“That’s pretty, isn’t it?” asks Rep. Jim Costa, pulling up a photo of his almond farm in Fresno with all the trees in bloom. In the age of Zoom, he likes his screen to tell a story.
While the almonds have brought a steady income to his family through the years, that was not always the case. His grandparents on both sides came to America from the Azores Islands as dairy workers. “You never want to forget where you came from,” the California Democrat says.
That goes not just for his family roots, but also for his early days on Capitol Hill, when he stood in line to get a back row seat at the Watergate hearings as a young intern. Later, he worked for Rep. John Krebs, an immigrant himself who escaped the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
