We were surrounded by cotton fields. At 7 or 8, I hoed cotton, I picked it. It was nasty back breaking work. You put the cotton in a long cotton sack you drug behind you. It was then weighed and you were paid by the pound. The cotton hulls would cut your hands, and if you weren't a "clean picker", you got too much leaf and hull in your cotton, you got yelled at. My folks insisted I work in the cotton fields. I guess it was to let me experience life should my scholarly efforts fall short.
In those days, Mexican families still came up from Mexico to harvest crops, beginning in the spring and following whatever crops needed picking as they moved north. My dad taught Spanish at Martha School, so whenever there was a problem, farmers sent them to my dad to translate. During Cotton harvest, it was not unusual to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night with a woman giving birth. Farmers in the area had shanty villages on their farms, used only at harvest. Some farmers cared about the workers, had nice accommodations while others didn't really care. The good farmers attracted the good crews year after year. Some farms hired the same families for 20 years, knew the children, their grandchildren, mourned the patriarchs passing over the winter.
As a child, I was fascinated by the crop dusters as the daredevil pilots did acrobatics under power and telephone lines. I played in the irrigation ditches, sometime trapping fish in the channel grids. I once brought home a dozen such fish in a cardboard box. Filled a wash tub, with water, placed the fish in the fresh water and ran in to get my mother. We returned and I was proud to show her my catch, only to discover the feral cats had eaten all of my ditch fish. Being a preacher's wife, mom was always worried a lady from the church would come by and the house would be dirty. Surrounded by cotton fields, with the western wind, the tractor plows, I think it drove mom crazy as the dust was inescapable.
As we debate immigration today, I am reminded that we once had a migratory worker program in this country. Families would load in caravans and head north following the crops. Once winter came they headed back to warmth of Mexico. Below are some notes from Wikipedia about migrant works from that period. The history is little known today. It is interesting to me that this issue seems to be never solved, and politics make strange bedfellows.
But they too picked cotton.
The UFW during Chavez's tenure was committed to restricting immigration. Chavez and Dolores Huerta, cofounder and president of the UFW, fought the Bracero Program that existed from 1942 to 1964. Their opposition stemmed from their belief that the program undermined U.S. workers and exploited the migrant workers. Since the Bracero Program ensured a constant supply of cheap immigrant labor for growers, immigrants could not protest any infringement of their rights, lest they be fired and replaced. Their efforts contributed to Congress ending the Bracero Program in 1964. In 1973, the UFW was one of the first labor unions to oppose proposed employer sanctions that would have prohibited hiring undocumented immigrants. Later during the 1980s, while Chavez was still working alongside Huerta, he was key in getting the amnesty provisions into the 1986 federal immigration act.[22]
The Bracero Program was initially prompted by a demand for manual labor during World War II and began with the U.S. government bringing in a few hundred experienced Mexican agricultural laborers to harvest sugar beets in the Stockton, California area. The program soon spread to cover most of the United States and provided workers for the agricultural labor market (with the notable exception being Texas, which initially opted out of the program in preference to an "open border" policy, and was denied braceros by the Mexican government until 1947 due to perceived mistreatment of Mexican laborers[1]). As a corollary, the railroad bracero program was independently negotiated to supply U.S. railroads initially with unskilled workers for railroad track maintenance but eventually to cover other unskilled and skilled labor. By 1945, the quota for the agricultural program was more than 75,000 braceros working in the U.S. railroad system and 50,000 braceros working in U.S. agriculture at any one time.
