50 Years Ago: Program to replace Mexican workers with Navajos hits a few snags

A special project begun in January of 1965 to replace Mexicans working on farms in Yuma, Arizona with Navajos has hit a few snags.

The idea behind the program, according to an agreement reached between the governments of the United States and Mexico, was to try and wean Arizona farmers off of using illegals to work on their farms and replace them with Americans.

In this case, Native Americans, who would, according to the logic of people in charge of the program, agree to work long hours for little or less than usual wages.

The federal government at the time was conducting a crackdown on illegal immigration but they were meeting resistance from farmers in Arizona and California because they said these workers from Mexico were needed to help harvest their crops since most Americans refused to work that cheaply and under the conditions that migrant workers were forced to work under.

The pilot program pointed out, however, that using Navajos may not be the best idea federal government officials had.

Beginning January 1, the Arizona State Employment Service began transporting Navajos to Yuma to work on the lettuce farms down there.

Within two weeks, according to an article in the Yuma Daily Sun, the program was falling apart.

In that amount of time, a total of 167 Navajos were transported to the area by the Western Growers Association and the Yuma Producer Association.

About 50 workers had quit after a couple of days, 27 were reported missing and more than 80 had been put in the Yuma County Jail for drunkenness. None of the Navajos lasted more than three days on the job.

Once he had heard of the report, Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai sent a group of Navajos to investigate what was going on in Yuma and to see if any Navajos were in actual danger. Those who went included Wilson Halona, chairman of the council’s alcoholism committee and various council members, including Harold Drake, Carl Harvey and Melvin Tso.

A couple of police officers and tribal social workers were also sent to check out the Yuma Jail, which media reports claimed was filled to capacity and beyond because of all of the Navajos who were now sitting in jail.

What the investigators found was that there was an attempt being made by the Yuma paper and officials with the grower’s association to discredit the Navajos in hopes of getting the Mexican workers back because they were willing to work for less and not make as many complaints.

The Navajo workers interviewed by the investigators said there was no variation in their menus; they got the same thing to eat every day and they didn’t even get enough of that. Mexicans had complained that they were also forced to pay $1.75 a day to the association for food that was unfit to eat.

The living quarters were substandard and people would come around all day and night offering alcohol for $2.00 a quart while their salaries were just $1.25 an hour.

The investigators also discovered that 46 of the 167 had been arrested for disorderly conduct, 18 on January 18 alone. On February 3, 15 of the 46 were still in jail.

Yet, said the Times, while there were problems in Yuma County, Navajos were doing a great job in Ventura County, California “declaring war on the county’s lemon crop.”

A total of 66 Navajos from Farmington responded to ads in papers there asking for laborers to help pick the county’s $30 million lemon crop.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” said Jack Lloyd, manager of the county’s Coastal Grower’s Association. “This is the finest group of men we’ve gotten since we started this recruiting.”

Navajo officials said that using Navajos as migrant workers was a good idea but to make it work, decent wages had to be paid and the workers needed to be given respect.

In other news that week, the Navajo Times admitted that it had made a mistake in an article printed in early February about playground accidents at the Chinle Elementary School.

The article was a rewrite of a press release and said that some 1,000 elementary school children were using playground equipment that had the potential of having some 80,000 accidents a year. But because of safety efforts, there had been only 12 minor accidents in the first semester.

The Times article, somehow mixed up the numbers and said that the school had 80,000 accidents since September which resulted in the school receiving a lot of concerned phone calls from parents who were wondering whether they should allow their children to continue attending school there since every student seemed to have an average of 80 accidents a semester or about one every two days.

The Times apologized but also pointed out that because of the number of phone calls that the school district received, it was obvious that people were reading the newspaper.

And in the latest attempt by the Navajo Nation to curb alcoholism on the Navajo Reservation, the council’s Commission on Alcoholism announced that it was setting up programs in all 96 chapters on the reservation to attack alcoholism on the grassroots level.

All of the chapters have been asked to set up referral centers “to reach problem drinkers in the early stages of their addiction.”

The idea is that these referral centers will work with these individuals to help rid themselves of their alcohol problem through education and getting to the root of their problem.

Commission members said that in rural areas where this has been tried off the reservation, the success rate is between 65 and 70 percent.

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