TO WRITE his first books about Florida, my dad, Patrick Smith, did a lot of what he called “physical research,” which took him out of his comfortable, air-conditioned existence and into the heart of South Florida.
Although he had driven by them many times, Smith had never been in a migrant labor camp when one day he read an article about labor contractors abusing migrant workers. His penchant for taking up the cause of the underdog stirred him to research this situation, which led to action. He got himself some worn-out old clothes and boots and headed down south, passing himself off as a migrant worker.
He joined the workers picking cucumbers and tomatoes in the sweltering Florida heat. He stayed with them in non–air conditioned and often filthy camps, ate the food provided to them, rode the buses to the fields, and took his meager paycheck for the back-breaking work. No easy task for a middle-aged man unaccustomed to hard physical work, but it was necessary to tell this story.
After two years of research, his novel Angel City was finished. Smith starts his story with the Teeter family, who had failed as farmers in West Virginia and packed up their spare belongings to seek a better life in Florida running a vegetable stand. Instead, they find themselves duped into signing on with a migrant labor camp and, basically, imprisoned. Things do not go well. They eventually find that in order to save themselves and get free, they must take matters into their own hands.
Angel City was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and was made into a CBS Movie of the Week in 1980. After it was shown, it caused such an uproar that laws were passed to prevent unscrupulous labor contractors from taking advantage of workers. Knowing that Dad’s work helped this cause gives me a lot of pride. In many ways, his work is still continuing. The story isn’t a happy one. Many people have told me that it brought back some tough memories of their own childhood in the Florida fields. While it evokes the harshness of working in the fields, it will also arouse sympathy for the struggles of migrant farmworkers.
Patrick D. Smith Jr., Fall 2020