Replace Migrant Farm Workers with “High Schoolers?”
Pulled up the rest of the story on young US citizens doing the same work as migrant labor. The thought being they were young enough to do it. Teenage boys heeding the call of a federal government looking for teens to work on farms. That was 1965.
I can tell you laboring for a bunch of tuckpointers working the scaffolds, multiple stories up a building is not an easy task in the Summer. Also, I was not bending over all day. I can imagine how sore they were at the end of each day. I slept well each night and was off to work via CTA and the Logan Square Elevated each morning by 7AM at the latest.
Food is going to get pretty expensive when those crops rot in the fields. Read on . . .
“The year red-blooded patriotic American high-school jocks replaced migrant farm Workers!” NPR
Randy Carter is a member of the Director’s Guild of America and has notched some significant credits during his Hollywood career. Administrative assistant on The Conversation. Part of the casting department for Apocalypse Now. Longtime first assistant director on Seinfeld. Work on The Blues Brothers, The Godfather II and more.
But the one project Carter regrets never working on is a script he wrote that got optioned twice but was never produced. It’s about the summer a then-17-year-old Carter and thousands of American teenage boys heeded the call of the federal government … to work on farms.
The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had labored in the United States under the so-called Bracero Program. Started in World War II, the program was an agreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by civil rights activists like Cesar Chavez that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.
But farmers complained — in words that echo today’s headlines — that Mexican laborers did the jobs that Americans didn’t want to do, and that the end of the Bracero Program meant that crops would rot in the fields.
Wirtz cited this labor shortage and a lack of summer jobs for high schoolers as reason enough for the program. But he didn’t want just any band geek or nerd — he wanted jocks.
“They can do the work,” Wirtz said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., announcing the creation of the project, called A-TEAM — Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower. “They are entitled to a chance at it.” Standing beside him to lend gravitas were future Baseball Hall of Famers Stan Musial and Warren Spahn and future Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown.
Over the ensuing weeks, the Department of Labor, the Department of Agriculture, and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness bought ads on radio and in magazines to try to lure lettermen. “Farm Work Builds Men!” screamed one such promotion, which featured 1964 Heisman Trophy winner John Huarte.
Local newspapers across the country showcased their local A-TEAM with pride as they left for the summer. The Courier of Waterloo, Iowa, for instance, ran a photo of beaming, bespectacled but scrawny boys boarding a bus for Salinas, where strawberries and asparagus awaited their smooth hands. “A teacher-coach from [the nearby town of] Cresco will serve as adviser to all 31,” students, the Courier reassured its readers.
But the national press was immediately skeptical. “Dealing with crops which grow close to the ground requires a good deal stronger motive” than money or the prospects of a good workout, argued a Detroit Free Press editorial. “Like, for instance, gnawing hunger.”
Despite such skepticism, Wirtz’s scheme seemed to work at first: About 18,100 teenagers signed up to join the A-TEAM. But only about 3,300 of them ever got to pick crops.
One of them was Carter.
He was a junior at the now-closed University of San Diego High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Southern California. About 25 of his classmates decided to sign up for the A-TEAM because, as he recalls with a laugh more than 50 years later, “We thought, ‘I’m not doing anything else this summer, so why not?’ “
Funny enough, Carter says none of the recruits from his school — himself included — were actually athletes: “The football coach told [the sportsters], ‘You’re not going. We’ve got two-a-day practices — you’re not going to go pick strawberries.”
Students from across the country began showing up on farms in Texas and California at the beginning of June. Carter and his classmates were to pick cantaloupes near Blythe, a small town on the Colorado River in the middle of California’s Colorado Desert.
He remembers the first day vividly. Work started before dawn, the better to avoid the unforgiving desert sun to come. “The wind is in your hair, and you don’t think it’s bad,” Carter says. “Then you go out in the field, and the first ray of sun comes over the horizon. The first ray. Everyone looked at each other, and said, ‘What did we do?’ The thermometer went up like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. By 9 a.m., it was 110 degrees.”
Garden gloves that the farmers gave the students to help them harvest lasted only four hours, because the cantaloupe’s fine hairs made grabbing them feel like “picking up sandpaper.” They got paid minimum wage — $1.40 an hour back then — plus 5 cents for every crate filled with about 30 to 36 fruits. Breakfast was “out of the Navy,” Carter says — beans and eggs and bologna sandwiches that literally toasted in the heat, even in the shade.
The University High crew worked six days a week, with Sundays off, and they were not allowed to return home during their stint. The farmers sheltered them in “any kind of defunct housing,” according to Carter — old Army barracks, rooms made from discarded wood, and even buildings used to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.
This experiment quickly disappeared into the proverbial dustbin of history. In fact, when Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores did research for what became her award-winning 2016 book.
“Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement,”
She discovered the controversy for the first time. Until then, the only time she had heard of any A-TEAM, she now says with a laugh, “was the TV show.”
Flores thinks the program deserves more attention from historians and the public alike.
“These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn’t have the power or space for the American public to listen to them,” she says. “The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren’t able to mask that up.”
She says the A-TEAM “reveals a very important reality: It’s not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It’s about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages.”
Carter agrees.
“If we took a vote that first day, we would’ve left,” he says of his friends. “But it literally became a thing of pride. We weren’t going to be fired, and we weren’t going to quit. We were going to finish it.”
The students tried to make the most of their summer. On their Sundays off, they would swim in irrigation canals or hitchhike into downtown Blythe and try to get cowboys to buy them a six-pack of beer. Each high school team was supposed to have a college-age chaperone, but Carter said theirs would “be there for a day, and then disappear to go to Mexico or surfing.”
Carter and his classmates still talk about their A-TEAM days at every class reunion. “We went through something that you can’t explain to anyone, unless you were out there in that friggin’ heat,” the 70-year-old says. “It could only be lived.”
But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.
“There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. “We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, ‘Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.’ “
Facebook: Ken Haller “Food for Thought” Facebook and Glee Violette @ Facebook, NPR’s Gustavo Arellano
I was part of a group of recent college grads that worked in the fields near Hemet, CA in 1968 for a few days. Apart from the back-breaking effort of harvesting grapefruit and carrots, we were simply awful. Productivity was abysmal. The single taco for lunch was barely an appetizer. Simply put, we were too soft.
Two centuries ago Goethe argued against allowing gung-ho college students to sign up to fight Napoleon…for exactly the same reason.
Unless you grow up living the hard life you simply can’t survive in the fields. As Latin American societies urbanize more and more, the pool of hardened workers will diminish, and Americans will have to start paying more for fresh fruits and vegetables that can’t be mechanically harvested.
John:
I would think any high school student should work some manual labor somewhere, doing something which is not typical for them or family. Unless one knows what all day physical labor is like, how does one decide? My day work the scaffolds all of his life, fell five stories, and yet again went back on the scaffolds to earn enough to feed a family of 4 children. I worked with him on side jobs.
As a laborer, I was paid $5/hour which was less than the real laborers were making. I paid initial union fees and stayed out of the way of the ones who would rat on you. The tuckpointers would warn me of their presence.
I still have my day’s tools and another man’s tools whose son did not know what to do with them. I can still point brick and block. My age and health now is in the way of doing so.
My dad told all four of us not to do what he had done. Surprising we did not. Of the 4 of us, the results were three MAs nd one BA (my youngest brother). He was very happy with the outcome. I do believe, there is a time in one’s younger life when an experience must be had, an exposure to some type of manual labor. Without such, how would one know what works for them.
John:
In 1968, I was gone, having enlisted in the USMC. I was trained for something other than infantry even though I was an Expert marksman with an M14. Nine months out of country and was a Sergeant at 2 years and two months. I left the Corps and went to NYC to see about a girl. Not everything is easy but some how, we got through it together. I did manual labor when I was not in classes for the three years it took me to get a BA with a math minor.
My point back to you? A person can do what is necessary if they put their mind to it. However, nothing should be so difficult to achieve for anyone.
I worked two summers at a steel fabrication shop in college. I stacked steel plates coming off a stamping machine. I got strong lower back muscles. It was easy compared to working in the fields.
I’m surprised it hasn’t been mentioned as a possibility yet, but I afraid this might lead to prison labor in the monoculture fields. Interesting to note, that in the last election, Californians voted against banning prison labor.
It’s the Hunger Games model.
Kaleberg:
Cute . . .
Three points. There were migrant camps within a mile of where I lived in the mid 1960’s and conditions were indeed deplorable. At that time church groups would visit the camps and try and help the workers. Eventually, the farmers in the area either mechanized the harvesting or switched to crops that could be handled mechanically and the camps disappeared.
As a 12 year old during the summer months I would ride my bike 3 miles to a farm which grew strawberries. The owner would have pick your own days but only after he had paid folks like me to pick the best berries. I recall that the rate of pay varied from 8cents a quart to 12 cents a quart depending on the size of the berries. I was not very good at it and eventually got shifted to picking weeds from fields where he grew other crops because I missed too many berries. I believe I was paid 60 cents an hour for picking weeds. I did not mind the work or the pay, but the whole thing lasted maybe 3 weeks, I did not work more than 4 or 5 hours a day, slept in a nice house in a nice bed and ate well balanced meals my mother prepared. It was warm and humid and the sun was brutal, but nowhere near a 110–more like upper 80’s.
I did work the summer after undergrad for a concrete contractor which was the hardest job I ever had. I was a high school and college jock and thought I was in good shape, but after the first day, I had difficulty getting out of bed and getting dressed and I was unable to use a knife and fork properly the whole summer. I was in good shape by the end of the summer, in fact the best shape of my life, but whenever I got down on Law School–which happened a lot the first year–I would tell myself I did not want to spend the next 45 years as a laborer.
@Terry,
There was a grad student in my department years ago named Mark whose father was a brick layer. Mark’s dad took him on jobs and he learned brick laying. When Mark went to college, he took a brick with him. Every time he got discouraged, he looked at the brick to remind him of the alternative. Mark took the brick with him to grad school, too. I was on Mark’s PhD committee. After his dissertation defense, I told him he could throw the brick away.
Most people do not realize:
State prisons do provide money which comes from jobs prisoners have in the prison. For a fee, relatives can send money to a special holding site which would uses credits and debits for prisoners. Otherwise, there is nothing. One article claims 86 cents per hour is the salary. I am only aware of ~65 cents per hour for someone who may be able to teach other prisoners (education is required).
In some places, prisoners can grow their own veggies also. They can make things which can be sold in a special prison store.
KInd of off topic; but, it is worthy of an answer. Also keep in mind, Prisoners are not slaves to be used as the state, etc. dictates.