WASHINGTON — At the age of six or seven — long before she became a college chancellor — Cynthia Azari got a tough lesson in economics for migrant farm worker families such as hers.
She and her sister had just dragged a bag full of cotton that they had been picking all day to place it on the scale. A grower told them that they had only earned 85 cents for their labor. This was before, she said, child labor laws protected the children of migrant farm workers.
“That probably could buy a loaf of bread and eggs and a quart of milk, but as a child I thought: I can’t do this,’” Azari said, recounting the years when she and her family lived in small shacks picking cotton and grapes in Texas and California. “There was no way I was going to work like this for the rest of my life.”
Change began when Azari and her younger sister got involved during their high school years in Upward Bound — one of several college access programs known as TRIO programs that emerged from the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 during the War on Poverty.
“It was a great program,” Azari said Thursday, recalling the regular Upward Bound meetings where students would brush up on English and math, all the while earning stipends of $8 or so per week.
“Lunch was 35 cents a day, so that bought lunch for a whole week,” Azari said of the stipends. “And we could go to the movies on the weekend.”
