Ruben Lemos: From Migrant Farm Work to Hanford and a Scholarship Program

Many people in Washington's Tri-Cities have family stories of migration, hard work and devotion to family and community, and the stories of Latinas and Latinos are no exception. The National Park Service's Hanford Latinx Experiences oral histories, part of Manhattan Project National Historical Park, record some of the Latinas and Latinos who contributed to the Manhattan Project, Hanford and the Tri-Cities. Ruben Lemos was interviewed by Drew Gamboa on August 13, 2024; his recollections are paraphrased here.

Following the harvests

Lemos's family came north from Edinburg, Texas: his parents and, by his count, nine people in their household, traveling with his uncle's family in one car. In the days before interstate highways, the trip on two-lane roads took them more than three weeks.

From 1951 until 1961, the family followed the crops. A typical year began cutting asparagus in Washington, then picking strawberries in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle, raspberries and cherries around Puyallup, cucumbers and green beans in Oregon, and potatoes back in the Yakima Valley. The children would start school, attend for two or three weeks, and move on to Idaho and beyond; the family's work took them as far as California and Arizona.

The work was hard. Before potato-digging machines, pickers wore a belt hung with sacks, bent over the rows and filled each sack to about 60 or 70 pounds, earning six cents a sack; a picker might fill 200 or 250 in a day. In Arizona, where machines picked cotton inefficiently, the family gathered the cotton left on the ground, dragging long sacks down the rows and earning three dollars for every hundred pounds. From first grade through his senior year of high school, Lemos cut asparagus for two hours or more before school — seven days a week in season, because asparagus never stops growing. He remembered dozing off in a warm history class in late May after weeks of dawn harvests, and a teacher throwing an eraser to wake him.

A path through education

When the family stopped migrating, Lemos worked in canneries and on farms. As he was graduating, a counselor told him he was not college material but arranged a scholarship to a beauty college in Yakima. After beauty school he was drafted. On leaving the military in 1968, he learned he could be discharged early to start college, and with his wife's encouragement enrolled at Columbia Basin College in Pasco. Both worked full time while earning their associate degrees in two years. He went on to a bachelor's degree through Central Washington University, which offered classes in Yakima, and later studied at Washington State University.

Hanford

Lemos joined the Department of Energy at Hanford in 1977, recruiting for professional positions. He moved to the Washington Public Power Supply System, which was hiring rapidly, and there worked mainly on affirmative action: investigating employees' complaints of discrimination based on sex, minority status or disability, advising managers how to correct problems, and helping resolve workplace conflicts. When the Supply System abruptly began layoffs, his former Department of Energy supervisor created a position for him to return. That work was later contracted to Boeing Computer Services, and he also worked at Westinghouse, where he again investigated discrimination cases. His Hanford career ran from 1977 to 1988.

A growing community

When Lemos and his wife moved to the Tri-Cities in 1968, there were few Mexicano and Latino families — perhaps five or six in Pasco, he recalled. Today Latinos are the majority there.

The Hispanic Academic Achievement Program

Inspired after attending an African American association's annual dinner, Lemos and his wife decided the Latino community needed a way to recognize and motivate its students. In 1990 they started the Hispanic Academic Achievement Program (HAAP), honoring Hispanic students from fourth through twelfth grade with a GPA of 3.0 or higher. Within a few years they were raising money from major local employers for scholarships, first of $750 to $1,500 and later much larger — awards that younger students saw and set their sights on. HAAP has now offered scholarships to Tri-Cities students for more than thirty years.

His advice to young people, drawn from his own life, is that education is the way forward: no matter how poor you are or what crops you pick, find a way to get an education — for instance through employers that sponsor training for nurses or teachers.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Latinx Experiences at Hanford: Ruben Lemos," Hanford Latinx Experiences oral histories: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/latinx-experiences-at-hanford_ruben-lemos.htm
• Lemos's interview is paraphrased rather than quoted.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.