When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers

[Rasulis]

Here is an article about a program that I have never heard before.

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers

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 that 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 besides 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 assigned 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.' "

You know, everybody should spend at least one summer working in the field to gain some perspective.

[Hinastorm]

In before the alt-righters

"Fox news tells me mexicans are rapists and criminals, and don't "share our values", so my lizard brain goes straight to hate!"

They value family structure and tend to be pretty religious...you have more in common with your average mexican than you do with your average democrat, you idiots.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

That’s sounds pretty hellish. Negros got out of the fields and I for one ain’t going back.

[Surfd]

Really makes me wish that "instant knowledge download" technology like they showed in the matrix actually existed. Except there would be no "Hey, I know kung-fu" moments.

Instead, I would use it so that every time someone badmouths somebody they don't understand, I would force-feed them a year of that person's life. Want to knock that poor bastard working at Mc-Donalds because "the job is so simple, a monkey could do it?" Well, how about you find out first hand exactly what that simple job entails.

Fuck "Walk a mile in another man's shoes", i'm going to feed you a year of their soul crushing life and watch you squirm. Then maybe the stuck up assholes will have a little less to say about the people working 3 dead end jobs trying to make ends meet.

[ImpTaimer]

The third paragraph says more than the entire article, specifically the last sentence. But if course OP bolds the last part which is just ultimately history repeating itself with a side order of virtue signaling.

Southern California is a shithole and not suitable for farming. The farmers there are just greedy assholes siphoning state/government welfare to protect themselves.

[Shelly]

You know, everybody should spend at least one summer working in the field to gain some perspective.

Mao thought the same thing and it didn't turn out too well then either.

The main thing that migrant labor gives us is cheap food, if anything a by-product of this current anti-immigrant stupidity will be a reduction in the number of overweight americans.

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The third paragraph says more than the entire article, specifically the last sentence. But if course OP bolds the last part which is just ultimately history repeating itself with a side order of virtue signaling.

Southern California is a shithole and not suitable for farming. The farmers there are just greedy assholes siphoning state/government welfare to protect themselves.

South and Central CA are some of the best farmlands in the world.

If we could just get rid of the cities all the water problems would disappear too.

The soil is fertile and well draining with long warm days and nights for almost year-round growing.

Ag is still something like 8% of the California economy and if you've had an almond, rice, walnut, avocado, salad in winter, oranges, franzia wine or out of season produce grown in America it was probably grown in CA.

As for the welfare, our food is cheap because of a complicated system of subsidies put into place by Nixon in order to combat food inflation and price instability. The entire reason you can buy a thing of Ritz crackers for less than $3 is because of that system.

[Underverse]

I picked blueberries for 2 summers. It wasn't that bad - kind of fun actually. The pay was fine, for a highschooler. But, I wasn't in California, so maybe it was more bearable.

[Rasulis]

Mao thought the same thing and it didn't turn out too well then either.

The main thing that migrant labor gives us is cheap food, if anything a by-product of this current anti-immigrant stupidity will be a reduction in the number of overweight americans.

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South and Central CA are some of the best farmlands in the world.

If we could just get rid of the cities all the water problems would disappear too.

The soil is fertile and well draining with long warm days and nights for almost year-round growing.

Ag is still something like 8% of the California economy and if you've had an almond, rice, walnut, avocado, salad in winter, oranges, franzia wine or out of season produce grown in America it was probably grown in CA.

As for the welfare, our food is cheap because of a complicated system of subsidies put into place by Nixon in order to combat food inflation and price instability. The entire reason you can buy a thing of Ritz crackers for less than $3 is because of that system.

I am not aware that Chairman Mao ever enacted a policy wherewith everybody had to spend one summer working in the field.

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I picked blueberries for 2 summers. It wasn't that bad - kind of fun actually. The pay was fine, for a highschooler. But, I wasn't in California, so maybe it was more bearable.

Try harvesting watermelons. I did that for two summers at my girlfriend's parent's farm in Salinas. My arms looked like Popeye's back then. Although Salinas is much more temperate than Blythe.

[CatchingFire]

Mass immigration destroys USA culture. The End.

[draynay]

Blythe? Yikes, wouldn't want to work outdoors there, its awful and in the middle of nowhere.

[Rasulis]

The third paragraph says more than the entire article, specifically the last sentence. But if course OP bolds the last part which is just ultimately history repeating itself with a side order of virtue signaling.

Southern California is a shithole and not suitable for farming. The farmers there are just greedy assholes siphoning state/government welfare to protect themselves.

It is true that Central Valley and San Joaquin Valley can be like that of a desert. The summers are long and hot and all the grass turns brown by the end of April. But, it’s not a desert. San Joaquin Valley and Sacramento Valley have the single largest patch of Class 1 soil in the world. Which means there is no other place in the entire world in one location with this much fertile soil. The best of the best. These soils produce over 400 different crops.

Farming is a risky venture and growing crops in the San Joaquin Valley makes so much sense when you understand the WHY.

A big thunderstorm is a rare occurrence in the valley and it usually makes for big news. One can count on having dry weather once the month of May begins and no rain till the end of October. This period of relative tranquil weather is the number one reason California is a the #1 agricultural state in the US.

For example. It is too risky to grow raisins anywhere else. Why? The unpredictable rain that occurs in every other state would make it impossible. Growing cherries is also very risky, a rain storm at the wrong time, and you have a disaster. Any rain on canning tomatoes is cause for great concern because mold can ruin the entire crop.

The fresh food market is an industry that has food safety as it’s number 1 priority. California humid free summers and lack of any rain during the growing season doesn’t promote soil borne pathogens that can plague other regions. All the wonderful produce Salinas grows also can be done because of the long periods of dry weather.

It is big money to grow all the produce they grow and it would be an extremely risky proposition to grow those crops where summer thunderstorms are the norm which includes most of USA. Farmers are not stupid. If giant agricultural corporations could do what they do somewhere else where there is water, it’s logical to think they would have left California and be doing just that elsewhere.

This hold true for San Diego County also. Farming is a 2.8 billion industry in San Diego County alone.

[Shelly]

I am not aware that Chairman Mao ever enacted a policy wherewith everybody had to spend one summer working in the field

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_t...yside_Movement

"The Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement was a policy instituted in the People's Republic of China in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result of what he perceived to be pro-bourgeois thinking prevalent during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong declared certain privileged urban youth would be sent to mountainous areas or farming villages to learn from the workers and farmers there. In total, approximately 17 million youth were sent to rural areas as a result of the movement.[1]"

[vindicatorx]

You know, everybody should spend at least one summer working in the field to gain some perspective.

I did it for 2 years. It was the only way a 14 year old can get a job. Shitty part was it paid under minimum wage. Nothing beats working 60+ hours a week for less than $200 take home.

[Femininity]

As a wee lass, I worked the fields after school, on weekends and over the summer until my great-grandpa died when I was 15. Took a job at a bigger farm while I was in school. Two business degrees later, I'm working blue collar again by choice. I love it.

[Jinpachi]

In before the alt-righters

"Fox news tells me mexicans are rapists and criminals, and don't "share our values", so my lizard brain goes straight to hate!"

They value family structure and tend to be pretty religious...you have more in common with your average mexican than you do with your average democrat, you idiots.

MS-13 doesn't. The cartels don't. Border jumpers are bad, merit based immigration and work visas are good. Anyone who disagrees needs to remove door locks from their homes immediately and leave them open year-round.

[Blur4stuff]

Reminds me of frightened right wingers who think all muslims are terrorists trying to inflict sharia upon them. They seem to think most immigrants are gang members, part of a cartel, or just looking to ravage the pure white christian girls.

This is what happens when all the old people watch fox news 24/7 and the younger ones live in places like /pol and t_d.

[Lochton]

Here is an article about a program that I have never heard before.

When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers




You know, everybody should spend at least one summer working in the field to gain some perspective.

Actually, the perspective of it sounds about right. Some could use some actual physical labour now a days.

[pfbe]

They should try replacing "migrant farmworkers" with "fewer farmworkers who can operate modern machinery, be they migrant or not". Continuing to supply cheap manual labor is only helping delay the modernization of farming. Take a good look at what makes farming expensive and what is tanking the prices of farm goods, and don't try to solve everything by depressing wages. You aren't going to outcompete third world slave labor by lobbying for subsidies and then turning around and hiring for cheap labor. All that does is make sure you get yours at everyone else's expense before your business collapses.

[Independent voter]

Automation will eventually replace a lot of farm labor. The thing is illegal immigrant labor is so cheap that it's way cheaper than even automation.

[Machismo]

I had my share of shitty jobs growing up, and there's a reason I decided long ago to never do those jobs again. Those jobs are tough, and not terribly rewarding. If there's someone who wants to do those types of jobs, we'd be morons to turn them away. People need to get over their bigotry and xenophobia.