After the Bracero Program was canceled in 1964, Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz faced the problem of supplying a legal labor force that was now on the other side of the border. Pressed by the prospect of thousands of crops rotting in the fields and noting the lack of summer jobs for high-schoolers, he came up a peculiar labor initiative. In a move that stands out for its arrogance, naiveté (and pseudo-racist ethnocentrism), Wirtz launched the A-TEAM program (Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower), recruiting nearly 20,000 high school students from across the U.S. to work at the farms that required labor. One of the campaign slogans was “farm work builds men!” Although the program was focused on “jocks,” all kinds of kids applied out of which only 3,300 made it to the farms. Many of them, after just a couple of weeks on the job, complained about the working conditions, the excessive heat and the poor housing. Like their Mexican predecessors, they organized strikes. These were jobs, the farmers noted from the beginning, that nobody—or at least no U.S. citizen—wanted to do. The media was also skeptical and a Detroit Free Press editorial painted the situation in the starkest of terms: “dealing with crops which grow close to the ground requires a good deal stronger motive than money or the prospects of a good workout, like, for instance, gnawing hunger.”¹.

Needless to say, the program did not make it to its second year.

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1. Gustavo Arellano, “When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers,” NPR, August 23, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers ↩︎