A Future Out of the Fields

In 1967, a skinny Mexican girl stood silent as a middle-school principal glared at her from across his desk in the Texas border town of Hidalgo.

The eighth-grader wanted to rise to something higher than the migrant worker she was. She was frightened, of course. Her future would rest on what happened in the next few minutes.

She was an able reader, got good grades and helped other kids with their homework, but she missed too many days of school when she and her family were picking crops in other states.

The principal’s heart that day was harder than a Texas creek bed in August.

“He told me I was too stupid and would never amount to anything,” said Juanita de la Cruz. He told her she couldn’t graduate to the ninth grade.

Fighting back tears, she wondered how she could have been misled about America being the great land of opportunity. She had just heard what amounted to a sentence: Pick crops, grow old and die. The principal seemed to have no inkling of her drive, her hopes--feelings she expressed in a poem she wrote at the time, which included these lines:

I am a migrant child.

One who has a faraway look in her eyes

When you ask my place of birth.

I am a migrant child

Eager to learn,

Thirsty for attention. . . .

Years later, she tried to find that principal to make him eat his words, to show him how wrong he’d been.

But that’s getting ahead of the story.

When Juanita was 18 months old, the family moved from Reynosa, Mexico, to Hidalgo, just across the border.

Until the third grade they lived in a farmer’s old one-bedroom house in a Texas orange grove. Her dad fixed tractors. The family was poor, but happy.

The happiness didn’t last. A freeze killed the oranges, the grove’s owner went bankrupt, and a bank foreclosed on the farmer’s house.

The family became migrant farm workers, heading north each spring.

“I knew nothing would ever be the same again when we had to leave the orange grove. But when I smell fruits and vegetables, the memories of that old house in the grove come back to me.”

She was 9 when her parents, along with Juanita, her two brothers and two sisters, began following the crops.

Their old Ford F-100 truck had metal rods bowed across the cargo area, and a canvas tarp stretched over them.

They stayed on the move through the North and the South, returning every fall to Hidalgo. Juanita would attend school there in the fall and winter until the family hit the road again in the spring.

“I made A’s and B’s in school and helped other kids with their homework. When we were on the road picking crops, I would set up a classroom with some old vegetable and fruit crates for desks and teach the little kids how to read.”

Discouraged after not being allowed to graduate from the eighth grade, Juanita dropped out of school at 14. She never went to high school.

But she continued to teach herself, buying old books at garage sales and in church basements for as little as a nickel.

She read while bumping along in the back of the old pickup on country roads in Ohio, Michigan, Alabama, Florida, Texas.

After picking crops all day, she read until the day’s last light in barns and stables where the family stayed.

The many little towns and roads are a blur now, but she remembers clearly the kids in other places in America--playing in yards, climbing trees, riding bikes, skating, playing hopscotch, laughing. She daydreamed about joining them.

“I thought how wonderful it would be to have a wood-frame house in the mountains with hardwood floors. And a fence, to define what was mine. And dogs and cats, rabbits and birds.”

Life on the road was about survival.

Can anyone imagine, she wondered, what it’s like to be little and poor and have to sneak into public restrooms to try to bathe?

Juanita and her brothers usually ate rice and beans twice a day, three times if they were lucky, along with whatever fresh produce they were picking.

When Juanita despaired, she would lie down with her head in her mother’s lap. Her mother would stroke her brow until she fell asleep.

Some hardships were especially painful.

“There was something wrong with my little brother. We didn’t know what it was,” she says. “He would try to walk and would fall down.”

Though it turned out to be Duchenne muscular dystrophy, she says, “He never gave up.”

While still young, he would crawl beneath the pickers’ ladders and gather cherries that fell on the ground.

Later, he finished high school through a homebound program. He was 27 when he died.

There were some acts of kindness along the way.

Juanita and her family were living in a pigsty in Alabama while they picked crops.

“One day a woman came to the sty with a new dress. I could tell it was new. It still had the tag on it and it was in some colored cellophane. The dress was pink cotton with some roses printed on it. I was 12.

“The lady said it was my size and she held it out to me. I said, ‘For me?’ I couldn’t believe it.

“How brave that woman was, a white woman who went into a migrant labor camp to do something for someone without being able to speak Spanish.”

Juanita learned about mean people too.

“We couldn’t use restrooms at a lot of gas stations. We always tried to go across Louisiana and Mississippi without stopping for anything but gas.”

She went on: “We spoke a different language. We looked different. The sweat. The dirt. Not being able to take showers. Lots of times I just wanted to become invisible.”

Juanita told herself things were going to change. And they did.

While in south Florida to pick tomatoes, she passed an exam and got a high school equivalency certificate. Then it was on to Miami-Dade Community College for two years--taking classes during the week, helping her parents pick on weekends.

Next, she enrolled at the University of Miami for a bachelor’s degree, and finally at Nova Southeastern University, where she earned a doctorate in education.

Today, Juanita de la Cruz heads the Miami-Dade public school system’s program to get homeless children in schools.

Sometimes her work takes her into the tomato fields south of Miami.

“When migrant workers see a stranger coming, they think it could be the immigration authorities. People drop what they’re doing and sound the alarm. ‘La migra! La migra!’ Everyone runs off and hides.”

Migrant children grow up hearing stories about the dreaded immigration officers and come to believe they are boogeymen.

“Even though I and the rest of my family were legal in the United States and had our resident cards, whenever I heard the shouts of ‘La migra!’ I would find myself running right along with everyone else.”

It hasn’t changed much in America.

“If I go into the fields today I hear the scurrying and scampering of people clearing out as I come near.”

Barbara Duffield, director of education with the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., says De la Cruz’s speeches about the forgotten kids can move people to tears.

While people are debating policies, she asks them to remember the faces of the children they’re helping and to focus on them.

“Because of her, there are a million futures that will take place, a million flowers that will blossom and in turn affect others because of what she is doing,” Duffield said.

De la Cruz says that after getting her doctorate she returned to the Texas border town where she went to junior high school to show her old principal how wrong he was about migrant children.

“He had retired and went to Mexico to live,” she said. “I went across the border looking for him, but I couldn’t find him. I wanted to see his face when I told him what I had done.”

De la Cruz spends several hours a week mentoring a high school girl from a migrant Mexican family.

And when she sees a covered pickup passing on the road, she can’t help but crane to look into the back and glimpse the migrant children. Given a break, she says, who knows how high they might rise.