At the height of the Chicano civil rights movement, a group of Stanford medical students helped start a free clinic in San Jose's Gardner neighborhood. The clinic served Chicano and Mexican immigrant workers and their families. In its first year, it was housed in a schoolroom at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, home to Fathers Moriarty, Boyle and Isaac, Irish priests who marched alongside Cesar Chavez.

Fernando Mendoza, MD, who grew up in Gardner and attended mass at Sacred Heart as a boy, was among the students who volunteered to deliver medical care at the clinic. "It brought me home and into community medicine," Mendoza said.

Fernando Mendoza, Packard physician and medical school associate dean for minority advising and programs, is a founder of San Jose's Gardner Family Health Care Center, which opened 30 years ago.

On April 27, Mendoza returned to the Gardner Family Health Care Center to help celebrate its 30th anniversary. Today, the center has its own facilities and operates on a $28-million annual budget, expanding its primary care to include comprehensive dental and mental-health care. "Few community clinics have been around for 30 years," said Mendoza, now chief of the division of general pediatrics at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital.

His early experience with Gardner shaped Mendoza's medical career and solidified his view of himself as a public servant. "I am very committed to the care of all children, especially the underserved and new immigrants," he said. "You can't be in this business without the sense that you want to help those with the least care."

During his 21 years at Stanford working in pediatrics, Mendoza has worked to impart the physician-as-public-servant model to medical students. Having them work, as he did, in needy communities gives students a shared common experience with their patients. "I don't know if you can be a public servant without it."

Lucky accidents

Mendoza, 53, says a rumor is behind his decision to become a physician. One day in the 10th grade, the high school counselor summoned him to her office. "I thought I had done something wrong. But she said, ‘Fernando, I hear you want to be a doctor.' That was the first I'd heard about it."

Until then, he had wanted to be a chemist, having been encouraged by his father, a truck driver, to pursue education. Mendoza became the first person in his family to attend college, graduating with a degree in biochemistry from San Jose State University. He then came to Stanford for medical training. Even that, he said, was an accident. "I was trying to decide between UCSF and Stanford. I wrote a note to Stanford asking for more information. They thought I had accepted and wrote back saying they were glad I was coming."

The eldest of six children, Mendoza gravitated toward pediatrics. His desire to tackle community-level health problems led him to later earn a master's in public health from Harvard University. Realizing the influence he could have on various aspects of community health from a position in academia, he returned to Stanford for a fellowship before being hired in 1981 as a faculty member.

Giving back

Mendoza currently focuses all aspects of his career on giving back to his community. His extensive involvement includes:

• Continuing to see patients at Packard Children's Hospital while serving as division chief.
• Serving as the associate dean for minority advising and programs since 1983.
• Directing the medical school's Center of Excellence for Minority Health and Education since it was established in 1992.
• Serving as president of the Hispanic Serving Health Professions Schools, a consortium dedicated to increasing the number of Hispanic health professionals.
• Helping to establish the South County Community Clinic in East Palo Alto and the Willow Clinic in Menlo Park.
• Conducting research on health disparities and culturally competent care.

Mendoza is quick to point out that his achievements have been the product of collaborations, partnerships and support at the medical center, not to mention the support he receives from his family. He says he will continue to work to bring quality health care to underserved communities, increase efforts to diversify the health professions and academic medicine and, in general, work toward eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities. "It gives me the opportunity to close the loop," he said.