I am a child of immigrant farmers. My parents worked on a farm picking strawberries and apples in Northern California. We actually lived on the farm. I knew many legal and illegal immigrant farmers. Any idea idea that they lived the high life and bought expensive cars is simply not true. I saw first hand how hard and backbreaking picking fruit was. My very first job was picking strawberries at age 13 in 1982. I was paid $2.50/hr plus $0.50/box. The regular workers got $3.35/hr plus $0.50/box. For a short time early in the harvest the strawberries were huge and it took very few strawberries to fill a box. The fastest workers could pick up to about 120 boxes a day. So in a good week they could make $400-$450 a week. But these were the absolute fastest workers. Most of the workers picked far fewer boxes. But by mid summer the strawberries became smaller and the fast guys only picked about 25-30 boxes per day. Like I said this was difficult back breaking work. You were bent over all day, We worked six days a week, 8-10 hours a day, in 90-100 degree weather. The workers had no medical benefits. No retirement benefits. The money they made went to buy food, pay rent, buy clothes for their children, etc. It was a tough life for these migrant laborers especially for the one who worked this type of job for decades. The farm owners knew they had a never ending source of cheap labor. Most of the farm owners didn't care one wit about their workers. A few did like the man that my dad worked for. He was a Japanese-American who was interned during WW II. So he had some compassion for poor people and the tough life they lived.
This author of this essay is from my hometown. His personal story is literally my personal story from the mid 1980's.
A personal essay by Alex Rocha.
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