A migrant worker is a person who either migrates within their home country or outside it to pursue work. Migrant workers usually do not have the intention to stay permanently in the country or region in which they work. Migrant workers who work outside their home country are also called foreign workers.Due to the United States’ proximity to Mexico, and Mexico’s previous ownership of California, many of these workers are of Mexican descent.
Felix Contreras: You were raised in a migrant farm worker environment. Can you describe what that was like?
Luis Contreras: First of all, we didn't have a permanent residence. We traveled in a truck and we lived mostly in a tent on the road between California and Kansas.
Because we were migrants, our schooling was incomplete. We would arrive in a town after school started and leave before the school year was over.
So things like child labor laws didn't exist back then?
There were child labor laws, but here's how migrant families worked it: When we were out in the fields you could see a child labor officer driving up along those dirt roads from at least a mile away. Looking back, I think it was in the interests of the industry to not have the child labor laws enforced because we did a lot of work as children. It was a different time. It was a different way of thinking among people who did agriculture work — meaning, there wasn't much of an interest in the welfare2 of the field worker.
Flash forward 40 years or so.
How did you first hear of Cesar Chavez's3 efforts to organize farm workers?
I read about in newspapers and also reports on television. News of the UFW [United Farm Workers] march from Salinas to Sacramento in 1966 was carried in the paper and on TV.
I thought, "Finally someone is doing something!" I thought it was a very good thing, especially regarding child labor. What he was doing was right. It was about time someone was doing something about that. Before Chavez and the UFW, they didn't show any of that, you know, how migrants lived and worked.
What did you think about the UFW's tactic of establishing picket lines4 at supermarkets in urban areas to raise the awareness of their fight?
I think those publicity tactics brought out a lot of popular support from people who experienced that kind of life. And even among those who thought it was just wrong.
Did you feel any emotional connection to their work to organize farm workers?
Yes, of course, I felt a very strong emotional connection to that organizing. I felt they were doing a good job. They were right.
How would your family's life have been different had there been a Cesar Chavez and the UFW when you were a kid?
I don't know. My father was a person that — I don't know if he cared if we were educated. My mother, on the other hand, had strong feelings about education. She was illiterate and she didn't know how to guide us in that direction, so we went to school no matter what — when we could.
After my father died in 1941 in Sacramento, we stopped moving, settling there. After that, we worked only in the summer and started the next school year on time for the first time.
Do you think the youngest generation, your grandchildren for example, have any appreciation for what Cesar Chavez tried to do?
I don't think the grandkids are too much aware of what Cesar Chavez was doing. It would be up to my children, you and your brothers, to tell their kids about Cesar Chavez.
I don't think most of the offspring of the generation that lived that life — I think they knew about that plight, they knew what was happening, but they didn't take any interest, because we made efforts to avoid having our children live that life. I think most parents didn't tell them unless they were asked.
Or it was presented in school as part of history or social studies.
Any final thoughts or feelings I haven't asked you about?
I want to add that after reading this some people may say: The parents, my parents, should have been more attentive to the kids to get ahead. I try to tell people who ask about it: Don't put that kind of blame on them. You have to put things into historical and social context.
We, my brothers and sisters and I, were never taken to an orphanage, or foster home and left there. My parents, and so many other migrant families, stuck it out and kept the family unit together. Now that I'm older I can see that that was the only way they could survive those kinds of living conditions.
It was survival, plain survival, they taught their kids how to survive and they did a d--- good job. My siblings and I did not become drug addicts, alcoholics, people who cheat and steal, those kinds of things that some poor people often fall victim to. My mother and father put us on straight and narrow and we stayed that way And besides, I'm 81 years old and I'm still in fairly good physical shape. Maybe all that hard work did some good after all.
