Conversations Across Our America: Talking About Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States

Humberto Fuentes

Humberto Fuentes was identified as a potential contact for me by a coworker who knew of his involvement with the Idaho Migrant Council. Humberto has two older brothers in Texas. Four of his siblings were born in Mexico. His father had a passport and moved from Matamoros to Portland before migrating to Caldwell, Idaho, in 1952, where he and his family lived in a labor camp and worked the sugar beet and fruit crops. At a Mexican restaurant in downtown Nampa, Humberto told me about his more than forty years of activism and advocacy and the changes he has witnessed in Latino activism. humberto: I was the founder of Idaho Migrant Council, back in ’69–’70. I was executive director for thirty-two years. I’m the national chair for Farmworker Justice in D.C. and on the Mexican Consulate Advisory Group. I’m still very much involved in the Latino community. For all practical purposes I should be retired. I spent thirty-two years with the concilio, and then we ran into a problem; todo el tiempo . . . there was a little group that wanted me out. Some thought I was too political and aggressive. So they got rid of me. We had a big battle. They are no longer an advocacy organization. They changed their name. We were known all over the place as the Migrant Council, and they changed to Community Council. It is terrible when you spend so much of your life to build an advocacy group and then you see something like that happen. But I guess we’re not unique; in many, many places around the country that has happened. We wouldn’t have made all the gains if it wasn’t for the walkouts and demonstrations of the ’60s and ’70s. This is a very conservative state. I developed the council from two people to an agency with about four hundred employees and a budget of $10 million. Politically we were very strong. We developed it into a membership organization. At one time we had five humberto fuentes 211 internal migration thousand paying members, similar to a union. César Chávez helped me develop it. He was one of my mentors. We structured the organization similar to a union, but we couldn’t be a union because Idaho is a right-to-work state. louis: I’d like to hear your family story. So many people think immigration has only occurred in the past twenty years. humberto: The only thing we are not being blamed for right now is the Iraq War, and they may come up with some angle to blame us for that too. In the ’70s también there were people trying to divide the community, so it’s nothing new. I think the problem is that the conservative media has really done a number on us. Even good, decent, Anglo middle-of-the-road Humberto Fuentes in Nampa Idaho. Photo by Louis Mendoza. 212 conversations across our america citizens are convinced that it’s really bad for the economy and the community . Unfortunately, they’ve convinced the majority of citizens that it is a bad thing. The ones with strong positions who are making lots of noise are the Minutemen types. My family experience is not a lot different. In the ’40s, ’50s, there was a lot of opportunity to work in the fields, and my two oldest brothers were born in Tejas, and four of us were born in Mexico. In that time it was not hard to get a passport—it was maybe $15 or $20 and documentation and you were on this side. My father had contacts in El Valle,1 so he decided to move there from Matamoros, Mexico. He had some compadres and one compadre was a troquero [truck driver]. In those days the trocas [trucks] were like buses; the families rode in the back. We came with six or eight families that migrated to Caldwell, Idaho— that was my first experience. The labor camp is still there. We came in and worked the fields—sugar beets, onion, fruits, apples, cherries—and then we followed the crops around—eastern Idaho for potatoes and then strawberries in Oregon. We moved around and ended up in West Texas usually around October or November. We went back and forth. I was about eight or nine years old, and I had two brothers, and...