Speech #890093745

Anger and dismay streak through the narrative written by this gifted. unusual reporter. willing to travel. live with. and work A3795 with the people he describes. The writing is well done. carrying the reader along. letting up on him periodically by suspending outraged comment long enough to supply him with a new batch of unnerving facts. By the last page one has just what the chapter is called: "a faint glimmer of hope." I would imagine that the reader will join the migrants by harvesting sympathetic despair from this candid. indignant book. Still. without questioning the worth of these boks. I wonder about their titles. and what they indicate the authors have failed to regard. Migrants are not slaves. nor do they feel gloomy and weary as a result of their toil. I have met a good number of migrants who have shunned urban unemployment and relief. chosen willingly to stay out and work -on the land. I have even met some who have left our ghettos for such a life. Why some of our rural poor remain loyal to farming and others go to the cities is an interesting and complicated problem. If we are going to call every inhabitant of the ghettoevery one of our relatively impoverished citizensa "slave." then I would not deny the migrants their place in such a categorization. Yet. frankly. I think we get nowhere using that kind of language. The word "slave" has a historical and political connotation simply not encompassed by the lives of migrant farmers. who have. if anything. an odd kind of wandering freedom. For that matter. they are not tied down to th inert peonage of relief checks. Nor are they so psychologically depressed as a group to warrant the singular mention of "despair" as their harvest. I am not being sentimental when I say that many of the migrant families I have studied showed less evidence of despaireither actual clincial depression. or a more pervasive sort of agonized dejectionthan I have seen in the uppermiddleclass clientele who find their way willingly to psychiatric offices. Rather than saddle the rurel poor with our despair. we need to learn how lives can face a near moneyless form of vagabondage and yet gather for themselves some persisting coherence. Let me be clear: poverty is no price to pay for any virtues or strengths it my unwittingly spawn.