever supervisors appeared in the California grape fields. Not from shame, but from necessity: He wasn't supposed to be picking fruit under the Central Valley sun.
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But those scorching afternoons became the crucible where his dreams took shape.
'When I was out there for hours a day, my mind had to wander,' Lopez recalls from his Stanford Business School classroom, a world away from those fields. 'I hated the hundred-degree temperatures, the dust everywhere, the mud getting stuck all over your shoes. I just had to take my mind somewhere else, so I would dream big. What would it look like to be a doctor? What would it look like to be an engineer?'
Today, Lopez sits in the most prestigious business school in the world, but his journey began with a legal status that changed everything: he was born on American soil while his parents worked the fields.
That moment gave him citizenship, and with it, a foothold for his entire family's future in the country.
His parents, immigrants from Sinaloa, Mexico, came to California as migrant workers fleeing the escalating violence of the 1990s. Lopez was born while they worked the fields, automatically granting him American citizenship and, as he puts it, 'anchoring' his family to America.
It was under those same grape vines where Lopez's father delivered the words that would reshape his son's trajectory.
'You can work under these grape fields every day, like us,' his father told him. 'You'll have enough to pay rent, get some food, and that's enough to live. But if you pursue education, you can be in an office space somewhere with AC. You can work on something you value, something you can treasure.'
To a kid sweating under the California sun, the message was clear: education was the pipeline out.
But Lopez's path wasn't just about escaping physical discomfort.
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In second grade, a teacher recognized his curiosity and fostered it in a way that would prove transformative. 'First day of class, I asked if we had free time,' Lopez remembers. 'She said, 'Free time'? We have a library right there. There's books. That's your free time.' From that moment, he realized 'the immense power that a book had.'
This early recognition of education's power became even more crucial given his family's context.
'In Mexican American culture, with immigrants in particular, they value work,' he explains.
Ironically, Lopez didn't end up in the air-conditioned office his father envisioned. Instead, he became a deepwater drilling engineer, spending weeks at a time on massive vessels in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's Arctic zones, managing projects worth $50-100 million.
'I'd balance my time half in the office, half in the field,' he says.
'Most engineers are supposed to do that to understand the work they're executing, but I loved being out in the field, at the wellheads where the connection really happens, where manual labor makes thoughts become reality.'
His role required orchestrating complex operations involving geologists, reservoir engineers, PhDs, and contractors, all while being younger and less credentialed than most around him.
What drives Lopez isn't just personal ambition but a deep sense of responsibility to his community.
'You can't be what you can't see,' he emphasizes, echoing a principle that has shaped his entire worldview. As the only male child among five siblings, Lopez carries additional weight.
Lopez's experiences have crystallized into specific policy visions for when he eventually runs for office, a goal he states matter-of-factly, not as aspiration but as inevitability. His future platform would center on two key areas: amnesty for undocumented immigrants who have been contributing to society, and heavy investment in STEM education at Hispanic-serving institutions and historically black colleges.
'There's about 11 million undocumented immigrants; these aren't just Mexicans, but people from all over the world who are taxpayers without citations or violations, people cleaning our schools, taking care of our kids, sustaining the fruits and vegetation that sustain us,' he says.
His second focus reflects his own journey: 'There's so much talent within underserved communities that are underrepresented in boardrooms today.
If Hispanics represent 30 to 60 million Americans today, there should be significantly more at Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB, the Ivy Leagues.'
Perhaps most striking about Lopez is how he navigates his dual identity. 'I'm the border,' he says, using a Spanish phrase that translates to 'I'm neither from here nor from there.' This position has created its own challenges: 'When I went to Mexico, I was too American.
Sometimes growing up in America, I was too Mexican.'
Yet he's found strength in this duality: 'We have Aztec blood, but we have American dreams. That's a powerful mixture.' Today, he identifies as 'significantly more American. My blood is Mexican and red like the Mexican flag, but it's American through and through.'
Lopez acknowledges the role of fortune in his journey. 'I could have been born in a different part of the United States.
Luck is a lot of it, being put in the right place at the right time with the right educators around me.'
But he balances this recognition with a broader philosophy: 'We need a sober sense of reality that we are all lucky. Even living is a gift. We all have air in our lungs and an opportunity to take a shot at something. Everybody's here for a purpose.'
As he prepares for his next chapter beyond Stanford, Lopez carries with him the weight of representation and the power of possibility. His story, from covered face in the grape fields to commanding million-dollar operations on offshore rigs to the halls of Stanford, embodies the very American dream he's determined to prove still exists.
'My parents picked fruit so that I could pick a future,' he reflects. 'I can't take that for granted."
