ustxtxb_obs_1980_08_08_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

13 SERVER By Rod Davis Hereford The odor of the onions drifts up from packing sheds and the broad High Plains fields and hangs in the air all day, simmering with a maddening sweetness. It completely covers Hereford, a West Texas town of about 15,000 squeezed up beside a Santa Fe rail line and busting over with the busiwork of agriculture. Semi-trailer trucks clog Highway 60 beside the railroad tracks, grain elevators rise up next to the tin packing sheds like skyscrapers, the houses on the acceptable side of the tracks seem tidy and prosperous and outside the town the fields are full of corn, sugar beets, cotton, soybeans, fat feedlot cattle, and onions. The onions have changed Hereford. They have changed the High Plains. As the area became an agricultural oasis after World War II, sucking up water from the underground aquifers to nourish the onions and the other vegetable crops, a northward migration of thousands of Mexicans and MexicanAmericans gradually pumped 60,000 Hispanics into the High Plains. Their purpose was always precise: harvest the crops, don’t made trouble. Every season the Hispanic workers have eulfilled this function. They have stooped in the hot fields 10-12 hours at a stretch picking up the onions or beets or potatoes or cucumbers and have lived in the barrio labor camps where rats should not be housed and they have lost their bladders because they could not urinate in the fields. They have been faithful. They have been very, very poor. They have worked as individual laborers at the whim of some of Texas’ largest corporations. They have been serfs. As of June 24, 1980, those days were over. In a series of wildcat strikes among the 8,000 acres of summer onions being Draft Protest Begins . . Mutscher Fading . . . Anderson Is On . . Sacking SALT II . . . Coup at A&M … The Death of Henry Miller INSID