Immigration Reality: Itinerant Life Weighs on Farmworkers’ Children

A look at the reality of the lives of migrant agriculture workers and their children.


Itinerant Life Weighs on Farmworkers’ Children - NYTimes.com: "In the clattering energy of Room 21 at Sherwood Elementary here, (teacher Oscar) Ramos, 37, glimpses life beneath the field dust. His students are the sons and daughters of the seasonal farmworkers who toil in the vast fields of the Salinas Valley, cutting spinach and broccoli and packing romaine lettuce from a wet conveyor belt: nearly 13 heads a minute, 768 heads an hour, 10 hours a day.

One-third of the children are migrants whose parents follow the lettuce from November to April, Salinas to Yuma, Ariz. Some who leave will not return.

Schools like Sherwood, and teachers like Mr. Ramos, are on the front lines, struggling against family mobility, neighborhood violence and the “pobrecito,” or “poor little thing,” mentality of low academic expectations. But the often disrupted lives of the children of migrants here is likely to grow still more complicated as the national debate over immigration grows sharper."