When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers

Randy Carter is a member of the Director's Guild of America and has notched some significant credits during his Hollywood career. Administrative assistant on The Conversation. Part of the casting department for Apocalypse Now. Longtime first assistant director on Seinfeld. Work on The Blues Brothers, The Godfather II and more.

But the one project that Carter regrets never working on is a script he wrote that got optioned twice but was never produced. It's about the summer a then-17-year-old Carter and thousands of American teenage boys heeded the call of the federal government ... to work on farms.

The year was 1965. On Cinco de Mayo, newspapers across the country reported that Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz wanted to recruit 20,000 high schoolers to replace the hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers who had. Started in World War II, the program was anagreement between the American and Mexican governments that brought Mexican men to pick harvests across the U.S. It ended in 1964, after years of accusations by that migrants suffered wage theft and terrible working and living conditions.