Erika Janik:
Antonio Saldaña began working in the fields with his family as a migrant worker when he was four years old. He tells us about his childhood and becoming the first in his family to graduate high school and then college in Green Bay.

Antonio Saldaña:
I started working as a migrant worker at the age of four. Everybody had to work, not just mom and dad. Everybody, if you could walk and talk, you were expected to work. The family had been coming to Oconto since the ’30s and ’40s. We were just there from the middle of July until the first week, second week of September, and then the cucumber harvest would finish, and then you would go to the next state for harvesting another crop. You went to school there in each city that you were at, so you were never there more than 2/3/4, weeks. So you didn’t make a whole lot of friends because the language barrier. Because although we were born, like I was born in Oconto, we were only around the migrant workers so we could understand English and speak it, but it was very limited. 

I was doing better academically, and the teachers took a, you know, an interest in what I had to say. So school was a lot of fun, but then a month before school was out, the students never understood why then I’d be gone, because then I would have to hop on the Greyhound, and you’re scared, you’re 14, so you get on the bus, and you’re on that bus for about two days, and then you travel all the way to Torrington, Wyoming, where you’re going to hoe beets. The sun was not our friend, he was our enemy. And I used to just look up at the sun and think, oh my gosh, I hate the sun. It is so hot, you know, but we loved the rain. If it rained, you didn’t have to work, but then there was nothing to do. 

There was 14 of us. Our shack was only between 24 and 25 feet long, and about 14-16, feet wide. You know the joke, it’s so small I have to go outside to change my mind. That’s about the way it was. 

Well, I always knew I didn’t know anything about education, because my dad had zero education, my mom only had a fifth grade education. But somehow, like in my mind, I knew this isn’t what I want to do, and there’s a way out, out of all the Saldañas and we’ve been here, I am a fourth generation, and I was the first one to graduate from high school. 

You know, as a school teacher, I just tried telling my students, they go, this is this subject that I teach. Spanish might not seem important to you, but if you don’t like the situation that you’re in, education can do this for you. So that the kids want a lot of the kids have the same dreams that I had, but there’s a lot of the children that do that that are trying to get out. But how can you, how can you have dreams when you can’t even dream? When that son’s beating you? When there’s not enough to eat? How can you have dreams? We are not an invisible people. If you went back to the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s and early ’70s, there was anywhere from 1,400 to 1,600 families at one time, in Oconto, in Neenah, all those places. We were a part of that economical system, and there’s nothing there to remember us.

Erika Janik:
Antonio Saldaña is a Spanish teacher in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Wisconsin Life is a co-production of Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Public Television, in partnership with the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Additional support comes from Lowell and Mary Peterson of Appleton. Find more Wisconsin Life on our website, wisconsinlife.org and on Facebook. I’m Erika Janik.