MOSES LAKE – It was a cloudy Wednesday afternoon as Lupe Reyna, 83, stared at an old gray building with boarded-off entrances – once a store for migrant workers.
Hidden by trees and shrubs alongside the highway, many usually drive by the building. But not Reyna.
For him, it was a place that shaped much of his teenage years while he worked in the nearby sugar beet fields.
“This is where I met my wife. The minute I saw her, it was over for me,” Reyna said.
Reyna, then 15 years old, migrated from Mathis, Texas, to Moses Lake in 1957 with his sister and her husband after local farmers were contacting people in Texas to work at the sugar plant. The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, based in Salt Lake City, built a plant in 1953 in Moses Lake and processed sugar beets grown throughout the Columbia Basin, Pasco, Ellensburg, Walla Walla and Umatilla, Oregon.
The plant was the largest sugar processing plant in the country and relied heavily on labor provided by Japanese American and Hispanic American workers.
“We’d be on the fields from early spring to late November, and after the season was over, everybody would go back to Texas,” Reyna said. “But the reason we stayed was because my brother-in-law managed to get a job on the railroad, so we didn’t have to migrate back.”
Reyna, who lived at the migrant labor camp just down the road to the sugar refinery plant, located on Wheeler Road, said he would wake up early in the morning to head to the fields before it would get too hot, and he wouldn’t leave until late in the afternoons.
Much of the work entailed cutting, hosing, thinning and cleaning the weeds away. That’s why they needed a large migration to the area, he said. When harvest season arrived, usually around November, they used beet-topping knives to hook and lift the beets, then slice off the leaves with the blade.
“Back then, we didn’t have the technology we have now; as far as weed control, you know, we didn’t have chemicals back then, so it was all manual labor,” Reyna said.
Even now, he said he remembers the smell of the chemicals from the pesticide spray.
“I’m lucky I never got sick,” Reyna said.
For 20 years, he endured hard labor at the sugar plant and the $1 hourly wages. At some point, wages went up by a quarter, which was a game changer for them, he said.
“Even when they went up to $1 we thought, ‘Boy, that’s great,’” Reyna said.
More than 800 farmers were growing 33,000 acres of sugar beets with an average yield of 800,000 tons by 1967, according to the Moses Lake Museum and Art Center.
But by 1979, a combination of falling sugar prices and increasing competition overseas led to the decline of the sugar industry, forcing the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company out of business. More than 50,000 acres of sugar beets were being grown in the basin at this point. About 450 workers from the Moses Lake and Toppenish plants were laid off.
Reyna said farmers had to find new crops to grow – that’s when he began working in the potato fields.
“It’s pretty much the same, except different crops. You have to plant the potatoes, the seed, grow it, thin it, and keep the weeds away,” Reyna said.
He said tumbleweeds are “good friends” of the potatoes and can be hard to separate from the starchy vegetable.
“We didn’t want to hurt the potato plant, so it was required to pull it by hand,” Reyna said.
Over the years that he worked in the sugar beet and potato fields, Reyna said none of the migrant workers were provided with goggles or gloves for protection, despite the daily exposure to chemicals. If they wanted any, they had to bring their own.
This problem persists today. A 2025 report by the Washington State Institute of Public Policy found that fewer than half of domestic farmworkers handling pesticides receive protective gear at least half the time and only one in three have regular access to it.
“We didn’t know any better. There’s nothing we could do. It was either you want to work or do you want to go home?” Reyna said. “People had to work; I had to work to support my family.”
‘Good old days’
Not all of the work was bad, Reyna said.
He still drives out to where the old migrant labor camps used to be, remembering the good parts of his younger years in the fields. Just by standing there and looking at the new houses, he said, he can picture the fire hall manager pulling out the truck and gathering migrant workers to fight wildfires.
He and his friends would run out of their homes hoping to be picked, knowing the manager would only take five volunteers.
When the fire hall wasn’t being used, he said families would be able to use it for special occasions. Couples would get married, others would be having baptisms for their kids and families, and neighbors would celebrate each other’s birthdays.
During their days off, Reyna said, sugar beet workers from various migrant labor camps in Moses Lake gathered to play baseball. His team wasn’t very good, he admitted, and often drew teasing from the others – but they always gave their best effort.
“Those were the good old days,” Reyna chuckled.
The most important moment for him, though, was when he met his wife. Reyna was on the school bus when two girls mentioned they had an older sister who didn’t go to school.
“I says, ‘Oh, really? She don’t go to school. How come she don’t go to school? I would like to meet her,’ ” Reyna recalled of his future wife, who was already working full time in the fields herself.
They met at the store – now a gray old building with wood boarding off the entrances – located at the migrant labor camp. Not long after, he dropped out of school, got married and had his first kid of 10 .
He said his wife died earlier this year, and she often accompanied him on drives out to the migrant labor camps.
Christi Malsam, Reyna’s oldest daughter, said she loved watching her parents’ relationship growing up.
“It’s been hard this year,” Malsam said. “They bonded from their love for Texas and to be up here together and so far away from the world that they used to know and working hard.”
She also remembers her dad constantly playing pranks on people, which, she joked, could be annoying.
“My mom would get so mad at him,” Malsam said, laughing.
But her parents were serious about one thing, Malsam said, and that was education. Even though the kids spent their summers working long hours in the fields, dropping out of school was never an option.
She remembers one of her mom’s cousins from Oregon visiting and suggesting that the family could earn a lot more money if she and her siblings worked full time in the fields instead of going to school.
Her mom immediately turned down the idea.
“I think it was such a good experience to really reinforce how important an education was going to be for me,” said Malsam, who graduated from Eastern Washington University with degrees in science and nursing.
The same goals Reyna and his wife had for their children eventually inspired him to go back to school.
“I told the kids, ‘You guys are always complaining about school. You can make it,’ ” Reyna said. “They go, ‘Yeah, but you never went to school.’ ”
Reyna explained that his mother died shortly after giving birth to him, and his father died when he was a teenager. His older sister became his guardian, but she already had children of her own and couldn’t afford to take care of him.
“She had her own kids, so I went to work,” he said.
Thirty years ago, Reyna decided to finish what he had started. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, after beginning work in the fields at dawn, he’d leave at 6 p.m. to take night classes at Big Bend Community College, working toward his GED.
“They’re real good programs, real good teachers. They put up with me, and they helped me,” Reyna said. “It can be done.”
Even though he got his GED, he continued working in the fields until he retired at the age of 65. The demand, he said, was the reason he kept working long hours in the potato industry.
Beyond his work in agriculture, Reyna said he spent eight years in pastoral ministry, focusing on kids who were struggling in school or on the verge of getting expelled. His experiences in the fields and his own journey with education made him a passionate advocate for learning and opportunity.
“I’m for education because I didn’t have it,” Reyna said.
After saying this was his first visit to the migrant labor camp in a while, Reyna got in the car and pointed toward the old sugar factory in Moses Lake, nearly blending into the gray sky.
The grass around it was sparse, and a fence now surrounded the once-thriving plant.
Slowly, the building faded into the distance – a faint shape on the horizon.
“There’s a lot of memories here,” Reyna said.
