A turn in the path

In 2001, Monitor readers met Michelle Castillo, the daughter of migrant workers. Michelle excelled in high school - when she wasn't working in the fields - and had several college scholarships to choose from. So at 17 she was nearing a crossroads. Would she pick a top university far from home, or a local school so she'd be near her boyfriend? Marriage or a career, the familiar or a promising future?

Today, we see how Michelle's life has changed in the past two years - and what challenges may lie ahead because of her choices.

Michelle Castillo awakes on the morning before her wedding with a jolt familiar to brides-to-be.

"It just hit me," she gasps, wringing her hands in a manner completely at odds with her characteristic calm. "Tomorrow we're getting married!"

Michelle is only 19, but she has been on the path to matrimony for several years. She and fiancé Mario Salazar met in high school in the fall of 1999. It took them a year to work up to a first date, almost two more years to become engaged, and then another year to plan the wedding.

Today they finally stand on the threshold of their new lives together. They're impatient, eager, excited, and - of course - utterly in love.

But for the adults around them, the wedding evokes a more mixed set of emotions. At least a few can't help worrying that, in reaching for one dream, Michelle may be losing her grasp on another.

Michelle is the oldest of three daughters in a family of migrant farm workers. She is the third generation of Castillos to pick vegetables and fruit, sharing with her family seasonal commutes between Illinois and Texas.

The migrant life is a harsh one. It requires grueling physical labor, and in exchange, offers only a subsistence salary, substandard housing, and an unsettled existence.

Michelle is intent on breaking away from this kind of life.

While still in high school, she enrolled in a program designed to channel the children of migrant workers into higher education. Now, on her wedding day, she's a few weeks from finishing her freshman year of college.

It would have been easier to wed after exams, but Michelle's parents must leave for planting season in Illinois.

So Michelle took time from her studies to marry. It's a pause that troubles her mother, Chris.

"It's not a good sign - leaving her classes for the wedding," Chris says unhappily, even as she swathes in tulle a candle that will serve as a wedding decoration.

She and Michelle's father, Nuni, wanted their daughter to finish college before marrying. Chris came to the US from Mexico at the age of 12. She struggled to learn English and worked hard to finally finish high school at the age of 21. Nuni - constantly on the move with his migrant family - never made it past fourth grade.

For them, to see a daughter graduate from college would validate years of struggle.

"But what can we do?" asks Chris, looking weary in the face of young love. "If we tried to stop them, they would have eloped."

"We've asked Michelle: 'Are you sure that this is what you want to do?' " says Marilyn Haggerty, director of the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) at Michelle's school, the University of Texas, Pan American, in Edinburg.

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