Agricultural Laborers in the 1950s
Laborers in an agricultural work camp, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
In the 1940s and 1950s Puerto Rico who arrived in small communities in metropolitan, New York as agricultural workers. Puerto Ricans represented a large segment of the agricultural workers in the Hudson River Valley just north of the city. They earned about $5.90 a day and endured poor working and living conditions on farms. They fought for many years before they gained “the right of self-organization in unions of their own choosing, and improvements in their wage scale to allow for a decent standard of living” said Fay Bennett, executive secretary of the National Sharecroppers Fund in 1959.
