I KNEW A KID once who was up at 4 in the morning to catch the farm labor bus at the Circle K down the street. He was a 15-year-old gringo, and what the hell was he doing on that bus at that hour?
The bus smelled of dust mixed with motor oil, sweat and oppression. The Kid and the other farmworkers nodded off to the rocking rumble of the ride, but awoke when the bus stopped at some remote field somewhere in the plain languor of Imperial Valley. The orange promise of an angry sun lingered along the eastern horizon.
Someone busted up pallets and started a small fire, something to warm morning tortillas wrapped in foil. Conversations were muffled by the yawn of dawn. Banda music played low from a tinny transistor.
A trail of thick road dust cycloned horizontally behind the foreman’s pickup truck. He always arrived after the bus, and waited with us for morning to lift its gray veil before setting us off to work. The Kid dragged gunny sacks, trudged down rows of onions while he worked his cutting knife. He and the rest of the crew bent at the waist at ninety-degree angles to top bolls of seeds from the bolts of onion plants
The heartless sun hit in a hurry. The crew hunkered in against another day in the field.
On a Friday at lunch, The Kid wedged into a furrow with a bag of Fritos and a sandwich — bologna and Velveeta between slices of Wonder bread. Another worker, an older Mexican man with a friendly smile, sidled up and offered The Kid a chile verde burro.
“Why are you here, gringo boy?” he asked. The Kid took no offense. The old man seemed kindly.
A summer job, The Kid answered. The family needed the sixty-five dollars he earned every week in the fields. It puts food on the table.
“You’ve lasted a week already,” the old man said. “Longer than most.”
The old man had seen them before. High school white boys working in the fields. Young and cocky. Varsity athletes. They had shown up by the dozens a couple of years earlier to replace the Braceros.
The Braceros vanished after 1964. The idea was that Mexican nationals shouldn’t be filling jobs that ought to go to hard-working U.S. citizens. At least that’s what the pendejo politicians said to stir up the passions of rubes. They still say that.
It’s laughable, really. Everyone who isn’t a rube knows that no self-respecting U.S. citizen would ever work in the fields. Twelve-hour days, seven days a week under a broiling sun for starvation wages? Yeah, right. Gringos have a higher opinion of themselves. Also, they are lazy assholes.
But who knows, maybe the farmers could bamboozle a bunch of brain-dead high school athletes to do the dirty work. Sure enough, the U.S. Department of Labor made a program out of the idea, in 1965. They called it Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower. The A-Team! Bus these boys in from all over the country, make them feel like they’re doing something useful for the summer. It’ll be an adventure, and they can make an honest buck along the way.
The program didn’t last very long. The A-Team was an embarrassing failure, and the fiasco reflected badly on the character and the work ethic of a new generation of Americans.
But several years later some local farmer might hire a dumb and eager Anglo kid to join a harvest crew. He just didn’t want a bunch of them on the same crew. That’s how The Kid ended up topping onion seeds in the summer of 1968.
“You’re in high school, right?” the old man asked.
Yes.
“Stay in school,” the old Mexican said. “Graduate. Go to college. Otherwise you’ll be like me, out here in the fields until the day you die — or until you can’t stand up straight anymore.”
He evidently thought he needed to share this bit of sage advice. I thanked him for his wisdom.
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THE EXPIRATION OF PUBLIC LAW 78 at the end of 1964 was a scary proposition for farmers who had come to depend on bargain-basement Bracero labor. The law had created a “guest worker” program that allowed temporary immigration of Mexican nationals into the country to harvest crops and to fill a labor gap during World War II. The indentured human imports had been a steal at $1.15 an hour, the starting wage. Braceros worked hard, didn’t complain, kept their bedding neat in the farm labor camps, and went back to Mexico when the work was done.
The Kid knew a little about Braceros. He grew up with one. The Kid lived for a time in a humble little ranch house midway between El Centro and the International Border, out in the boondocks and next to an irrigation canal. A Bracero named Juan lived in a studio shack on the property, about ten yards from the main house. The shack had been built specifically to accommodate hired hands.
Juan was like a father figure to The Kid. They didn’t speak the other’s language, but they somehow communicated over a deck of cards and the game of Hearts. Juan came and went with the harvest. The Bracero Program ended and The Kid never heard from Juan again.
After those good men were sent home for good, farmers naturally panicked about who would accept the starvation wages and the miserable working conditions they offered their hired hands. The farmers sure as hell didn’t want to invest in their employees any more than they had to. But now their guaranteed cheap labor had disappeared. In 1964, about 70,000 Mexican nationals worked the fields in 11 states. Most of them were gone in 1965.
Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz had a brainstorm to solve the problem: Recruit high school athletes for summer jobs in America’s fertile farmlands. Round them up and bus them across state lines to places like Imperial Valley and Yuma, Florida and Salinas. Call them the A-Team.
It went about as well as you’d expect.
Wirtz said the program was a response to the growers’ panic and dire predictions: If farmers couldn’t dig up cheap labor somewhere soon, America’s food supply would wither away.
Wirtz’s A-Team was meant to fill the gap. But some of the more skeptical farmers — farmers with a grasp on the reality of human nature — sensed that hiring high school kids wouldn’t solve their problems, and in fact would only make matters worse. They were right.
Students who did find jobs in the fields were not happy campers once they arrived and saw firsthand what they had signed up for. Thousands of A-Team members scrambled back to their homes within a couple of weeks. Students from a tony San Diego high school were fired from jobs in Blythe after they staged an impromptu sit-down strike because it was too damn hot to pick watermelons. Farmers complained that students spent too much of their work days lolly-gagging, engaging in horseplay and whining about the heat.
Early in the going, a group of parents from Orem, Utah, complained to authorities after hearing rumors that their kids were being mistreated by a farmer in Soledad. Investigators determined the rumors were unfounded. But another federal investigation revealed that the Carl J. Maggio farm in King City failed to provide proper living conditions for A-Team members who had been bused in from Topeka, Kansas. The farm camp accommodations had evidently been good enough for the Braceros, but they didn’t meet native standards.
As was the case everywhere else in the country, the Salinas Valley A-Team experiment was an utter failure.
The following is an excerpt from a news account written by the great Eric Brazil, a reporter at The Salinas Californian at the time. It was published on the front page of the Californian on August 10, 1965:
Sometimes it has been hard to tell who was more disenchanted with the program, the boys, their employers or the state and federal officials who tried to make the A-Team go.
Between June 6 and July 1, 874 Labor Department-sponsored Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower poured into the Salinas Valley. The 26 A-Teams included teen-aged boys recruited out of state from Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Wyoming, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska; and Californians from San Leandro, Oakland, Richmond and San Diego.
The State Department of Employment reports that just 227 A-Team members — about 28 percent of the boys recruited — stayed on the job through the six weeks of their work agreement. The rest dropped out early — 135 of them in the first week and a half of the program.
Brazil reported that most of the high school kids sent to Salinas were recruited to work the strawberries. A fellow named Bill Pihl, who coordinated the A-Team program for Salinas Strawberries, told Brazil that his company lost about $75,000 because of the program, not including the transportation, supervision and other costs squandered on high school kids. At the time, Salinas Strawberries was the largest berry grower in the nation.
Brazil asked Pihl if he could think of any redeeming features about the program. “As such, I don’t think there are any,” Pihl answered.
The A-Team kids mostly complained about everything, Pihl said. They complained that they were homesick, whined about the food and sanitation at the farm labor camps. They complained about their pay and they started to feel as though they were being held against their will. Like slaves, or something.
“Many of the boys had expected something more glamorous,” Pihl admitted. “Like lumberjacking.”
Brazil reported that Pihl was a “non-smoking abstainer from stimulants and hard liquor.” Even then, Pihl “developed a dandy ulcer since taking on the job of coordinating the A-Team program.”
The national program was terminated within the year.
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FIFTY-EIGHT YEARS AFTER THE A-TEAM FAILURE, farmers still remain reliant on undocumented immigrants pouring in through porous borders to fill their menial field jobs. Estimates vary, but undocumented workers make up between 37 and 50 percent of farm jobs.
It was a seamless and agreeable transition for the agricultural industry, from A-Team kids to migrant workers. Wages and conditions didn’t need to change all that much, and undocumented migrants can’t afford to whine and complain.
— Story and photo illustration above, “Boys on the Bus,” by Joe Livernois
Sources:
North America Newspaper Alliance
Associated Press
National Public Radio
United Press International
The New York Times
The San Diego Union
The Salinas Californian
Note: The A-Team came and went about 20 years before The A-Team first broadcast on NBC. The action-adventure television series made a star of Mr T, the charismatic actor with the Mandinka warrior-inspired hairstyle. Many of us remember that his most famous catchphrase — “I pity the fool” — wormed its way into the English vernacular. But faulty memory being what it is, Mr. T never uttered the phrase during the five-year run of The A-Team. Instead, Mr. T first read that line as boxer Clubber Lang in the 1982 sports drama film Rocky 3.