I have lived in Florida so far all 26 years of my young life. It is hard to hear some days about these stories, and yet other days when my own life gets hectic and I focus on my own problems then it gets easy to forget. So much of this is happening right by me, I went to college in Tampa, Florida, in Hillsborough County, and in Hillsborough county there is also one of the Taco Bell farms that employs many, many workers. I currently live in Jacksonville, Florida, and there are farms around here as well but people can live their day to day lives not even knowing about it. Thanks for reminding me not to forget my neighbors.

Every time I buy any produce I always acknowledge who picked the fruit and say a quiet prayer for them. Unlike those idiotic orange grower commercials where the gabacho owners peddle their OJ through the juice section to the white housewives which never shows the real pickers. I guess they aren't photogenic enough.

Malicia, it is easy to forget about them, isn't it? I live in an area of upstate NY where we just never see migrant farm workers. Up north, they work picking apples, but around here, agriculture is on a small family farm-scale, and if any do employ migrant laborers, we don't see them. The construction and kitchen workers tend to be invisible, too, unless you think to look for them.
Ten years ago, I visited California with my Dad. As we drove south from San Francisco to Monterrey, we had the ocean on our right, and farm fields to our left. I could not take my eyes off the fields. They were full of people, brown skinned people bent down picking the produce. Every so often, there was a port-o-potty out on a little oasis in the field. It looked like slavery to me. I had never seen anything like it.
In the hotel, I couldn't stop talking about all the "Mexicans" serving our food, changing our linens, tending the pool. My father said sadly, "Out here they have a built-in servant class." He had seen the same thing in Singapore, where the indigenous Malaysians are that country's Mexicans. Like Nezua said a little while ago in one of his posts about YearlyKos, I was so distracted by all the brown people working around me, I couldn't even care about the luxuries they were providing.
Having just returned from 3 month's work in Mexico, I kept thinking about the friends I had made there, the quiet mothers and the proud young men wanting to go north, and I couldn't imagine those I knew working like slaves for "my" people.
Awareness is the first step toward change, Malicia. That trip to California was just one of many seemingly unrelated events that, over the course of years, dawned in me an increasing awareness. The only thing I regret is that it took so long. But once aware, anyone can do little things, or big things, to bring about change.
Awareness->curiosity->research->even more awareness->disbelief,dismay,anger,rage->ACTION.
David - I've seen that commercial a million times, and never even thought of that glaring omission! See, the awareness just keeps coming..

"Like Nezua said a little while ago in one of his posts about YearlyKos, I was so distracted by all the brown people working around me, I couldn't even care about the luxuries they were providing."
Just to clarify, by "distracted" I did not mean annoyed by their presence, of course. I meant it in the same way I think Nezua meant it in his post - intense interest, and a kind of love that changes our lives.

of course.

and...distracted as in "how can i sit here and be part of this dynamic?"

Nez:

This makes me so fucking proud to be pink, you just can't imagine!!

I was just home (Omaha, NE) for my neice's wedding--she married a really, really big dude named Dom Arias--did I mention he was, like, NFL big? Anyway, his family is, like, the strangest bunch of Irish folks I've ever seen, such dark eyes, and hair and, ummm, skin. I wonder if they're really Irish at all. My sister's daughter has some children that are decidedly different than all of my blond neices and nephews and her brother's beautiful girlfriend is also sort of puzzling to me. One of my other brother's kids has a husband whose name is Salazar--I think that might be Norwegian or Polish, maybe.

Anyway--I'm glad to be very notbrown and smarter and harder working (well, I would be if I had a job, anyway) than all of those lazy, shiftless people who after spending their whole day outside, enjoying nature, can't be bothered to lift themselves up by putting their little ones in nightcare so's they can get themselves an education in some field that will allow them to makes a pile of money (a smaller pile, to be sure) like their white benefactors do.

Peel me a grape.

Nez;

I have to laugh or I just cry.

"She died while working picking tomatoes on a farm in Virginia, shortly after being fired from a janitorial job for trying to establish a union."

She died while doing something good. So many others can't say the same.

Rest in peace, Eli.

Thank you for all the light you brought to this dark world.

The reason I cannot stand teaching Spanish classes is that many Whiteman students say they are there "because we are being invaded by Mexicans." Once they have said this I have trouble staying in the room.

Eli played by all the rules: she was always on time, always positive, and always the hardest worker on the line...She talked about her sons often: one excelled in math; one volunteered at his church in Port-au-Prince, one was on his way to college, one had found a job in Canada...It's hard to get the care one needs without health insurance...

Eli.

Heartbreaking. Enraging. Heartbreaking again.