In “A Gringo in the Lettuce Fields,” Gabriel Thompson spends about two months cutting lettuce in the hot fields of Yuma alongside immigrants laborers. At first glimpse, the immigrants thought he was either crazy or an undercover immigration agent ready to deport them back to their home country. But within a few days just outside Watsonville, Thompson got to know some immigrants and sensed the backbreaking, harsh conditions work of these immigrant laborers. He would then get physically drained, and never became good enough to keep up with the machine that puts along with the rows of lettuce driving the pace of the crews. Thompson, in the end, shines a bright light on the underside of the economy, exposing injustices endured by low-paid laborers
In the article "In the Strawberry Fields", Eric Schlosser uses an abundance of rhetorical strategies to influence the audience. "In the Strawberry Fields" is honest and gets to the point of the illegal immigrants working. His in depth description of the migratory workforce in California proves how farmers who pick strawberries for a living are the lowest-paid, and hardest working, which makes it an unfavorable job amongst farmers. The author uses eloquent details to get the message across that California has also become one of the most dependent states to have the availability of cheap labor. He descriptively details the backbreaking work migrants perform and the financial unsteadiness to make readers aware of their hardships and motivate a
The documentary film “The Harvest/La Cosecha” is based on migrant agricultural child labor. In some countries, children work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. One of those countries is the United States of America. Every year there are more than 400,000 American children who are torn away from, their friends, schools and homes to pick the food we all eat. The film has three main characters being Victor who is a 16-year- old boy, and two girls who are Zulema (age 12) and Perla (age 14).Out of those 400,000, three of them are Victor, Zulema, and Perla.
The McFarland community is widely made up of poor farmers who pick fields day and night in extreme weather conditions for minimum wage. Further, the runners also help their parents pick crops from a young age while also attending school. Coach White is astonished when he comes to know that they do not pay the farmers “by the hour. [They] get paid by the field.” (McFarland USA).
Jessie Lopez De La Cruz. “The Women Have to Be Involved” The farmworkers ' movement was established in the 1960s which are still present was founded César E. Chávez. It 's National Association, the United Farm Workers, looks for congressional enactment to ensure reasonable wages and treatment of undocumented specialists. Cesar Chavez may have driven the La Causa movement (Farm Work Union), however, it was because of the tirelessness of supporters like Jessie Lopez de la Cruz that the cause got national consideration and impacted work laws.
Jacob Riis’ photo, Five Cents Lodging, Bayard Street (1889), expresses a moral environmentalist approach similar to that of Van Hoffman because of its cluttered and humanizing elements that display the tired and sleeping faces in a dull, crowded, and unclean lodging room. The first thing that comes to the forefront is the scenery. The crowded and dirty room distracts people from the people who are actually living in it. The viewer is immediately distracted and displeased with these elements. Riis uses this tool to create a visceral reaction of disgust with the living conditions of the lodging.
During the 1930’s thousands of Dust Bowl migrant workers made their way from the central plain into California seeking work. In their search for work and some form of income many of the migrants and their families ended up in Hoovervilles, which were makeshift roadside camps that were greatly impoverished. Steinbeck was able to travel through the labor camps and recorded the horrible living conditions of the migrant workers. The collection of these recordings was published as Harvest Gypsies. During the tours of the labor camps he saw the oppression of the workers first hand in addition to workers being demoralized by wealthy land owners.
During 1942-1964 many Mexican immigrants were “given” the “opportunity” to enter the United States in order to labor and help the United States economic industry. For many immigrants the bordering country was seen as an exceptional place that offered great opportunities but at the same time many family difficulties. The Bracero Program during the 20th century for many Mexicans was seen as an exceptional deal that offered immigrants and infinite amount of opportunities to succeed; however, in Ejemplar y sin igual we realize that the Bracero Program in reality was not the “exceptional program” everyone thought. In Ejemplar y sin igual, Elizabeth Rosas mentions that “an entire generation of children experienced uniquely difficult childhoods because
The life of immigrants living on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s early 1900s was tough. Coming to a new country itself is difficult. Immigrants didn’t have much to begin with. Most of them had jobs that allow them to barely live. Anzia Yezierska’s short story “The Lost ’Beautifulness’” depicts the immigration experience.
In the short story “ The Circuit” by Francisco Jimenez, the lifestyle of a migrant worker is portrayed as discouraging. Migrant workers have to move often. After a long day of picking strawberries, Panchito returns home to find that “Everything [he] owned was neatly packed in cardboard boxes.” he “suddenly felt even more the weight of hours, days, weeks, and months of work.” (1) Moving often is discouraging because everything that you have built at your current location is taken away.
Plantation life in hawaii during the 1800’s was terrible, people were not paid much fo their backbreaking labor, put into small, unsanitary homes, and were racially discriminated. Plantation life in Hawaii in the 1800’s was very hard for the immigrant workers. Living conditions were very squalid, unsanitary, and too small for the amount of people residing inside, Working conditions were backbreaking and people were given a very small salary, and the Race discrimination was terrible, the whites and Portuguese had the best jobs and the Asians had the worst. Firstly, living conditions were terrible.
The Dust Bowl, beginning in the 1930s, added to the struggle of American farmers as lands out west in states such as Oklahoma and Kansas were over-plowed, causing the topsoil to become uprooted, creating massive dust storms. These dust storms left the land unusable to farm, displacing many Americans in the agricultural industry. Steinbeck’s The Harvest Gypsies displays the struggles these farmers faced when moving west to California, hoping to find some sort of work. Many displaced farmers lived in squatters’ camps, temporary dwellings for those looking for work. Steinbeck described these camps as having awful living conditions, saying that “From a distance it looks like a city dump, and well it may, for the city dumps are the sources for the material of which it is built.”
When America was built, its character and identity was established by The Declaration of Independence, providing its citizens equality, liberty, and equal opportunity. The premise of the composition of USA became known as the American Dream, with the aspiration that one’s achievement is not constrained by his/her social class or fortune but is determined by endeavor. This delusion of harmony was greatly contradicted by two novels: The Crucible and The Grapes of Wrath. In The Crucible, under constant hallucination of evil and corruptness, people for their own greediness began making false accusations on each other.
He was a grape farmer working from 6 am to 7 pm almost more than 13-hours a day his salary was $2.56 an hour from that salary he had to support his family that was still living in Yemen. Many migrant farm workers who pick these fruits travel across the country and cross borders to fill the agriculture jobs in the U.S that U.S citizens are not willing to take. (McKenzie, 2015). Agriculture jobs is not an easy job, but these migrant farmworkers are willing to fill these physical exhausting jobs because of the economic hardship, and the lack of jobs in the there country, therefore, courtiers that have these immigrant farmworkers should recognize immigrants for their hard work.
Although I would have valued to get the prospective of the day laborers themselves, I settled and got the perspective of an employer. I was perplexed when speaking to colleagues and friends, to discover how many have employed day laborers for their households and privately owned businesses. One friend in particular recollected one of his more recent experiences. He arrived at a pick up stop before seven o’clock in the morning. It is his belief that the good workers are selected early in the day, and those who remain were not equipped for the job.
