To this day agriculture in the United States relies heavily on migrant workers for labor. These documents are about migrant workers in Illinois in the 1950s and 1960s. They worked picking strawberries, tomatoes, apples, and a variety of other foods. These two documents are both articles from the Chicago Daily Tribune and appeared in a column called “Day by Day on the Farm.”
The first article has a simple headline: “Migrant Workers Busy in Area.” It’s a fairly straightforward article—it discusses crops grown in the area, the route migrant workers typically took, and the amount of work that was to be done. The article seems fairly unbiased except for the beginning, where the writer describes and “invasion” of native born workers of Mexican descent, and also describes the movement as a “small army.” Given the tone of the rest of the article, the author probably thought those words were harmless, but they might raise eyebrows today, when the topic of Mexican and even Mexican-American workers is highly political.
The second article is titled “Need Pickers of Strawberries,” and discusses the shortage of harvesters. A lack of labor was causing some farmers to consider letting their strawberries rot in the fields because they could not get them picked fast enough. While the article explains how picking strawberries pays well and there is a vast shortage of workers, it does not inform readers as to how they might get a job as a harvester. The article also points out that the lack of labor most likely stems from new labor laws regarding foreign farm workers.
Digital History at Eastern Illinois University 