Radio Bilingue’s Hugo Morales – from farmworker to public radio mogul
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Welcome to Code WACK!, your podcast on America’s broken healthcare system and how Medicare for All could help. I’m your host, Brenda Gazzar.
How did Hugo Morales, co-founder and executive director of Radio Bilingue, become such an impassioned champion for farmworkers’ rights in California’s Central Valley and beyond? What life experiences shaped him into the influencer that he is today? We recently had the honor of asking him ourselves.
Welcome to Code WACK!, Hugo.
Morales: Glad to be with you.
Q: Tell us about your early life experiences, and how they inspired your work to empower the Latinx and indigenous communities.
Morales: I’m an indigenous person, grew up in indigenous territory, La Mixteca. There are 2 million of us indigenous Mixtecos. Our community covers three states of Mexico — half of the state of Oaxaca and then the southern part of the state of Puebla, and this other part of Guerrero. Our territory was cut in three. Probably in California, we’re probably talking about over 160,000 (people) or so.
So I grew up very poor like most of the Mixtecos in the homeland so I never met my father until I was 9 because he was here undocumented. He left our village with the hope and idea to come to the U.S. But obviously it’s not easy to cross the border. So he went to visit a cousin in Mexicali (Mexico) as a way to see how he could cross the border. I think he spent at least a year there working in the fields of San Quintín, which today is part of the winter harvest. That’s how a lot of us here in California get our tomatoes and other vegetables. It’s in Baja California Norte. So he spent there some time and he also spent some time in Mexicali, which is the capital of Baja (Mexico) and he became a mariachi. He played the violin and the guitar. From there, he was able to get a local passport, and that’s how he was able to cross.
Q: Wow. So tell me more about your life growing up in Mexico.
So I grew up in poverty in Mexico with a single mom and I have an older brother and a younger sister. I experienced and saw a lot of hunger among children, a lot of alcoholism, and a lot of the typical incidence of high poverty in a community. But I experienced incredible love from my mother, like a lot of moms. That was very, very helpful. I was able to go to school, to start at the age of three, which is very unusual. Most of the Mixtecos in my generation didn’t have access to any schooling. But I was lucky enough that in my village there was a private school. They only had like, I don’t know, some 30 students, you know, one adobe house. I was the only preschooler there. Everybody else was five years and older. And I have an older brother so he had exhausted the three years of the school program there in that village so we moved to a town called Huajuapam de Leon. So there I was able to actually thrive academically because I had already gone to preschool, as opposed to everybody else.
When my dad in 1957 legalized — at that the time, a letter from your employer was enough for you to be considered for legalization and that’s what he got from his grower boss there in Healdsburg, California in Sonoma County — and so he was able to bring the whole family the next year in 1958.
Q: Interesting. So what was life like for you as a boy in the U.S.?
We settled in a farm labor camp with my father and so we grew up with no health insurance, no minimum wage, no sanitation regulations or enforcements, no inspection of the sanitary facilities there.
At the same time during the summer, you know, it was prune season. There was a 100 acre prune farm. That’s when the migrants would come and help pick the crops in Healdsburg in Sonoma County for prunes…so I got to see literally the hundreds of cars of migrants come through with no job, literally, with cars full of children. And the children, of course, would work. So I got to see the poverty and the incidences of poverty. I got to see how parents are deprived of having a decent salary so they can’t, you know, afford to keep health insurance or properly take care of their children or properly provide nutritious food and lack of information about nutrition and their rights and so on. So I ended up actually at a tuberculosis hospital from that experience. Tuberculosis follows poverty and all that, I mean, so I ended up being locked up for a year in isolation when I was 12 years old. So I have a history in terms of access to health care. And of course I had a contagious disease so I was pulled out of school when I was a 7th grader out of Healdsburg Junior High, and put into isolation.
Q: So what do you remember about being in isolation?
So I got a lot of time to reflect. In our culture, in traditional indigenous culture, we are discouraged and actually told not to question the elders, or the adults. So I was a very quiet boy, in part because of the culture. But after spending a year and reading a lot about what was on the outside, because I didn’t realize that I lived in a very, very isolated farmworker culture and in deep poverty. I didn’t realize the context of that. I know that I was not invited to the parties of the rest of the class. I was the only Mexican. So I never had a social life with the rest of my classmates in elementary school.
But, I mean, we ourselves thought of ourselves as different because they thought we were different. Right? And that I was poor and I was Mexican. I sort of saw it as logical of sorts accepting the difference but I did not see the context of stuff until I was at this tuberculosis hospital and began to read about what was happening on the outside…I realized that the world that my parents lived in was very, very different than the mainstream and that being mainstream really didn’t have a sense of what was going on among farmworkers and the way that the mainstream, including the growers and their kids, the way they approached us, was as if we were aliens somehow, like we were not really part of their community. And it seemed like they were not really interested in getting to know us.
So when I came out of that sanitarium a year later, I was out to speak and I welcomed the opportunity to speak to my peers, to my teachers, to anybody that wanted to listen and see deep poverty there in Sonoma County and it was not something that was happening, you know, miles away or hundreds of miles away but rather right there. So that’s where my passion comes from for advocating for farmworkers because the mainstream at least up to then, really didn’t have a sense about what poverty was like.
Q: Interesting. So tell us about your college experience.
I ended up at Harvard College. And when I got to Harvard College, I realized that even the faculty didn’t know what it was like to be poor. And I was the only farmworker in my class and the only Mexican American and it was like wow.
It was quite an experience to know that, at least at that time, there was little or no research done about poverty in the United States….Within months, I realized that I had a very unique experience in the sense that I was experiencing deep poverty and was part of that culture and of course we could spend a lot of time talking about how elitist Harvard is, and other Ivy Leagues or whatever but what I thought would be valuable for me would actually be to continue that experience of being poor and working in the fields as long as possible so that later on — because I knew I would have to leave the fields at some point — I would be able to advocate for that community.
And I felt that as long as I could be a part of my family and my extended friends, the longer, the better. So that’s what I did, and I invited Harvard College students to come… I had lunch with a lot of my classmates. They wanted to talk to me because they wanted to know more and tried to help farmworkers. And they had never spoken to a poor person before, or a Mexican, or a person of color. So, I would invite them and say, “hey why don’t you come and join us in the farm fields so you get a real sense of what it’s like?”
So a couple of people did. It was just great to see middle-class white boys go out there and live in the farm labor camp there in Healdsburg in a tent like everyone else — $1.25 an hour — and experience the situation. Again, no health care. Living in situations not particularly sanitary and see and work among a class of workers that are exploited and be part of that. That’s something that I became very, very interested in as I went to Harvard College and Harvard Law.
Q: And why is that?
I was trying to figure out how I could be an advocate, how I could be an interpreter, how I could help farmworkers, my fellow farm workers. I identified with being a farmworker because I continued to work in fields until I graduated from Harvard Law. So it was important for me to get a sense of that culture and reality. For me to translate to the mainstream, I had to learn about the mainstream. And that’s why I thought it was really important for me to go to Harvard College but also Harvard Law so I could figure out how the system worked. So what I did actually at Harvard Law, I actually had a curriculum that very much catered to Wall Street, I actually learned about corporations. I learned about commercial paper but I also learned about injunctions and labor law. I took accounting, just wanting to know how the business, with the idea that I wanted to build this radio service that somehow through that information we would be able to, through exchange of ideas, we farmworkers would lift ourselves (up) because I identified as a farm worker so that’s why I became such and continue to be such a passionate advocate for farmworkers because I was a farmworker.
Thank you, Hugo!
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