Idaho Migrant Council Inc.
Humberto Fuentes, Executive Director
Maria Salazar, Jobs Training Program Director
Tim Lopez, Housing Program Director
104 N. Kimball St.
Caldwell, Idaho 83606
208-454-1652

Idaho boosters were pleased and proud on Friday, July 23, when the top story on the front page of the Idaho Statesman trumpeted the good news: IDAHO PERSONAL INCOME SHOOTS UP.

"Idaho ranked third in the nation in total personal income growth between the first quarters of 1991 and 1993," Reporter Paul Beebe wrote, "pointing up again that it has one of the healthiest economies in the United States. The newspaper quoted a current report from the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, revealing that average annual income in the state soared 7.2 percent a year during the period, nearly doublint the national average of 4.6 percent. The state's payroll growth rate ranked third in the nation in manufacturing payroll growth, fourth in construction payroll, fourth in service wages and first in local and state government payrolls.

This actually IS good news, of course.

But glaringly left out of the glowing income statistics -- and the Statesman's coverage -- were the thousands of migrant workers who reach the fertile potato, sugar beet and fruit growing fields of Idaho's Snake River Valley. While the efforts of organizations like the Idaho Migrant Council have made a real difference in some of the worst labor camps and exploitative situations that farm laborers once found on this northern end of the western migrant stream, the region's Hispanic community, migrant and permanent residents alike, remains poorly paid, poorly housed and poorly educated by a public-school system that seems incapable or unwilling to alter a high-school dropout rate that's in excess of 50 percent.

For well over 20 years now, under the charismatic leadership of Humberto Fuentes, the Idaho Migrant Council has been trying to do something about that.

Fuentes, himself the child of a migrant farmworker family, started working his way up the migrant stream from South Texas to Idaho with his family as far back as 1952. After military service, he went to Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario, Ore. (adjacent to the Southwestern Idaho orchards) and then became a minority recruiter for the community college. Inspired by Cesar Chavez, however, he and three other Hispanic organizers were fired when their militant organizing efforts prompted political pressure on college officials. They responded, with the help of the San Francisco-based Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, by suing the college, arguing that it failed to follow federal Office of Economic Oppurtunity regulations requiring client control of the Farmworker Policy Board that oversaw its use of OEO funds to run migrant-related education and vocational-training programs. The group won the battle, Fuentes says, but lost the war when it achieved victory in court only to see the college abolish the programs. But then the group went on to win the OEO's funding in its effort to start an independent, client-controlled organization, which became the Idaho Migrant Council in 1971.

Since that time, it has grown into a powerful, effective organization operating dozens of programs, with a year-round staff of 70 that swells to 300 while its Summer Head Start Program is under way in Idaho, Western Montana and Western Wyoming, and an annual operating budget of $6 million. Despite political and financial reverses, most notably the harsh cuts of the Reagan years that saw, for example, five functioning public-health clinics flatly abolished because of lack of funds, the organization has continued to receive federal support from the old OEO, later replaced by the Office of Community Services and now the Job Training Partnership Act.

Among its many activities in addition to Head Start, some of the most visible include: