A Season for Harvesting, a Season for Schooling

Sometimes the kids are ashamed. They don’t want to say where they’ve been.

But guidance counselor Primitivo Gonzalez is hard to fool. He picks them out in the hallways by their sun-scorched ears, pinched faces, arms corded with muscle.

“You can see a special tiredness in their faces,” says Gonzalez, who counsels the almost 200 migrant students at Memorial High School. “You know that look? These kids have been through hell and back.”

It’s that time of the year: After summers stooped beside their parents in northern fields, the migrant kids pour into South Texas schools in great waves. When frosts fall and work dries up, many of the nation’s migrant families rumble south in pickups and Greyhounds.

Their cross-country odyssey ends here, in the trailers and cramped homes strung along the Rio Grande.

For the youngest migrants, the work has just begun. Some have been studying at northern schools; some haven’t. Many will give up and drop out before graduating.

They’ll head north again as early as April. Migrants follow the whims of the weather, the turn of the seasons.

Spring is seeding. Fall is harvest.

Winter is schooling.

Dreaming of Relief

“One day I’d like to go back and give everybody a Coke out in the fields,” Eduardo Olvera says.

Beside him, Marcie Hernandez brightens.

“Yeah, I’ve thought about that too--bringing water so everybody can have a break,” she says with a giggle, then falls serious. “It’s horrible out there.”

Marcie and Eduardo are both 16. They live a few blocks apart, take the same bus across the railroad tracks to school. She picked Michigan celery this summer; he hoed rows of California tomatoes.

She’s bubbly and lithe, pink sequins winking on her black T-shirt. He’s quiet and deliberate, his hair shocked stiff with gel. They don’t hang out together, not much.

But tucked side by side in Gonzalez’s office, they finish each other’s sentences.

“It’s like that with all the migrants--it’s weird,” Marcie says, then shrugs. “It’s like a connection. We’ve been through the same things.”

The return to school is not easy. Late arrivals are often shut out of popular computer, telecommunications and advanced placement courses.

“Sometimes we go ahead and overload the class,” says Armando Saenz, the dean of instruction. “Other times we just can’t.”

Migrant kids don’t usually have time for classes like choir and painting--they spend two of the seven periods catching up in Gonzalez’s “migrant laboratory.”

Fewer than 30% of U.S. children of migrant farmers graduate from high school, according to the Cesar E. Chavez Institute for Public Policy at San Francisco State University. Fewer than 10% end up in a four-year college or university.

Thanks to an aggressive, $675,000 migrant program, McAllen does better than most school districts. In 1999, 88% of Memorial migrants earned diplomas.

A former migrant himself, the 49-year-old Gonzalez worked his way through college pulling melons and onions from the Texas dirt. After graduation he took a job with an oil company. But once his twin daughters were born, he headed back to school for a master’s degree in counseling.

Gonzalez attacks the dropout rate with a simple strategy. It’s too late to learn everything, he reasons. He pushes the kids to understand the general ideas, then move on.

“It’s quality, not quantity,” he says. “It’s not a perfect way to learn it, but we try to hit the concept.”

Not everybody buys into that approach. Some advocates prefer to see kids take a more painstaking path through school--even if it takes longer.

“[Schools] end up just baby-sitting them and marking time,” says Roberto Haro, interim director of the Chavez Institute. “It’s a marginal education because the schools don’t want to hold them back. They don’t want to pay for it, they don’t want to deal with it.”

But Gonzalez has seen plenty of kids throw down their pens and walk away for good. The trade is tempting--on the farm, each day pays a cash reward, sweet and certain as sunset.

The farm demands a strong back. School demands faith in the unseen.

A Highway of Hope

In John Steinbeck’s day, the hard-luck cases flowed west, following the dust clouds along Route 66. Today the human rivers run north and south, from Monterrey, Mexico, to the shores of the Great Lakes; from the colonias of Brownsville, Texas, to the apple orchards of Yakima, Wash.

In poorer days, people migrated because they’d lost everything. At the beginning of the 21st century, families hit the highways because they’ve got nothing to lose. Most are Mexican nationals, immigrants or the children of immigrants. At the bottom of the economy, they toil for a chunk of American prosperity.

These days, one in every 10 U.S. farm laborers is a migrant, the Department of Agriculture estimates. In the Rio Grande Valley, the ebb and flow of migrant labor is as familiar as the return of the cold weather.

“I remember asking my parents why we couldn’t go too,” recalls Paul Toscano, 40, the son of a Harlingen lawyer. “All my friends in school would leave, and it seemed like fun. When you’re a kid, you don’t get it.”

Migrant teacher Aaron Brenner walks a thin line. He works to ease the strains of migration, but he’s wary of making kids feel ashamed or inferior if they end up following their parents to the fields.

“I get a little sick of people acting like it’s the end of the world if these kids grow up and work on farms,” he says. “I mean, they shouldn’t have to. But what if they want to? It’s good, honest work.”

Marcie and Eduardo remember sun so hot it slams like a punch on the back of the neck. When 100 degrees shimmer in the dust, they wrap themselves in sweaters and hats because heatstroke seems less threatening than sunburn.

The meanest tasks--hoeing, hefting rocks and clipping vines--leave them wasted with weariness. But when the work is easy, the sun seems to slide even more slowly across the sky. There’s no good way, and no use looking at a watch.

“It is so hard. If I end up doing farm work for the rest of my life, that’s the last straw,” Marcie says. Eduardo groans in agreement.

“I don’t care what I do. I’d work in Burger King before I went back to the fields,” Marcie continues. “Really, I would do anything.”

Her parents have hauled and picked and weeded their way through decades of Midwestern summers, earning as little as 45 cents an hour. These days Juan and Maria Hernandez pull down $6 an hour, plus free rent on a small house at the hem of the celery fields.

“Every year we tell each other, this will be the last time,” says Maria, 65, kneading her hands in her lap.

But every spring, they load the Suburban and make the 25-hour trek, following their headlights north like some misty hope.

A Veteran of Bracero Program

Juan Hernandez is 77, a Guanajuato, Mexico, native who doesn’t speak a word of English. He’s scraping a living from the black soil of Michigan with no retirement in sight.

He was one of 4 million Mexican nationals who crossed the border to work U.S. farms in World War II. The Bracero program was meant to fill the jobs left empty by men at war.

“Look at me--I never earned any money,” Juan Hernandez says. “Just enough to get by. They’ve always paid us as little as possible.”

Maria Hernandez nods.

“And every day,” she says, “you get a little more tired.”

They watch Marcie eagerly, pray that life will handle their youngest daughter gently. There isn’t much they can do to help. They never got much schooling.

Outside, the last light of day slips into the Rio Grande. In the Hernandez living room, the flicker and glow of a Mexican newscast bathes the plaster walls.

The family just got back to Texas, and already the semester looms. When class rankings come out, Marcie’s gunning for the top 5%. Then there’s the physics test she’ll take--after three months of missed assignments. She took some classes in Michigan, but it didn’t turn out to be the schedule she needed. Anticipating a tough return to Texas, she tried to learn a little physics with a tutor--but it wasn’t enough.

“The teacher writes it on the board and just expects you to know it already,” she gripes. “I am really, really behind right now.”

The academic scramble is nothing new. To Marcie, it’s just another difference between herself and the non-migrants. She’s not around for autumn football games or spring dances. Last year she missed her older sister’s graduation.

“That’s just the way it is,” she says. “Some people have it easy. But in our case. . . . “

She trails off, studies her toes.

“We have to bring ourselves up.”