Juan Argueta's story could easily have dead-ended in California's Salinas Valley, another Steinbeckian tale of an unemployed professional man ground down by market forces and reduced by savage circumstance to a lifetime of farm labor.

But Argueta, an uprooted pharmacist from Mexico, has always been persistent and practical. If life is a formula, he reasoned, then he need only plug in different factors to change the outcome - and his future. Years later, Argueta has moved far enough away from his farmworker past to see the wisdom of his course. Yet, as he continues in his second year at the UCSF School of Pharmacy, his feet remain planted firmly on the ground.

"There is an enormous need for pharmacists who can speak Spanish," says Argueta, who, when not a UCSF student, works at a community pharmacy in Salinas, CA, 120 miles south of San Francisco. But at the age of 43, and as a pharmacy graduate of the University of Guanajuato in his native Mexico, Argueta brings more than language proficiency to the task. He has cultural fluency as well, an understanding of what practices, beliefs and attitudes shape the questions he hears. "I know what it's like to live in a house with 20 other people, to have your hands cramp in your sleep after working ten hours with a hydraulic pruner, to lean over all day picking vegetables."

In short, he dispenses clarity as well as prescriptions. And in doing both, he brings to his fellow UCSF pharmacy students a healthy dose of reality. "I may speak with an accent," says the affable Argueta, "but I don't think with one."

Indeed, in straddling the pharmacy and the farm, Argueta bridges the gap between good intentions and unintended consequences, offering insight into real-life problems. The seemingly simple instructions on a pill container are just one example. "Some drugstores use a translator computer program for Spanish patients, but the instructions often don't make sense. 'Every other day' becomes 'another day.' And some pharmacists may not be aware that to someone who can't afford a doctor in the first place, it makes sense not to take your pills every day so that your supply lasts longer. Or others may take them only when they don't feel well. Being a pharmacist means you have to anticipate and explain."

Complicating matters is the pharmacy tradition in Latin America, where many prepackaged drugs, including antibiotics, are available over the counter from a pharmacy clerk. "Customers never see a pharmacist at the pharmacy, not even when they need a controlled drug. They just show a clerk the empty box [for a noncontrolled drug] and ask for another. Or they show the prescription for a controlled drug." Those unfamiliar with the American pharmacy system are baffled when the same transaction does not happen here. "When I tell them they need to see a doctor, they wonder what I am."

What Argueta is well on his way to becoming is a doctor of pharmacy (known as a PharmD), a prestigious and important title within the pharmacy profession, but one largely unrecognized by the general public. At UCSF's School of Pharmacy, long ranked as the nation's best by various surveys, the doctor of pharmacy curriculum consists of four years of full-time study. Students like Argueta deepen their knowledge of basic biological, physical and chemical sciences in the first two years before specializing in one of three pathways for their advanced studies. Of the three - pharmaceutical care, pharmaceutical health policy and management, and pharmaceutical sciences - Argueta is leaning toward the first possibility after flirting with the last one.

"There are a lot of compliance issues and much confusion about drugs in general in the farmworking community. I know I can help on the pharmacy care side."

Argueta has the same keen eagerness when working with his fellow students on team projects, where the differences in age - the average PharmD student is 26 - and experience become most apparent. "I'm married, I have a 6-year-old daughter and house in Greenfield (30 miles south of Salinas). And I go home every weekend. But I'm also a library mouse. I love doing research and gathering information, which can be very useful when you're studying as a group."

Indeed, it was Argueta's hunger for information about how to speak English that first took him to the library in Salinas. Traveling there in a borrowed car, he taught himself the rudiments of the language from instructional cassette tapes. "I wanted to learn fast because I wanted to improve myself." It was far from easy. "Learning English as a second language is like saving pennies. It takes a long time before you have accumulated enough to have anything of value. But I worked out my own system that forced me to think in English." That Argueta was broke and frustrated during his first months in California did not help matters. "It was a shock. I thought I knew where my life was headed. I was going to become a teacher at the University of Guanajuato where I had graduated." But after losing his job as an industry pharmacist in Mexico when he refused to condone corruption, he could not find another.

His only option was to join some of his 13-member family in the Salinas Valley, including his father, who had spent his entire life as a farmworker. After two years in the fields, Argueta had had enough. He then joined a state-financed employment training program, which taught him business skills as well as refined his English. That led to an 11-year stint as an administrative clerk at the Salinas Adult School, a job that helped to finance his pre-pharmacy classes at Hartnell Junior College. "I was determined to restart my pharmacy career and determined to come to UCSF even though I didn't know anything about San Francisco."

He knows a lot more now, but is not tempted to relocate. "When I'm driving home and start to see open sky and planted fields, I know that Greenfield and the Salinas Valley are where I want to be." It helps that many people from Argueta's small town have relocated in the vicinity as well. Other regions of Mexico also are represented. "The newest group is Indian workers from Oaxaca," says Argueta. "For them, Spanish is a second language. And they have an Indian healer tradition." Argueta pauses to ponder the implications - and factor a new equation. "I'm going to be their pharmacist some day. I'd better start learning more about them."