During his tenure there, Street studied history with Leon F. Litwack, whose lecture style and politics strongly shaped his values and writing.

That summer, after completing the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, Street used his military pay to finance his master's thesis on African-American workers in the American South during the 1880s.

For six weeks, Street visited archives for his research, saving money by sleeping out in the back of his 1955 Chevrolet station wagon.

To finance his research, Street began writing for Pacific Sun, a weekly newspaper in Marin County, California.

The historian Kevin Starr used the manuscript to write the agriculture section of his 'Americans and the California Dream series, then sent it to Oxford University Press for publication.

Street used the travel opportunities, contacts, income, and experiences to extend his original research and consult material in over 500 manuscript collections in 22 states, Spain, Mexico, Germany, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

In an interview, Street observed that, if boxed and stacked, his research material would fill every room in the average house, floor to ceiling, including the garage.

His corporate clients included Agtrol Chemicals, Buena Vista Winery, Gerawan Farming and California Rural Legal Assistance.

In his first book, Organizing for Our lives: New Voices from Rural Communities, Street integrated his photographs with interviews and prose to describe the experiences of six groups engaged in successful self-organizing campaigns.

In 2003, Street was appointed to the California Labor History Map Committee, where he wrote the entire farmworker section of a project that developed a web-based resource for studying the state’s working classes.

From 2010 to 2011 Street was a visiting professor at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Emory University.

Street’s research focuses on rural California, defined broadly to include everything from border and community studies to photography and the history of labor unions.

Reviewers praised the books for their accessible and engaged writing style, definitive research, and for the way they brought scholarly work to a general readership far beyond the academy.

The University of Oklahoma Press was to publish this as Knife Fight City and Other Matters: An Independent Life Adrift in the California Agro-Industry at Millennium’s End.

In the last four chapters Street switches from third-person to first-person and moves himself into the story as eye-witness to, and photographer of, the events he is chronicling.

(ISBN 978-0-8166-4967-9) “The Last Time I Saw César,” History New Network, April 21, 2008, http://HNN.us “Photographing from the bullpen on assignment, when César Chávez ended his fast at Forty Acres, August 21, 1988,” 77 Pacific Historical Review (Winter 2008), 151-153 (and photograph) “Leonard Nadel’s Photo Essay on Bracero Laborers in California,” Center 27: Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2006-May 2007, National Gallery of Art, Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Wash., DC, 2007), 152-155.

“Photographing César’s Last Fast: A Personal Essay,” in Leroy Chatfield, ed., National Farmworker Documentation Project (Sacramento, 2004).

“Framing Farm Workers Through a Historian’s Lens,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7, 2002, B13-15 reprinted in History News Network.

“Tattered Shirts and Ragged Pants: Accommodation, Protest, and the Coarse Culture of California Wheat Harvesters and Threshers, 1866-1900,” Pacific Historical Review 117 (December 1998), 136-166.

“A Nation of Strangers,” in Points of Entry (San Diego, Museum of Photographic Arts, 1995), ed, by Arthur Ollman and Vicki Goldberg, photos, part of a traveling exhibition Lights: Urban-Suburban Life in a Global Society (Oxford University Press, 1995), by E. Barbara Phillips, photos.

“Hard Realities,” La Peña Cultural center, Berkeley, California, December 5, 2008 – January 25, 2009 “Life and Labor in the Fields,” Pasadena Playhouse, April 29-June 8, 2008, accompanying the production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men “César Chávez and Dolores Huerta,” Buehler Visitor’s Center, University of California, Davis, November 2004-January, 2005 Marin Artists Grantees.

Mark Arax, “Yesterday’s Seeds, Today’s Harvests, “Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 27, 2004, R6-8.

“Framing Farm Workers Through a Historian’s Lens,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 7, 2002), B13-16 “Organizing for Our Lives,” by Mark Lapin, Photo District News, January 1994, 84-86.