My Next Hypertext

Posted by Matt Stockamp:

When I enter a grocery store, I always buy fruit but I never think about where it came from or who worked the fields to get it here. It wasn’t until this past summer that I realized the low wage labor that immigrants do in the fields every day in northern California. After reading Reaching Out by Francisco Jimenez, I became interested in the lifelong consequences that fieldwork presents in the lives of children. As people have emigrated from Mexico, the entire family is forced into labor in order to generate enough cash to get by. Because of this, children cannot attend school so they get trapped in the vortex of becoming a fieldworker.

I want to focus my next hypertext on the hard situations children working in the fields face as they look forward into the future. It is likely that children in these circumstances don’t cast a vision for themselves as they et trapped into the culture of poverty. I hope to get a better perspective of what life is like for the average child fieldworker in the strawberry fields of Salinas. It is not right that these children have to face such difficult circumstances at such a young age as many come from broken households. They are exposed to hazardous pesticides, brutal physical labor, and most influential being the lack of access to an education to help them for their futures. Children work out of demand for what is needed now. It is too easy to solely focus on spending time getting money by working the fields rather than establishing long-term development by getting an education. It is in the uncommon case of Francisco Jimenez and few others that we see immigrant fieldworkers with the determination to push through and put in the long days in order to set high hopes for their future.

There is still no answer in how to solve this pressing issue. I have found a blind spot in this area, and I want to do my best to provide a solution for these children working the fields. I believe that everyone has the right of an education and the ability to dream as I do so I plan to find a means to give these children hope.