Vicki Filgas -- the longtime Mexican dance teacher at Selma High -- was on her way to becoming a hippie in Fresno 40 years ago. Then her Mexican mother forced her to take a detour. It took her first to Spain, and then to Mexico, where Filgas absorbed the culture and even worked as a midwife in a village. Then it led to Filgas taking over the renowned Mexican folkloric dance program at the high school. Like many people in the San Joaquin Valley, she found both identity and a sense of belonging as she embraced her Latino heritage. Filgas, 60, nurtured the dance program for 34 years until she retired from teaching last month. Already, she's brimming with travel plans and ideas for new projects. However, it's clear that part of her heart remains on the dance floor.

She believes the dance program -- which will continue with another teacher -- has always been about more than steps and performances. It's been "a bridge of understanding" between American-born Latino students and their Mexican-born classmates, she said.

Filgas possesses an understanding of both groups because of a life's journey that included a childhood in the ethnic salad bowl that was the community of Del Rey, north of Selma.

Her father, Johnny, was Czechoslovakian. Her mother, Margarena, had a Mexican mother and a French father. Everybody called Margarena Filgas "Miggie," and she could -- and did -- pass for white.

Johnny Filgas wanted his daughters -- Vicki was the third of four girls -- to know how to work. During the school year, they had jobs in his variety store, and in the summer they worked in the fields.

"We were the only four gueritas [fair-skinned girls] field packing peaches," Filgas said with laughter.

As they got older, they found summer jobs in the packing houses -- which beat laboring under the sun. However, Filgas already had started to notice that the darker-skinned Mexican kids from the labor camp seemed to be treated differently. They didn't get packing-house jobs, but instead stayed in the fields.

It made her feel bad, but Filgas wasn't ready yet to claim her Hispanic identity.

At Selma High -- where she graduated in 1967 -- she ate inside the cafeteria with the white students, while the small number of Latino students then attending the school congregated outside the building.

However, the world was changing. The late 1960s was a time of unrest in America, and Filgas drifted toward the hippie movement when she started at California State University, Fresno. She went barefoot to class and wore a bell around her neck.

Her mother -- alarmed at what she saw happening -- acted decisively. She packed Filgas off to live in a convent in Spain while she attended the University of Madrid. Filgas had a cubicle as a bedroom and shared a bathroom with the other boarders.

"My mother was not dumb," she said. "I would have become a hippie if I'd stayed here."

One good thing came from that period in her life, Filgas said. She began to think of herself as a Latina. "I realized it was OK to be what you are, rather than trying to conform to so many other people's ideas of what you should be."

Filgas remained in Spain for two years, returned briefly to Fresno State, and then continued her education at universities in Mexico. She studied Spanish, but squeezed in dance classes whenever she could. Filgas had grown up seeing her parents dance -- even jitterbugging -- and she loved to dance, too. She learned the native dances in Mexico.

She also lived for a time in a village, where she volunteered in a school and was trained to work as a midwife. It was the immersion in Mexican culture that Filgas' mother always wanted for her daughters. She wanted them to not only know Spanish, but "to feel" the language -- knowing the culture behind the words. Filgas got that feel.

She couldn't know it, but this was preparing her for the teaching job in Selma.

In 1975, Filgas was at a crossroads. She had returned to Del Rey from Mexico to care for her ill mother, and after her mother died, Filgas wondered what came next.

She didn't want to teach, but took the job at Selma High anyway, partly to satisfy her father. He still believed in his daughters being productive. Filgas was stepping into one of the Valley's first Mexican dance programs, which was started by Ernie Martinez before he went on to teach at Fresno State.

Filgas did many things as the dance teacher. She performed with her students and sewed costumes. She raised money and traveled with her dancers when they performed at colleges and festivals in and outside California. She took her children (Cori Trevino, now 26, and Casey Trevino, 22) to practices. They played on the floor. And she helped upgrade the course's curriculum so it satisfied a fine arts requirement for students going to the University of California.

Only a handful of her students went to UC campuses, but Filgas saw the dance program as meeting other important needs at Selma High. For American-born Latinos seeking to connect with their culture, the class was a link to their heritage.

"It gave them an understanding of their roots and who they are, and an appreciation of the kids from Mexico who brought their roots with them, but needed to feel they are somebody," Filgas said.

Dancing gave the Mexican students an opportunity to feel accepted, she added. "They had to have the confidence to go up on the stage and basically say, 'This is me. This is who I am.' "

One of Filgas' former students -- 19-year-old Oscar Flores -- said he danced in her classes at Selma High, and before that at Abraham Lincoln Middle School. (She also taught at Lincoln for many years.) Flores said Filgas was positive in class, took students on trips to Mexico and was someone he could always talk to.

"She helped shape me into the person I am today," said Flores, who now attends Fresno State.

Praise also comes from Selma High principal Mark Babiarz, who first met Filgas in 1985. She spent countless hours on a dance program that was her passion, and she maintained that level of commitment for decades, Babiarz said.

However, Filgas knew this year that the time had come to retire. She was growing tired, and she wanted the freedom to do more traveling -- as her sister, Toni, had urged her to do before dying several years ago.

In recent years, Filgas has been to China, Tibet, Peru, Argentina, the Galapagos Islands, Turkey, Egypt and India, and she has two trips planned for later this year to Thailand and Tunisia. She also has considered turning her hacienda-style home east of Selma into a bed and breakfast or cultural arts center.

Even as she looked to that future, she knew how to direct a performance that would entertain. In one of the dance group's last performances under Filgas, they did the humorous La Danza de los Viejitos (The Dance of the Old Men) at a spring tea honoring retiring teachers. The students danced with canes and each wore a mask that was an enlarged photo of a different retiring teacher.

The crowd roared in appreciation.

Filgas had made a mask of her face, too, and gave it to one of her students to wear.

"My best female dancer was me," she said with laughter.