Bitter Harvest

Unlike the commercial networks, public television has plenty of time available for the exploration of "social" questions, and it is a charter well worth pursuing. This month the National Educational Television channels are carrying a pair of muckraking documentaries on the plight of the migrant farm worker. No Harvest for the Reaper is a chronicle of exploitation of Negro migrants on Long Island; Huelga!, a report on the 1965-67 Mexican grapepickers' strike in California. Both films contained remarkable and affecting footage, although they were more successful as polemics than TV journalism.

The Long Island story begins in Arkansas where a crew chief, himself a Negro, recruits his workers ("All you've got to do is get on my bus"). He barely mentions the $30 fare that begins the treadmill of debt. Sometimes, in picking strawberries at 10-c- per quart, the migrants earn only $2 for their day's work. But the crew chief deducts $1.25 a day for transportation to the fields. He also overcharges them for their filthy accommodations, for their food (a concession controlled by his wife), and the 51-c--a-pint payday wine that he sells for $1. As a result, at the end of the Long Island harvest, the migrant will have no choice but to bus along with the crew to the next stop: Florida. And then back to Long Island --perhaps for a lifetime of latter-day slavery.

Marble Fire. In Huelga! (Spanish for strike), the main grievance is union recognition. Pickets line the vineyards and through loud-hailers plead to the scabs, also Mexicans. "Are you going to sell out your race?" Another stirring scene shows the migrants' demonstration march, behind union flags, to Sacramento. Curiously, though, there is not even a mention of the violence that occurred mid-strike, when the workers fired marbles with slingshots and the farmers retaliated by dusting them with insecticides.

The probable explanation for the omission is that there was no film available of those battles, and such was the deficiency of both NET documentaries. The producers were so smitten with their own camerawork in the fields and labor camps that they did not provide perspective on the problem--whether its cause lies in the economics of the industry, lack of unionization, inadequacy of the laws or failure to enforce them, or perhaps a combination of these factors. As a result, the exposes were neither as searing or as illuminating as Edward R. Murrow's 1960 CBS documentary on migrant workers, Harvest of Shame. But both of NET's programs proved, as one of the films concluded, that "the migrant condition is still the shame of the nation."

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