Month: January 2014

Seemore in Michigan

The light turns red and a line of cars come to a stop. Tan Ford. Black Ford. Red Ford. Blue Toyota Corolla. Black Ford. Tan Ford. Gray Ford. A young woman with blond hair sits inside the Toyota looking straight ahead trying to ignore the angry looks of the passes by and the man in the Ford car next to her.  “What are you doing driving that Japanese car! You are the reason I don’t have a job!  You are destroying Detroit,” a man yells at her window.  Deep breath in, exhale. The light finally changes. It is 1978 and the young woman is my mother.  It is her first day in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  She is only 23 years old.  All her belongings are neatly packed into that Blue Toyota, the only Toyota on this block, and maybe it seemed like the whole state.  Just weeks before her one year long volunteer job with AmeriCorps VISTA helping families in poverty in Levittown, NY had come to a close.  She had spent the last day driving from New York to here in her trust car, Seemore.  Just another trip to add to the list of places “See more of the country” had taken her.  It was now time for a new adventure. An adventure with a plan. Step one establish residency by finding a job in social work.  Step two apply to grad school with said job in social work. And step three make a world of change.

Find a place to live.  Without a plan for a living situation or a job my mother had packed her bags and driven nine hours to a new state with a whole lot of determination.

“What am I thinking?” my mother mumbled to herself.  Down the street was a guest house. She had experienced poverty with her work in Levittown, but never lived it herself. The mindset of the other inhabitants were a harsh reflection of the economic times.  Their daily concerns were not what to make for dinner, but where the next nights stay was going to come from. My mother did not share their desperation because she knew if things did not work out here she could always go home.  She did however share a determination to survive. She would not be returning to Houston, TX where her parents and two brothers had moved three years ago.  No, she would be proving her independence and living life on her own.

After two nights at the guest house, it was time for a change.  The Y, where she swam every day, offered inexpensive housing.  That would work for the time being.  By day three my mother found a job as a waitress at a expensive hotel.  The shifts started early, but it was there that she made her first friend.  The friend was short and her dirty brown hair fell to her shoulders in uneven layers.  Her face was kind and her actions reflected it.  She was about three years younger than my mother.  It didn’t take long for her to figure out my mother’s living situation was not ideal.  With a generosity only a special few have, she invited my mother to come live with her and her mother until my mom could afford an apartment to move into.

My mother had never been in a trailer park before, let alone a trailer home.  With such a show of kind thoughtfulness and the prospect of a friend to talk to on the way to work in this new city, my mother said yes.  She spent one week living with the brown haired girl and her mother.  It was just enough time to get on her feet, save some money, and find an apartment.  After that week they stayed in contact some, but my mother’s life moved on and now only the memory remained. The first year in Michigan was one of the most challenging times for my mother, but the graciousness that this family still remains with her today over thirty years later.

 

Story Pitch

WAGE THEFT

Oregon law requires farm workers to be paid minimum wage, however to get around this law, some farmer owners pay a “piece rate”, or a set fee per volume of harvest. Those not covered by employment insurance, hired for a set fee, custom, or contract work are not represented in the Oregon Employment Covered wages. Furthermore, many of Oregon’s farm workers are immigrants.  According to Alice Larson, a Washington-based researcher specializing in farm worker populations, in 2013 there were about 87,000 farm workers in Oregon’s agriculture, nursery and food processing industries, of which 31 percent were migrant.

Because employers of migrant workers do not need to file paperwork with the government, many farmworker immigrants become subject to wage theft, the exploitation of labor so that workers receiving less than the minimum wage, don’t get overtime, tips, have to work “off the clock,” and/or fail to receive their pay at all and so can not afford adequate housing or health care.  While some workers seek redress with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, many are not aware or able to obtain help.

I hope to talk to a family that has experience wage theft and can show me their account of how it has affected their lives, specifically with housing.  Many migrant farmworkers live on farmworker camps that may or may not have adequate drainage, bathrooms, laundry facilities, and hot water may not be available in adequate supply, contributing to poor housing conditions.

Virginia Garcia’s mobile clinics provided 715 migrant workers with medical care and 69 with dental care at a cost of $2 per person, per visit. Their van visits nine migrant camps and two nurseries in Washington County, plus two nurseries in Yamhill County. I am currently talking to their outreach communication about interviewing a family living at one of the farmworker camps.  I hope to shed light on their form of life as a farmworker living supporting a family minimum wage, as well as someone who has experienced wage theft.  I will get this contact from the Director of the Oregon Law Center Woodburn Migrant Farmworker Camp.

Untold Story

A loud clang echos through the halls and the groups of playing children organize themselves into files to enter their classrooms.  At the classroom on the far end a male teacher stands at the door and watches his students enter.  They spread out into five rows and sit on their knees.  The three students at the front of the class sit with their heads held a little higher than the other children who are still laughing and talking loudly.   A young boy in the middle of the group cranes his neck to get a better look at the two girls and one boy in the first row.  They are the star students, the best in the class, and he is not.

The teacher walks in and as a group, despite some snickering from the students in the back, they all place their palms together, lean their heads to towards the ground and utter a single word.  Namaste.

This is not a temple, but a fifth grade classroom in Lynwood, California. The teacher is Mr. Cano and despite the largely Catholic population, he chose to start his class off with a tradition from another culture.  For many of the kids there, like the young boy in the middle of the group, it was a window into another world.  A world full of possibility and hope.

The boy is Jeffrey Mercado.  The son of a single mother working two jobs, a middle child to two other brothers, and up until a class with Mr. Conno, a boy on the brink of falling into the wrong crowd.  Just a year earlier he witnessed drugs take the life of his uncle.  It was a normal morning and his mother, father, brother, and sister were all awake preparing breakfast.  His father told him to wake up his uncle.  One knock on the door, no answer.  Two knocks, still no answer.  “Tió despiertate.”  Still nothing.  The door wouldn’t budge either.  “Papa he’s not waking up.”  His father appeared, his face calm, but only to mask the anxious look just beneath the surface.  Something wasn’t right.  Fists started to bang on the door.  More and more hands pummeled as if to a beat on the door as the rest of Mercado’s family gathered around the door.  “Jeff take your sister into the other room.” His father told him.  Mercado heard the sound of splintering wood just as he rounded the corner into the livingroom out of sight.  His father had kicked down the door.  He heard shouting.  Movement.  They kept on saying his uncles name.  He ran back to his uncle’s room and saw him lying on the ground.  Motionless.  Still.  And then the world went black.

A few weeks after that day, Mercado, his siblings, and mother moved out of their grandparent’s house.  His father had surcoomed to the same addictions as his uncle.  They were moving to Lynnwood.  Just a short eight minute drive to the heart of Compton.  The kids in this area cussed and looked at him threateningly if he stared too long.  They said fuck. They said fuck all the time.  There was graffiti and their house was a garage, one room in total.  At one side was a bunk bed pushed up against the wall which was painted the color of green chillies.  In the middle of the room was a fold up table they would sit around if they were all home at the same time.  There were no windows.

There came a day, as he rode his bike home from school, when sitting anywhere but in the front row for morning namaste was no longer acceptable.   Not being recognized for something positive was no longer satisfactory, no matter what the gang lifestyle promoted.  At the young  age of eleven, Mercado became a man.  That bike ride lasted longer than usual.  The churning thoughts became commands to do better, be better, and expect more.  The smart kids aren’t the only ones who can be smart, he told himself.  I can be smart too and be recognized.  I deserve that.

That year was like no other.  He earned more memorabilia for good classwork than any other year.  He was invited to presented his science project in front of the city.  And every day he was one of the five students in the first row.

The next year he tried giving himself the pep talk once more, but something didn’t click.  He started skipping classes and it was harder to avoid the ever present lifestyle of those who ruled the streets of Lynnwood.

Over ten years later however, he is in college and has traveled to Ghana.  The road to this point was not straight or flat, but that bike ride years ago and the shining year of successes that followed still shines brightly like the north star, guiding Jeffrey forward to his dreams.