UPDATE 12-4-24
Available on Amazon and e-book. Please let me know if you need help reaching my site. I will start writing a sequel to this book about migrant farm workers during the 50s to the 60s, who left South Texas to migrate over 1000 miles to other states to do stoop labor. First, I must finish The Windbloewer/El Soplavientos and The White House of San Benito. Thanks for buying “Children of the Cotton Fields.” Call 956-421-2864 for information and ask for Rosie. Again, the book is available on Amazon and locally at 711 W Jackson, Harlingen, TX, where the writer can sign it by appointment.
Children of the Cotton Field is the story of Mexican American Children picking cotton, vegetables, and fruit in the USA during the 1950s and 60s. It is also a commentary on the sociological and political landscape of the Lower Rio Grande Valley between 1910 and 1970. The book consists of a series of events in my life within a surprising narrative that sheds different views on social terms and historical events. Furthermore, it is an example of child labor exploitation based on racism.
DEDICATION
Dedicated to my parents, Lázaro Palacios Treviño and Gavina Jiménez de Palacios, and my seven siblings. Our lives from the 1950s to 1967 were a true cotton-picking adventure. They were models for love first, endurance second, and hope third.
Thank you, Mr. La Rue, my sophomore creative writing professor at Western Michigan University. At the beginning of the semester, he assigned a short story. My short story’s title was Children of the Cotton Field. He gave me an “A” for it. It had impressed him so much that he also gave me an automatic “A” for the semester. Mr. La Rue, if you are out there, without your encouragement and belief in my writing potential, I might not have written this brain-picking, soul-searching book.
PREFACE
In 1971, near the end of my high school senior year, I sat in Mr. Atchinson’s government and economics class, staring out the windows from the second-floor classroom at a cotton field abutting the school campus. I remembered, nostalgically, the ten summers I hand-picked cotton. I had not picked cotton since 1966. In the last four years, we migrated north and picked crops in Michigan and Indiana. I wondered if they still picked cotton by hand. At that moment, I decided to write a book about those times one day.
My memoir consists of individual short stories, or chapters, for the most part, tied together chronologically, unfolding events of my life as a Mexican American child who picked cotton, vegetables, and citrus fruit in the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the 1950s and 60s.
I was five when I first picked cotton. We began the day before dawn and worked till dusk. In those times, Mexican American mothers and daughters made tortillas from scratch at home. No grocery chains then carried Mexican foods unique to our culture. One might find caviar in a large chain grocery store before tortillas or pan dulce. European Americans forbade public signs in Spanish, considered un-American. Speaking Spanish in school was punishable by spanking…
My many stories illustrate what life was like for typical Mexican Americans in the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the 1950s and 60s, especially children. How they worked, played, and learned, the dangers they faced, and the society they lived under. The government declared this region one of the poorest in the country then, a fact even today. The great majority of the population has been Mexican American historically. Currently, it is about 94%.
I insert genealogical information about my family through anecdotes of the lives of my grandparents and their ancestors. I was a child when I first asked my parents about all they knew about their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and as far as they could go. Their story is the foundation for my life, the roots of what I am today. I believe this is important for the full scope of the book to be grasped and understood.
Several chapters describe my educational experiences, showing the formidable challenges I faced in a school district with no idea how to educate Mexican American students. Mexican American children were dropping out of American schools as early as elementary. One day I asked my mother why we picked in the fields, and she answered that she and my father were uneducated. My mother got to the first grade, and my father to the third in Mexico. At that instance, I realized what an education meant to people like us and made plans to do whatever it took to get one.
Writing this memoir has been a tremendous challenge. The writing involves people I love intensely, others I don’t like, and a social system I had few good things to say about. It took so long to write the book because my emotions often got in the way, my writing became too personal, and I had to strike a balance between subjectivity and objectivity. To achieve this, I re-wrote many of the stories perhaps a hundred times––I had to learn to write for an audience and me and not just for me.
Ultimately, it has been a labor of love writing and re-writing every chapter in this book until it tells the story crisply, interestingly, and artistically.
PRAISE TO MY PARENTS
My father, Lazaro Palacios Treviño, had a third-grade education in México. He arrived in Texas with his parents in 1912 at age 10. He never broke the law, and as far as I knew, he got one driving ticket since he started driving as a young man. Around 1921, he bought his first car, a brand-new Model T Ford, paying $800 cash for it with money he earned doing stoop labor, like picking crops, irrigating crops, clearing woods, digging ditches, etc. People who knew him envied him and called him a bulega, meaning a bootlegger. It was prohibition time. How else could un pobre Mejicano (a poor Mexican) get the money to buy a new car? He had friends who were smugglers, but there is no evidence he ever was. Papi was a God-loving, humble man who cared for his family and practiced a healthy lifestyle. His bank account always had a few dollars, and he often lent money to family and friends in need. He never coveted material riches and avoided quarrels at all costs. Despite his lack of formal education, political influence, or large businesses, his humble and God-loving nature inspired and guided me, shaping my life and this book.
My mother, Gavina Jiménez Palacios. She was exceptional. She placed God first above all things. She had a pleasing social personality, hundreds of comadres, based on the sacraments, and friends. She never gossiped or spoke ill of anyone, and like my father, she was ready to lend a helping hand. I honored her by naming my book publishing company, Gavina LLC, after her and featuring her on the back of my book cover. Though she went to school in Mexico for a few months, the lessons I learned from her were far more valuable than what I learned in classrooms or lecture rooms.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Growing up in South Texas, Jose Ramon Palacios hand-picked cotton and other crops in the Lower Rio Grande Valley from age five to fourteen. He took his parents seriously when they advised him early in life that education was the way out of the fields. Jose Ramon has a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters in Education, with a major in English and a minor in Sociology. Married for over 50 years to Yolanda Abrego, Jose Ramon runs three businesses and enjoys traveling with his wife. He says he hopes to write 40 books before he dies, God wills. See his website for more information about his writing projects at www.joseramonpalacios.com. Thank you.
GOD BLESS US ALL
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