Student Recalls Migrant Life During CBS 'Thirty Minutes'

Until three years ago, Laura Ruiz '80 spent eleven-hour days picking cabbage on upstate New York farms. On a half-hour CBS program which aired last Saturday, Ruiz, an Adams House sociology concentrator, discussed her childhood as a migrant worker.

Ruiz said she wanted the "Thirty Minutes" program to awaken people to the conditions migrant laborers face. She described working in the fields in New York from May to November and then returning to school in Mission, Texas, for the rest of the year.

"I despised the work, but I was working collectively with my family so we could eventually buy a house and other things," she said yesterday. Most migrant workers live in camps that are "unsanitary an unhealthy. The kids would have sores all over their bodies," she added.

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Ruiz said that her family was lucky in developing a "close, trusting relationship" with their employer, who placed them and another family in a farmhouse rather than in the migrant camp.

She said many migrant worker children drop out of school rather than miss so much work, and their lack of education "keeps the cycle going." "You tend to lose interest in the work and wonder if it's all worth it since you're always behind," she added.

Joanne Caplan, one of the show's producers, said she decided to focus on the children of migrant workers in upstate New York. "I heard about Laura, who was going to Harvard, and figured what better way to tell the story than through someone who's been through it," she said.

Caplan said she felt torn between emphasizing the plight of migrant workers in general and "telling the special story of Laura, who now lives in two cultures, not totally belonging to either."

Ruiz said she had many problems adjusting to Harvard as a freshman. "Back in junior high school, I wanted to go to Radcliffe--I had a romanticized notion of Radcliffe. And I also wanted to see what the east is like." A recruiter from Harvard particularly made her feel she would not be alone here, she said.

"But I come from a part of the U.S. where poverty is a way of life, and I questioned whether my being here was doing anybody any good. Living very comfortable felt odd while my parents were back home working," she added.

In the past three years, however, Ruiz said she has found the direction she wants to take. "Naturally, I want to work with migrant workers, developing effective programs for kids like me who've been shifted from school to school.