Migrant students and their families follow the seasons year-round to sow and harvest America’s produce. The children of these families take pride in their parents’ work ethic — but struggle to continue their schooling. The 50-year-old CAMP scholarship helps hundreds of them go to college

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Claudia Kolker
@KolkerClaudia

Eddie Gaspar
@SafoItsEddie

The tiny student center at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas looks interchangeable with countless other college lounges. There’s a capacious couch, a bowl of leftover Valentine’s chocolates, and a bright-colored print of a summer day in the country.

But for Daniela Herbert, a rangy 19-year-old with dark curls, almost everything in this room signals how far she’s moved from her previous life.

Herbert is one of 35 migrant farm workers attending St. Edward’s on a scholarship from the pioneering College Assistance Migrant program, or CAMP. Each year, with the help of the federal government, the university admits 35 first-year students from farmworker families.

In 2022, the school’s CAMP program turned 50, making it the oldest of its kind in the country.

The program’s longevity, and each student it educates, reflect victory over almost overwhelming obstacles.

During the 2016-17 school year, more than 300,000 children migrated within the United States to follow the harvest, typically with their families, according to the U.S. Department of Education. For many of these young people, just graduating high school can be daunting.

Growing up with constant disruptions to school, working alongside families at exhausting manual labor, many drop out.

*Herbert adjusts photos of her mom and sisters on a shelf in her dorm. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra*

The year before college, for example, Daniela Herbert was working in the fields. Her father specialized in harvesting watermelons. Starting when she was 13, Herbert traveled with her brothers and her father several times a year to farms throughout East Texas and New Mexico. Once they arrived, the family members rose at 4:30 a.m. for pre-dawn planting, turning, and carefully choosing watermelons ready for harvest. For Herbert, many of these memories were good. She loved the freshness of the early morning air, the attention it took to study each fruit’s development, and the satisfaction of planting seeds and watching them sprout.

But the sacrifices involved in migrant work are immense. From their homes in Texas, California, Florida, and other states, migrant workers may drive to Michigan, the Dakotas, Arkansas, and Washington for different growing seasons.

Arduous as it is, the choice to travel huge distances to labor in strawberry, apple, green bean, and peanut fields and orchards has a logic to it. For low-income families, it’s reliable, seasonal work that allows some power over where and how to work. And, crucially, it is a way for everyone, including children, to earn wages as a team.

‘It was all I ever knew. But I felt shy talking about it.’

CAMP students like Herbert know both the farm and the campus, and many say they feel connected to both.

“I really like this painting,” Herbert said, studying the framed print in the CAMP lounge. “You see those two people? They’re bringing the crates to the truck. Those people over there at the edge of the row are taking a break. They’re talking to the boss. These people in the fields are harvesting. That’s exactly what it looks like in the fields.”

A half-century of scholarships

Perched on a hill a few miles south of rowdy, congested downtown Austin, St Edward’s calls to mind the serene Texas Hill Country of several generations back. That was the same era when a young Lyndon B. Johnson taught grade school in Cotulla, Texas – and was forever moved – by the poverty he saw among Mexican farm workers. His Great Society initiative would lead to the 1972 inauguration of CAMP, which grants free first-year college tuition and housing for children of migrant farm laborers.

Sonia P. Briseño, director of the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP), gives a presentation during an orientation for five CAMP members who have also been accepted into the Johnson-Turpin Scholars program at St. Edward’s University on Monday, March 6, 2023. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra

St. Edward’s was one of the original four universities to join the program. Now, 50 years later, it’s the only one that has continuously offered the scholarship since 1972. (Nationwide, there are 59 CAMP programs, including nine others in Texas). Nearly 3,000 migrant students have taken part in the St. Edward’s program. To be eligible, students need to fulfill the school’s acceptance requirements, be U.S. citizens or residents, and prove that migrant or seasonal farm work is the main, or a critical, source of their family’s income.

Today, the federal government provides 7% of the full CAMP scholarship for freshmen, said Sonia Briseño, the program’s director. In 2020, the Department of Education gave the school a five-year, $2.125 million award for students’ first year of tuition, room and board, and academic support services. The rest of the CAMP scholarship – including tuition for up to four years, mental health services, academic tutoring, and other resources – totals around $5 million a year and flows from private gifts. One of the biggest private donors: Luci Baines Johnson, class of 1997 and daughter of the former president. Along with her husband, Ian Turpin, Johnson contributed more than $1 million in 2014. That allowed CAMP students to apply for independent research projects, and even study abroad programs.

A Migrant, Not An Immigrant

For new CAMP students at St. Edward's, one of the first surprises is a school environment where many of their peers and administrators appreciate their background.

Vince Martinez, a political science major, grew up with a home base in Harlingen, Texas. But every spring on the last day of school, Martinez, his parents and three siblings drove to fields as far off as Arkansas to cultivate cotton, peanuts, and watermelon crops. When fall came, they’d fill out page after page of paperwork so the kids could start class weeks after they began. Even so, some of Martinez’ schoolmates and even his own parents kept their migrant work secret. “My parents were apprehensive about telling people,” he said. “In part, they didn’t want to disclose that their children were working. And they felt shamed. I was indifferent – it was all I ever knew. But I felt shy talking about it.”

*Justin Treviño, 19, majors in video game development at St. Edward's University, and is a College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) scholar. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra*

*Treviño’s framed photos of him, with his sister and mother at his high school graduation, on his desk in his dorm at St. Edward’s on March 6, 2023. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra*

Even in his Latino-dominated hometown, Martinez said, some people didn’t understand the migrant farmworker life. For example, many high school classmates didn’t realize that migrants often own homes, from which they travel during growing season. Others imagined that migrant workers existed in the past, and that today it’s machines that pluck all the beans, strawberries, and apples.

Most painful, Martinez said, were tirades he saw on social media during the years of the Trump administration conflating immigrant farm workers with migrant workers – and to Martinez, demonizing both. Not only is there a shortage of farm laborers, he said, “Many migrant workers are American. This is home. We are Americans. My parents are Americans. My grandparents were Americans. It was a big insult to their hard work.”

Yamilet Banda, a CAMP student who grew up caring for her young siblings in the fields of Michigan, recalls facing the same misinformation. “Growing up, I would bring up that I was a migrant,” she said. “People would say, oh, you’re an immigrant. No – I’m a migrant. It’s completely different. After a time, some people were even making fun of it, judging not only me but also my family. It really hurt.”

Adding to the pain of misinformation about them, many migrant students take pride in their family’s work ethic and closeness.

*Yamilet Banda, 19, majors in biology with a concentration in health and is a College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) member at St. Edward’s University. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra*

*Sonia P. Briseño, director of the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) at her office at St. Edward’s University, on Monday, March 6, 2023. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra*

“If you actually work in the fields, you know what hard work is,” said Graciela Rodriguez, 44, a Houston dentist who graduated from St. Edward’s CAMP. “We did oranges, strawberries, tomatoes, apples, and cucumbers. You’d get your oranges in a plastic box – when I was little, they put me in one of those when they were out in the fields and check up on me.”

St. Edward’s administrators, who work closely with migrant counselors to recruit migrant students, are well aware of what these young people have gained from lives as migrant workers. And that understanding now comes firsthand: in 2020, Briseño, a former migrant worker and St. Edward's CAMP graduate, became the campus program’s director. Briseño’s hiring process included interviews by current CAMP students, who understood her summers spent driving with her family to weed sorghum fields and harvest onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes in the Texas Panhandle. After graduating from St. Edward’s, she earned a master’s of social work at the University of Texas at Austin. “I’m still very connected to my South Texas roots,” Briseño said. CAMP students, she added, come to school with a formidable work ethic, an extraordinary sense of loyalty — and respect for opportunity.

‘It’s hard to let go. We are a very collective culture.’

Students from migrant families also come with specific educational obstacles, Briseño said. Even more than other first generation college students, for instance, migrant students are deeply connected – and economically integral – to their families. Many have never spent even one night away from their families. Some, in fact, return to farm work over the summers, often as a condition of the family decision to let them attend college; others hitch rides home with friends every weekend during college to simply spend time with their loved ones. “It’s hard to let go,” Briseño said. “We are a very collective culture.”

*Herbert points to a photo of her and her father from when she was 16 years old while riding through a field in Mission, Texas on March 14, 2023. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra*

To address this, CAMP invites the students and their families to a weeklong orientation before other St. Edward’s students arrive. Speaking in English and Spanish, administrators explain the care that the students will receive, the expectations of college academic life, and the range of support CAMP students will have.

The CAMP grant includes tuition for four years, as well as free academic tutoring, writing and reading workshops, group activities to discuss common experiences, and learning life skills and financial literacy. Because most CAMP students come from underserved schools, with constant interruptions in their education, St. Edward’s provides free, ongoing tutoring in academic subjects along with close contact among faculty, administrators, and students about students’ progress. First-year CAMP students are also required to attend regular mental health check-ins.

‘The way I was raised, with my father being in the fields all the time, my mother working all the time, at times when I did ask for help they would shut it down.’

One of the most vexing problems for new CAMP students, Briseño said, is guilt. At the very moment they are sleeping in warm beds on a college campus, waking up to a hot breakfast in the cafeteria, their parents and siblings may be sleeping on floors in rented rooms during harsh Michigan nights, waking at 4 a.m. every day to get to work.

Another challenge distinctive to CAMP students: an aversion to asking for help. This is a survival skill in the fields, where parents are overworked and exhausted and children learn early to take care of themselves. “The way I was raised, with my father being in the fields all the time, my mother working all the time, at times when I did ask for help they would shut it down,” Yamilet Banda said. At St. Edward’s, she sees non-CAMP students casually raising their hands in class with questions, or asking each other for a few dollars to cover a last-minute dash to the store. “I feel I could never do that,” she said. “I don’t want to bother anyone.”

CAMP, though, actively coaches its students to take advantage of the resources around them, Briseño said. “We talk about how it’s okay not to sleep at night, to be homesick, to worry about school, and to meet with the free mental health counselors every week if needed,” she said. Before the second semester, CAMP holds a second day-long orientation — this one simply to acquaint students with the wealth of resources available for St. Edward’s students.

Feels Like Home

When twilight approaches the St. Edward’s hilltop, the student center is mostly empty. Inside the CAMP office, though, Daniela Herbert lingers thoughtfully in front of the framed print of the summer field. She points out more and more familiar details — the truck, the boxes, the crates — pleased that a painting on her college campus so accurately reflects a part of her life that is otherwise remote.

The CAMP staff purposely honors that past, hiring upperclassmen and women CAMP students as peer counselors for the newcomers, supporting a CAMP alumni club, and making the office a haven for all four classes of students. “They like being in this office,” Briseño said. “They’re primos and primas.”

*Daniela Herbert picks up a freshly sprouted watermelon while visiting a field with her father in Mission, Texas, on March 14, 2023. Photo by Eddie Gaspar for palabra*

At the same time, CAMP actively pushes students beyond what they might have imagined for themselves. A year ago, Daniela Herbert was roaming watermelon fields with a harvesting knife in her pocket. Today, she studies business. Vince Martinez, who collapsed from the heat as a little boy in a cotton field, just returned from a CAMP-sponsored semester in England, where he studied political science.

And Yamilet Banda, who fended off taunts about her family’s work, now is a peer counselor for other CAMP students, majors in biology, and aspires to be a veterinarian. In her free time, she practices musical instruments: piano, trombone, ukulele, and guitar, which she picked up throughout elementary and high school. Music comes easily to her, she said, after years of singing with her family during the migrant season. Banda also takes time to email teachers with questions, and lounges at the CAMP office with peers who have made the same journey she has, from the fields to college classrooms. “People no longer mock,” she said. “I can very proudly say I am a migrant.”

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Sowing Success

Migrant students and their families follow the seasons year-round to sow and harvest America’s produce. The children of these families take pride in their parents’ work ethic — but struggle to continue their schooling. The 50-year-old CAMP scholarship helps hundreds of them go to college