From the fields to the classroom: Inside the lives of U.S agriculture’s youngest workers |
The news article published by NBC news, titled "From the fields to the classroom: Inside the lives of U.S agriculture’s youngest workers" by Didi Martinez, Gabe Gutierres, Christine Romo and Nicole Suarez, addresses the challenges of young students from migrant households. The narrative revolves around the lives of Jimena (17) and Leslie (15), who both started working as seasonal farm workers after their parents got deported from the U.S. Both girls have to cross the border on a daily basis searching for a job as farmers in order to send money back to their parents, who are unemployed due to COVID-19. Them, as many other underage farm workers, don't live with their parents. As Tracie Mcmillan exposes in her book ‘‘The American Way of Eating’’, generally children from age of eleven start working adult hours in farms during summer, on weekends or after school. This not only pushes them to mature faster, but it drastically influences how a regular ‘‘day of school’’ looks for them. From working 40 hours a week, being a high-school student, taking care of their siblings, paying the bills, and sending money back to Mexico for their parents, have made both sister’s lives into one where sleep is a luxury, work is a scarce blessing and education is the only means to break the poverty cycle.
The article emphasizes the fact that most farm workers have some kind of foreign tie, whether they are from abroad or their parents are. We could infer that this pattern only continues to takes place due to the lack of inspections from the Labor Force Department as commented by Mcmillan. This lack of inspection leaves a big room in the agricultural sector for undocumented workers. Similarly, the documentary Food Chains, presents to the audience how within the food system, the farmers bear most of the production cost, while supermarkets earn 50% of the profit. This inequitable and non-sustainable system has stigmatized the hard labour done by the workers in the agricultural sector as something easy and done by poor people. The article also discusses the challenges that youth and women experience when trying to get a seasonal job in this industry. More certainly, Leslie commented, the contractors will choose the grown experienced men over the other two groups. This implies that farming still carries some historical and cultural prejudices toward minorities, who were and still are denied such roles. Such that, Chris Newman addresses the necessity of providing opportunities for these groups to own farms, including people of color, LGBT community and women in particular. This view might be a stepstone in breaking old prejudices in the agricultural industry. Thereby, society will no longer view agriculture as a patriarchal environment and may start perceiving the role of farmers as a dignified job and equally respected as an office-based occupation.
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