Attorney who fought for farm worker rights in Valley pens memoir

17 hours ago 14

For anyone who has familiarized themselves with the fight for Civil Rights for farm workers throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the name Jim Harrington is one that is often repeated as a central force for change, and a thorn in the side for many who stood in his way.

Harrington is no stranger to taking on Goliath in the courtroom through his work as an attorney with the American Civil Rights Union, founding Oficina Legal del Pueblo Unido and the Texas Civil Rights Project, as well as serving as Cesar Chavez’s attorney for 18 years.

With the United Farm Workers, Harrington successfully earned workers’ compensation for farm workers who are injured while on the job; he also earned unemployment compensation for workers when the harvest season ended; and he secured the right to know about pesticides used while working the fields.

At 78 years old now and living in Austin, Harrington has taken to penning his memoirs for a book that is anticipated to be published in September through the University of Texas Press.

Harrington said that he originally wanted to title his book, “Being A Badass: The Texas Civil Rights Project,” but instead had to settle for “The Texas Civil Rights Project: How We Built a Social Justice Movement.”

“It sort of runs the gamut of my nearly 50 years as a lawyer,” Harrington said about his book, which will include stories from his time working in the Rio Grande Valley.

Harrington recalled working with farm workers in the summertime while growing up in Michigan.

“The area I worked in, which was the southwest corner of Michigan, had 25,000 to 30,000 migrants that came in to harvest crops, berries principally, and they were all from the Valley,” he recalled. “So I was intent at some point when I finished school to get involved in the farm worker movement.”

Harrington initially joined a seminary with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest, but with the labor movement heating up, he said that he had a calling of a different sort.

“During that period of time, I began to see that that wasn’t going to be the place for what I wanted to do,” he said. “I had always been interested in social justice, and the Church was obviously going to be too confining.”

While at the seminary, he was randomly assigned a course on the Spanish language — a fateful decision that seemingly steered his career in a new direction.

“Opportunities opened up during the summer to do work with migrants with the church,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Man, you know, I can do something good and I could use my Spanish.’ That’s how I got involved. It turned out to be a perfect social justice issue. And it turned out that just that quirk of fate being assigned randomly to Spanish changed my life.”

He left the seminary and began studying philosophy with plans to move to the Rio Grande Valley and teach the subject while pursuing activism.

“Saturday mornings, I used to get up every morning and watch ‘Underdog,’” he recalled. “And I set up one Saturday morning, just sat straight up and said, ‘No, you need to be a lawyer.’ And so then I went to law school. Just like that. Kind of the story of my life, actually.”

Harrington hopes to share that story with readers and younger people who want to become active in their communities. He said that he hopes that his book will engender respect for those “badasses” who fought to bring change to the Rio Grande Valley like Mia Gomez, Genoveva Puga and Juanita Valdez-Cox.

“My last chapter in the book is a discussion I have with Juanita about the change that has gone on in nonprofits, that they’re not on the ground in the way that we used to be and that people think they can do social media and work from home and still be part of the movement,” Harrington said.

“The movement happens because people come to see you about stuff that’s going on,” he continued. “They don’t come to see you because, ‘Hey, we got 20 people ready to do this.’ They come to see you because there’s something going on in their lives. And then when you work with that and understand that, and find out there are other people that you get involved in that. So I think that’s a general critique that is shared by people in my generation.”

He said that he and his contemporaries are cognizant and appreciative of those who are following in their footsteps to bring change to their communities. He said that he hopes that his book will serve as inspiration for others to come together and continue the work that they devoted their lives to.

“All this was a lot of fun,” he said. “It was awfully hard work, but the stories that we have to tell, some of which I put in the memoir, are really, really good.”