A migrant worker's dream comes true

Saturday finally dawns, a typical May morning in south Texas. By 8 a.m., the air is already thick and oppressive.

But for the Castillo family, this sweltering Saturday is anything but typical. Despite the early hour, they're up and attired in their best, pressed tightly in a crowd with hundreds of other equally eager families outside a convention center in McAllen, Texas.

They're waiting to see their daughter, Michelle, a third-generation migrant farm worker, graduate from college. (Click here to view an audio slideshow chronicling Michelle's journey.)

"I feel so proud of her," bubbles Chris, Michelle's vivacious mother. "Because from my side of the family and his side of the family, she's the first one graduating from college."

Graduation is a magic moment for every family, but only for a few can it resonate as it will for the Castillos. Finally grasping a college degree in her hand will be a triumph not only for Michelle but for her entire community.

When the Monitor first met Michelle, she was a 16-year-old with a dream: to go to college and break the cycle that kept her family toiling in the fields.

Michelle's family is originally from Mexico. With little education, they found it easy to drift into the migrant lifestyle. But once rooted in that rhythm, there seemed little hope of getting out. By the time Michelle and her sisters were born, their lives was built around two fixed points: In growing season, home was a crude, unheated trailer on an Illinois farm. In the winter, when the farmer had no more work for them and the trailer became uninhabitably cold, they retreated to a tiny home on the edge of the Texas-Mexico border.

Such an existence was far from ideal. For the adults, the work in the fields was bruising. For the children, schooling was interrupted each time they moved. For all of them, there was the sting of a certain degree of loneliness and prejudice – at least during the part of the year they spent in Illinois.

For Michelle, there was no future in such a world. "The conditions and everything, I couldn't do it," she says. "I had to get an education, to find a way out."

But it's not so easy for the child of migrant workers.

"The obstacles for mi­­grants are tremendous," says Jose Martinez, associate director of the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) at the University of Texas Pan American and a former migrant himself. Few children from migrant families make it to college and even fewer ever graduate, he says. Their academic background is usually weak due to those early years of travel, he points out, and not all migrant parents support the idea of college. Many worry that it will pull their children too far from the tight orbit of family life.

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