Cut To The Bone, by Michael Grabell is an interesting piece centered around the idea that big business takes advantage of the common man. In this case, Case Farms taking advantage of illegal immigrants. The context behind this piece is so much deeper too stretching back decades to really understand why these immigrants are coming here. This article invokes several questions such as does the immigration system need to be reformed? How did we get here, both with the industry and with the immigrants?…
“We are farmers! Bum bad um bum bum bum bum!” I went to interview Javier Villegas from Farmers Insurance. Javier Villegas is 36 years old from Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico. He currently lives in Wichita with his wife and daughter, also another child on the way.…
The Harvest follows three of the 400,000 plus children that work in the American fields. Each one of these children were introduced to the migrant lifestyle at a very young age. Some do not even remember how young they were when they started in the fields, like 12 year old Zulema. It was passed down to these children like their parents had it passed down to them and so on. It’s a perpetual cycle of generations, partly because it is all they know and also due to the values instilled in them.…
Bajo la Alambrada, La Soledad, No Speak English, Mi Nombre, and La Pulga, on the surface, are all stories that seem to be just personal stories of people who are of Mexican-American descent. In actuality, all these stories have at least one common theme of examining the struggle of assimilating to the American culture. These pieces of literature are all reflections of the experience that immigrants and children of immigrants have in a culture that fails to accept them or in even making an effort to try to accept them. In Bajo la Alambrada and La Soledad, Francisco and his family are living an impoverished life while working as crop pickers.…
1. FOR WHAT AUDIENCE WAS THE DOCUMENT WRITTEN? a. The audience that it was written for were for Chicanos. Chicanos advocated nationalism and sovereignty for Mexican Americans.…
He talks about how the Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino laborers and how each group was treated. They were seen as cheap labor. Steinbeck says, “foreign labor is on the wane in California, and the future farm workers are to be white and American. This fact must be recognized and a rearrangement of the attitude toward and treatment of migrant labor must be achieved” (Steinbeck, pg.57). He suggests that since migrant workers are former farmers, they should be allowed to own leased land and small communities should be built.…
Would you be happy working on a field picking grapes from sunrise to sunset for less than minimum wage, and at the same time be mistreated? Many farm workers across America lived and worked under unacceptable conditions during the twentieth century, they suffered from injustice. One of the most important hot topics in the second half of the twentieth century is the Civil Rights movements. In this research paper I will explain the significance of the United Farm Workers Association, the importance of their leader Cesar Chavez, and how it influenced people across the nation that where fighting for other types of civil rights.…
Book Review This is my review for the book From the Jaws of Victory, The Triumph and tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement was written by Matt Garcia, a Professor of Latin American, Latino, & Caribbean Studies and History at Dartmouth College. (mattgarcia.org). He is the author of two other books such as A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900–1970, and Mapping Latina/o Studies. Also, writer of many articles, including “Cesar Chavez, Flawed Hero of the Fields for the Los Angeles Times, September 25, 2012. Garcia himself has a background of field work, not necessarily himself but his grandparents from both sides.…
People in the 1930’s pointed to the drought and dust as the cause of the hardship, but dust itself did not stomp all over the migrants, kill their families and starve their children. Dust would have been an vanquishable obstacle were it not for the greed shown to the migrants by the farmers in California. Through charity and cooperation, the migrants could have overcome the obstacles they faced in California. The migrants…
Introduction- The Young Chavez in Adobe Cesar Chavez endured trials and tribulations throughout much of his youthful life. Chavez was reared up in the same small adobe hut where he was born, in which there was not much livable space for Chavez, his mother and father. As we critique here, there is a realization in taking a little and making a lot.…
For over a century, migrant farm workers have been opposed a suitable and equitable life in the fields and communities of California's agricultural valleys. Most farmers were making only ninety cents an hour, forced to drink out of the same cup, and required to pay two dollars or more per day to live in metal shacks with no plumbing or electricity in the 1960’s. Overall, farm workers, also known as braceros, labored in inhumane conditions as growers ignored the state laws regarding proper working conditions. The Bracero Program was started by the U.S. government after WWII due to labor shortages and “this program imported temporary laborers from Mexico to work in the fields”(NFWM-YAYA Staff). However, change and improvement were greatly sought.…
“Americans doubled their consumption of fresh strawberries. Last year California shipped 76 million boxes of fresh strawberries (a box, also called a flat or tray, holds a dozen pints and weighs roughly eleven and a half pounds), an all-time record” (Schlosser). According to Eric Schlosser, writer of the article “In the Strawberry Fields,” Americans have greatly increased their consumption of strawberries. But, at what cost?…
“Structural violence is manifested as social inequalities and hierarchies often along social categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality” (pg. 89) no one is understanding the illness this type of work is bringing towards people. The poor faced many health problems working to harvest strawberries Seth began to be close to the three men listening to their stories and experience of how they were injured causing a physical violence, another to have headaches and that effected the symbolic violence and the last one to have stomach pains. These people go through all the trouble because where they live is no work for them to do so the risk of traveling in hopes that is why they migrate to survive in order to work. Triqui migrants go through mental, physical and emotional suffering (page.…
Do you think it’s worth it? Working hard and only get paid only about 10-12 dollars an hour as a man of the household? In the article “A Gringo in the Lettuce Fields” by Gabriel Thompson, he talks about how hard working in the field can be and what kind of obstacles field workers deals with on their daily basis. As Thompson tries to experience working in the field he deliberately interprets how the human body reacts after working for a certain amount of time in the fields. He also discusses how much trouble a single head of a lettuce can bring to its laborer.…
This is additional evidence that helps to show how physically demanding it is to be a migrant worker. As Viramontes offers details on the physical demands of laborers, she is able to make clear her viewpoint on the harsh lives of migrant…