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  1. #1
    Senior Member butterbean's Avatar
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    (Ilegals) Picking For Their Families

    http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ ... 30379/1004

    Published Monday, May 23, 2005
    PICKING FOR THEIR FAMILIES
    Workers Put in Long Hours in Trees Harvesting Fruit

    By Diane Lacey Allen
    The Ledger

    SECOND OF SIX PARTS
    EAST POLK COUNTY
    By the time the bus with about a dozen men arrives at the grove, the sun has set up shop over the lush, tree-lined hills.

    The group spreads out quickly, each taking four long rows of Valencias as they move like locusts, cleaning the trees as they head south.

    There is little chatter as they go about the business of twisting and pulling oranges from branches, whose sweet-smelling blossoms have already started working on next season.

    This is hot, back-breaking work where 10-hour days are typical.

    Work that Jesus, a corn farmer who recently arrived from Mexico, must do if he wants to earn money for his wife and 10 children -- the youngest still an infant.

    A pick sack slung across his body holds more than 90 pounds of fruit. The awkward load makes him walk like a pregnant woman whose swollen belly has shifted to one side.

    He and others carry these sacks up and down 18-foot ladders, dumping them with a resounding "thuuuuunk" into plastic bins. Each bin filled represents about $8 to workers; a very good day for a skilled picker is 10 bins or about 9,000 pounds of fruit.

    The bins are picked up later by the driver of the "goat" truck, a noisy piece of farm equipment with a large mechanical arm that moves the bins to a waiting trailer.

    Aside from a radio protected from dust and debris by a pillowcase, a portable restroom, and a brief lunch break that comes as the sun reaches full bore, there are few luxuries out here.

    There are, however, plenty of fire ants, spiders and snakes. Rattlers have been found, although the persistent goat truck zipping through the sugar sand tends to scare off the venomous critters.

    Picking fruit is a sort of Citrus du Soleil, a purposeful balancing act that intuitively positions ladders so the tree's branches support the weight of men like 26-year-old Santos.

    Reaching the tallest limbs, Santos disappears in the green camouflage of foliage. His feet, clinging to a rung like a bird on a perch, adjust ever so slightly as he stretches to fill his pack.

    Both hands seem to work independently of the other -- like a juggler tossing his orange orbs down instead of up.

    This is Santos' second year in the groves. When he smiles, his face has an uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods.

    Santos, though, has no idea who Woods is -- although he is impressed by the fact he looks like someone who is a millionaire. Santos plays soccer and knows nothing about golf.

    Santos got here by way of Honduras, passing through Guatemala before spending a year in Mexico. He came to the United States with a coyote, a person who traffics in illegal immigrants, in a car.

    He is familiar with agriculture.

    He planted coffee before he ventured to the United States.

    "I miss my family," Santos said. "But it's a necessity to be here. We need the money for my family . . .

    "It's too hard over there, not enough income," he said. "You don't make hardly anything. Barely $5 a day."

    Santos sends his money home to his mother, father and six siblings. He is the eldest.

    "If I get hungry, I eat three oranges," Santos said. "We get pizza on the way home."

    Last year Santos picked in New Jersey. He expects to go there again for blueberry season.

    He just realized that the Social Security card he bought is probably a fake. Taxes have been taken out of his paycheck anyway, he said, and he knows he is not entitled to the benefits of the U.S. system.

    "All of us that don't have papers that we know of, that's the way it is," he said.

    The small brown balls lying on the ground nearby are reminders of the three hurricanes that tore through Polk County last year, putting millions of oranges on the ground.

    For the workers, this means less work and less income.

    But the hurricanes have also meant that there is ample opportunity outside citrus in construction and landscaping. Migrants now find themselves being recruited from the fields and front porches. And they hear about jobs through friends.

    Those without connections or a pipeline into this Spanish-speaking network turn up in the groves first.

    "The buses I've seen haven't been the older (workers)," said Bernard Pita, a code investigator for Polk County. "The ones I see picking also have been younger. Usually you see guys in their 30s; now it looks like guys in their 20s . . . They look a lot younger than they usually do. . . ."

    The thick trees off the beaten track offer some degree of comfort for newcomers who don't speak English or have much familiarity with the United States.

    It is a school in its own right, complete with the pornographic magazines stashed near the back of a bus and the stop for food on the way home.

    "First you pick, then from there you have opportunity . . .," Pita said. "I think everybody starts at ground level.


    EDITOR'S NOTE
    Ledger editors, reporters and photographers wrestled with the thorny issue of anonymous sources while preparing this multifaceted, six-day report on farmworkers in Polk County.

    For the last six months, The Ledger interviewed many people who either did not have documents to prove they were legal or who were related to people in that circumstance.

    After several discussions, The Ledger has decided to not use undocumented workers' faces or last names.

    We think it is important to consider the vulnerability of those we report on. In some situations, the level and seriousness of that vulnerability leads us to protect such people by withholding identification.

    We know there are people who may not agree with this. But to tell this important story we needed to hear directly from the workers, and we knew they would cooperate only if we protected their identities.

    For those reasons, we feel it is important to keep such sources unidentifiable, to protect them not only from possible deportation but also from retaliation from their employers.
    RIP Butterbean! We miss you and hope you are well in heaven.-- Your ALIPAC friends

    Support our FIGHT AGAINST illegal immigration & Amnesty by joining our E-mail Alerts at http://eepurl.com/cktGTn

  2. #2
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    Yes, of course...they should be protected. There are probably no longer any Americans in those groves. People who are needing those jobs to survive some of the turbulence of life. Americans, of course, don't need any protections.

    RR
    The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try to do nothing and succeed. " - Lloyd Jones

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