Oral History, Community, and Work in the American West

6. “That’s All We Knew”: An Oral History of Family Labor in the American Southwest - Skott Brandon Vigil

102 6 “That’s All We Knew” An Oral History of Family Labor in the American Southwest skott brandon vigil Historian Skott Brandon Vigil uses his family history to understand two groups neglected in western history: Mexicans and Utes. His oral histories illuminate the experiences of migrant families who created a place for themselves in the American West while providing an essential agricultural workforce in the region. Focusing on Mexican migrant workers, Vigil shows that the migration to the West came from the South as well as the East. His interviews deconstruct many stereotypes of Indians and Mexicans and provide a way for him to reexamine his role as a “second generation migrant wanting to remember where [he] came from.”1 in 1942, audenago Vigil and his two sons, Nick and Jose Bill, left their humble home in Pilar, New Mexico, for Denver, Colorado. The Great Depression had hit the family particularly hard. There was little work available in their rural home, just southwest of Taos, and the family survived on “sweet gravy” (a flour and sugar mix), rabbit meat, and poached livestock. Audenago heard about the prospects for good wages and abundant work in Colorado. The nation ’s agricultural production had begun to increase in response to “That’s All We Knew” 103 the war raging in Europe, and Colorado farmers devoted more land to the cultivation of sugar beets. The Vigil men packed their meager belongings, bid their family farewell, and boarded a bus for central Colorado. On arriving in Denver, the trio found transportation to Berthoud, where, for the next fifteen years, the Vigil family (and eventually Audenago’s wife, Erminia, and their nineteen children) worked as migrant farmworkers in northern Colorado. In the 1950s, when mechanization of the sugar beet harvest reduced the amount of work available near Berthoud, Audenago packed his family into a two-door Chevrolet and moved to Santa Maria, California. There, the family picked strawberries, carrots, and string beans in an effort to find a piece of the California dream. These migrations left an indelible imprint on the family’s oral history. For the nineteen Vigil children, now fully grown, the decades removed from their migrations and agricultural work did not dull their memories and descriptions of work in the American West. Family oral histories are one of the few ways that readers can understand the work and labor of the region’s agricultural workforce. This essay uses oral histories from the surviving members of the Vigil family to uncover the experiences of a migrant worker family in the American West. The Vigils’ stories provide an intimate look into the lives of migrant laborers and the challenges they faced in the twentieth-century American West. The Vigils vividly remembered the difficulties of picking sugar beets in Colorado and strawberries in California. Oral histories also revealed that they organized their labor within their household. All family members contributed labor power by picking crops, hauling wood, watching younger family members, pooling their wages, and enforcing work codes and discipline on each other. The family also remembered conflicts with their employers, not over labor conditions in the fields but when employers attempted to undermine kinship and family relations within the Vigil household. The Vigil family’s story provides one example of how oral history can help us show the experiences of poor, working families and how they created a place in the postDepression American West. Oral history is essential to understanding this family history. Often even the best written sources lack the powerful and emotional accounts contained within oral testimonies. The oral histories 104 skott brandon vigil of the Vigil family are important because, as scholar Ingrid Scobie observes, “Interviews serve to remind historians of the individual cases which comprise the generalized picture.”2 Oral accounts deepen and strengthen our knowledge of the past; without them our understanding of history is less textured. During summer 2005, my family and I traveled throughout Colorado , New Mexico, California, Wyoming, and South Dakota in an effort to conduct interviews with fourteen of Audenago’s children. These interviews provide the foundation for an examination of the lives of this multicultural working-class family. Without oral history, we would lose the opportunity to see their struggles and experiences . The Vigils were one of many families that saw in westward migration an opportunity to find a better quality of life and improve their social station. Their story and oral...