Topic: Legal Mexican Immigrant Farm Labor in Southern California

For my second hypertext essay, I would like to focus on the labor of legal Mexican immigrants on farms in the United States, specifically Southern California. My plans changed from child labor after I went on a trip to Santa Barbara last weekend. There was a constant amount of farmland beyond what I had imagined (for whatever reason) the entire way. Every so often there was a bus parked towing a trailer with 3 port-a-potties that I inferred to be the practical transportation system of day labor in the modern farming industry. We also took a random exit for gas that took us quite a distance off the freeway, where I we ran into a small residential area, maybe 50 yards by 50 yards, consisting of small concrete shelters in which I imagined the people that work out of the buses sleep at night. The sight was exactly as I remembered the small communities in Africa when on a family vacation, except I was in America.

This sight alone really got me thinking about the true low wage life of immigrant workers in Southern California. My father brushed it off as necessary temporary living but I find that to believe. As Ehrenriech pointed out, such low wages cannot support health needs that every human being encounters, not to mention barely providing for daily essentials. I want to focus on legal immigrants working in these conditions because these people are coming to our country in a respectable fashion, seeking prosperity through their own tenacity, and having it all shoved back in their faces in the form of horrible working conditions. It is interesting how effectively this phenomenon is described as the result of the white exodus in Fast Food Nation. A once republican economic utopia has transformed into a liberal economic hell for those at the bottom of the barrel, who actually constitute a majority of the population but are simply crushed by legal but unethical strategies for labor.

If in researching this topic, I find that legal Mexican immigrants are actually a very small minority of this workforce which may be mostly illegal immigrants, I will change it to illegal immigrants seeing as the focus is their low wage life, not the ridiculous but legal conditions in which they came to it.