“I don’t think things are any different now.  You come to work.  You don’t come to rely on anyone else.”

When Humberto Fuentes was growing up, he worked in the fields, with his parents, hoeing sugar beets.   They were paid by the acre.  The work was brutal but they did it –all of them, even the children—because they had to.  “Education,” he explained “came second.  It was something that you did whenever you had the time.  Survival was more important.”

Mr Fuentes, a pillar of the farmworker rights movement in the United States, is a natural story teller.  I interviewed him when he was in town recently for an FJ Board of Directors meeting.  He has a kind grandfatherly face and a gentle smile.  When you meet him, he’ll give you a warm handshake and maybe tell you about his kids or grandkids.  You would never know that here was someone who helped shape one of the greatest social movements in our country’s history. 

That is, not unless you catch him reminiscing with someone else caught up in the heady days of that time period, Gene Ortega.  Both men are on FJ’s Board of Directors and when I met up with them to do the interview with Humberto they were drinking Coronas, laughing and talking about the “old days”.  They mentioned Jorge Gonzalez, Jose Angel Gutierrez and someone named Lalo de Coalo –names completely unfamiliar to someone who probably was not even born when they were changing the world! 

I wanted to hear more about what it was like back then, what it must’ve felt like to be hanging out with the likes of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, how things were different now and what hope they had for the future but my assignment was specifically NOT to cover these usual topics.  Everyone knows about those days, my boss told me.  What I want to hear is stories about his childhood.  What did he experience as a youth before he became a lifelong farmworker activist?  So that’s what I asked him about.

Born in the little town of Cruillas in the state of Tamaulipas in Mexico (about 100 miles from Brownsville, Texas), Humberto’s father would cross the border regularly to find agricultural work in the U.S.   In 1952 his family moved here permanently to settle in a small town in the Rio Grande Valley.  From there, they joined thousands of other families who traveled across the country, following the crops northward to places like Idaho, Washington and Oregon as part of the Northwestern Migrant Stream.

Kids growing up in families that migrated faced special challenges that U.S. school systems too often did not take into account.  Moving and adjusting to new schools several times a year, not to mention missing days or weeks while traveling, makes it very difficult to get a steady education.  Humberto’s stories of his early education reflected that tough reality.

“It didn’t matter what age you were, there was always an incentive to drop out, especially for teenagers” he said.  “You’d go in and out of school for a long time”.  He said children in farmworking families  had to repeat grades and fell further and further behind until eventually they’d drop out.  

And it’s not necessarily that they’re not doing well in school despite the circumstances.  Older kids in families facing dire economic circumstances often wanted and needed to go to work full time to help out.  Mr Fuentes’ story is a perfect illustration.

“I was a very good student,” he says.  “And I still remember my sixth grade teacher.”  When he was in the middle of sixth grade his teacher told his parents that he was working so far above his grade level that if Humberto could stay and finish out the rest of the school year they'd recommend he skip the seventh grade and go straight to eighth. 

I can see in his eyes, the pride he felt as a child as he tells this story.  He was thrilled at this possibility and begged his parents to let him do it.  They did.  His family arranged for him to live with an aunt while they went up north for work.  He would have to join them later during the summer, though, because they needed the money.

“But agriculture,” he explains “is nothing if not unpredictable and it turned out that that year my family was three weeks late returning home in the fall.  Three weeks.  School had already started when they took me back home.  It was too late.  They said I had to go ahead and do the 7th grade.”  I can imagine how this must’ve felt to a little kid,  filled with raw pride and acute sense of injustice.  He had worked hard, was smart and tested high enough for the eighth grade.  It wasn’t fair that the administrators hadn’t followed through on their promise. 

So Humberto dropped out of school and went to work full time.

At age 22 he got drafted but in a strange stroke of luck he was not sent to Vietnam because back then –in 1964/65—“if you had less than a year [of  high school  they didn’t send you.”  So he served his military term in San Antonio while he worked on his GED.

“I was a boxer in the military, on the team so I got my own room.  Did basic training in California, then was in San Antonio for two years.”

He still did agricultural work and met his wife Hortencia in the migrant stream.  They were married in Idaho and settled for awhile in Oregon.  “I wanted to finish school,” he said, so in Oregon he enrolled in community college. 

“I wanted pilot training,” but the counselors at the school discouraged him—why was this farmworker kid thinking he could fly planes? They urged him to become a welder instead.  Nonplussed by the prejudice of his teachers and counselors, Humberto decided to study industrial electronics instead. 

Meanwhile he also became a counselor helping to recruit other farmworker kids to continue their education and it was in this capacity that he met Cesar Chavez.  Humberto soon ran into trouble at the school for “organizing”   and was fired.  The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) provided him with a lawyer to sue the school and amazingly they won but to settle the matter he agreed to  leave Oregon.   He was ready for life’s journey.

It would take him through many years of farmworker activism and major contributions to the development of the Latino community in this country.  We are very fortunate to have his active involvement in Farmworker Justice.

You only have to talk to Mr. Fuentes for a minute to realize that one of his most noticeable characteristics is his compassion for others.  Even in telling his own story, he is telling the story of thousands of others who endured similar circumstances, growing up in a society that routinely dismissed and discriminated against kids whose parents had to migrant in order to survive.