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Introduction lloyd was born on a farm in the northern part of the Red River Valley near Fisher, Minnesota, in 1927. His family produced a variety of crops, such as barley, oats, wheat, corn, and “a few potatoes,” and raised some cattle. This diversified farm fit a pattern common in the region after World War I, as the wheat monoculture for which the valley was famous no longer provided a satisfactory income. Indeed, about the time Lloyd was born, his father received his first contract from the American Crystal Sugar Company to grow thirty acres of sugar beets. One of Lloyd’s earliest memories was riding with his father during the mid-1930s on a horse-drawn wagon to deliver harvested beets to American Crystal’s nearby piling station. His father died in 1936, however, one of the driest years of a dry decade in the region . As his father lay dying, Lloyd’s mother lied to her husband in order to comfort him, saying that the sugar beet crop was better than it actually was. Shortly thereafter, she moved her family into Fisher for a few years while she leased the farm to another sugar beet grower.1 The family did return to their land just before World War II, and an older brother and Lloyd once more planted a variety of crops, including sugar beets. Lloyd entered the army in the waning days of the war, but he was home on furlough in the early summer of 1945, hauling German prisoners of war held in Crookston, Minnesota, out to work in his family’s sugar beet fields. An agricultural labor shortage throughout the region forced sugar beet growers to scramble for workers during the war years. Lloyd returned to the family farm in 1948 and received his first contract with American Crystal that year. Together with his brother’s allotment, they had about 150 acres of sugar beets—a fairly large operation at that time. With wheat prices high just after the war, Lloyd recalled that their neighbors “laughed at [them] for monkeying with sugar beets.” But when wheat prices sagged in the 1950s, those same people “were begging to raise beets.”2 3 The larger operation required Lloyd and his brother to employ more and more Mexican migrant workers, most of whom came from South Texas. By the early 1960s the brothers relied on three Mexican migrant families to cultivate over two hundred acres of sugar beets. When his brother died in 1965, Lloyd took over his allotment and eventually expanded the sugar beet operation to over three hundred acres. Two Mexican migrant families became year-round employees at that time to help maintain the farm, which still included acreage devoted to wheat, barley, and oats. The Mexican families occupied his brother’s former house and some mobile homes that Lloyd equipped with “hot and cold water and all that good stu≠.” When other valley growers decided to form a cooperative and purchase American Crystal in 1973, Lloyd borrowed $24,000 to participate in that venture. That move paid o≠ for Lloyd as his income from beets increased dramatically , so much so that he incorporated his farm two years later. When Lloyd retired in the early 1980s, he turned the farm—now with allotments for over six hundred acres of sugar beets—over to his son. Lloyd and his wife moved into Fisher, although he still helped his son from time to time. When asked what had made his farming career so profitable, Lloyd replied that it was sugar beets “by far.”3 when jesus came to the valley to work in the sugar beet fields with his family, he discovered that the local people could not pronounce his name correctly. So he had them call him Jesse, a name he continued to use when he was among Anglos. Jesus was five years old when his family first migrated to the region. His father, Jesus Sr. (born in Texas on Christmas Day in 1926), had attended school in the Lower Rio Grande Valley near McAllen through the fourth grade, yet he could not speak English. Marrying in 1945, Jesus Sr. began a life of migrant labor almost immediately. Jesus Jr., his second child, was born near Lubbock, Texas, where the family had gone to pick cotton. Eventually, there would be ten children, although a girl born in 1964 in the Red River Valley died within a month and was buried in Moorhead , Minnesota. The family...

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