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BN: And then you said you were there for less than a year.

FS: Yeah. Actually, when I finished the ninth grade, there was a summer before we left. And I'm getting older... well, not that old, but teenager, thirteen, I guess. And I wanted to make some money, so my father let me work on the farm. There was a lot of flower farms. And so I had a summer in which I experienced working with, I guess people call it stoop labor. You bent over, going up and down the field. And that was very important for me. My education is that way. My whole life has been that way. it was the kind of questions these guys... you know, they were all, must have been in their twenties, and they had friends or girlfriends or family in Mexico, I think, all of them. And all they would do all day long, whenever we have a break, because you work, you go up and down the rows and you can't talk to each other much because you're bent over working. And when we'd have a break, they'd always ask me about my mother, what she looked like. She would have been a young woman, and they were more sexual questions type of thing. And that short summer made me realize what the life of a lot of these Mexican people that were coming here, working in the field, and it made me very conscious of the movement that started by... I forgot the gentleman's name. I knew it vividly... you know, the farm movement.

BN: Cesar Chavez.

FS: Chavez movement, yeah, very sensitive to that. But you know, the irony of that whole thing -- I think it's the perfect time to bring it up -- is that I also worked close to, because of Marian, to a farm people that came back from World War II. And Marian's cousins, they're all farm people up north in Lodi area. And her cousin's husband, who I really admired and liked, he was a air conditioning businessman, he had his own business. But when I brought up the Chavez kind of thing, he told me something that I won't forget. He says, "Look, we came out of camp and we had to make a living with these people." So his feeling of the Cesar Chavez movement wasn't quite as... he had a different perspective as a Nisei coming out of camp. Because they were like tools of their survival. And you know, I've never thought of it from that perspective because I was always more... I don't want to say rebellious, but maybe I am. I was very empathetic to that movement, just like to the American, Native American Movement and all of these kinds of things, or civil rights, whatever. It sort of surprised me, it never occurred to me. And I could understand what that might have meant to him to have these people that you depended on becoming rebellious if you want to call it that. That wasn't the intent of Chavez, he was just trying to improve the conditions. So these were all learning experiences for me.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.