In 1928, nine-year-old Teresa leaves everything she knows in San Antonio—including her beloved cat Diamante—and boards a train bound for Michigan, where her parents have found work in the vast sugar beet fields of Saginaw. The long train north is a source of fascination, but stepping into Michigan feels like entering a different world—the cold wind, the strange houses, and the long days helping on the farm instead of going to school. Teresa cares for her little sisters while her parents tend to the sugar beets. She learns to navigate a life shaped by hard work, migration, and constant change. After the harvest, a new season begins, and the whole family must pack up and make the long trip back to Texas, to plant new roots. Based on the stories the author’s grandparents told her about their lives as Texas migrants in Michigan’s Thumb, My Sugar Beet Summer pulls the reader into Teresa and her family’s life in a new land, on a sugar beet farm on the eve of the Great Depression.

Rachael E. Moreno visited many farmworker camps growing up, and she joined her grandparents as they harvested crops on Michigan vegetable and fruit farms. She is fluent in Spanish and English and learned the music and stories of the farmworkers around campfires. She graduated from Central Michigan University, where she was a Ford fellow, and earned a master’s from the University as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow. Rachael’s career in education included teaching all of the elementary grades and becoming the first Mexican American principal in Michigan. She was also appointed associate superintendent for instruction at Genesee Intermediate School District, consultant at the Michigan Education Association, migrant program director for the State of Michigan, board member at Central Michigan University, including president of the board. She operates a farm in Shiawassee County in her retirement.