Parents packed up their children and belongings and moved West. Most Nebraskans moved to California, hoping to start a new life. Each year during the s, the number of children starting first grade went down. The government census showed that about 65, people had moved out of the state of Nebraska during the "Dirty 30s. Alvin and Delbert Apetz knew farmers who couldn't make payments on their land so the bank took over their farm.
Many once-proud farmers packed up their families and moved to California hoping to find work as day laborers on huge farms. Walter Schmitt had just graduated from high school in When her husband is robbed of money borrowed to buy fireworks to sell in Acapulco, she comes north across the border with him and her young son.
Fausto Sanchez, from a large family of impoverished Oaxacan farmers, leaves his southern Mexican village to work as a migrant in the Mexican state of Sonora. When work in Sonora is slow, he joins fellow workers on a trip north of the U. At the age of nine, Beatriz Machiche begins crossing the border at San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, with her family to work in the lemon orchards in Arizona.
By age fourteen, she joins the farmworker struggle in the Coachella grape fields. All these stories are part of what has been a mass migration north, rooted in a history of colonial domination, exploitation, and racial oppression. Farming in California as we know it today has its origin in the mid—s, when U.
A white supremacist society proclaimed its right to exploit nonwhite immigrants as its Manifest Destiny. Successive waves of mainly nonwhite immigrants supplied the labor to feed this so-called California dream. It was not until the early s, after previous waves of immigrants from Asia were banned or proved inadequate, that California and Southwest growers turned decisively to Mexico.
Mexican workers first were brought north along the railroad routes built from the interior of Mexico to the U. Over time, a plundered Mexican economy became a source of colonized labor on which California agriculture has fattened itself ever since. And, it should be noted, around 80 percent of the U. Oscar Ramos, as the undocumented child of a migrant family, lived in fear of being taken away from his family who worked in Hollister and lived in a local labor camp. She [the babysitter] got put in their van.
Fausto Sanchez worked in the onion and garlic fields in the small town of Kerman. When you got up at five in the morning, you went directly to the field. Instead of crossing in front of the agents, we tried to sneak behind them, and when they saw us do that they became suspicious. They have dogs! They grabbed a few. My mom got some boxes out of our car and hid people under them. These children are losing family members all the time. There is no mass resistance to conditions in the fields at present.
But resistance in other forms continues. In , Roberto Valdez nearly lost his sixteen-year-old son to heat stroke. That same year, twelve farmworkers died from heat stroke. These are the people that nobody wants, earning their bread every day. When Maricruz Ladino is raped by a supervisor at a Salinas vegetable-packing plant, she summons the courage to denounce him.
She is fired from her job, then shunned by other employers. Still, she continued to fight. In , she was featured in a Frontline documentary, Rape in the Fields , exposing widespread sexual abuse of farmworker women. Heraclio Astete takes a job as a sheepherder to help his family in Peru. He faces desperate conditions and contracts Valley Fever, which nearly ends his life.
By , only about 25 percent of the original Dust Bowl migrants were still working the fields. As the the former migrants became more prosperous, they blended into the California population. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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