Dark Harvest Migrant Farmworkers In America
Author: Brent Ashabranner
Date Published: 1993
Every year more than a million men, women, and children travel across America to harvest the nation's fruits and vegetables. Machines have not been invented that can replace human hands in gathering many of our vital foods. Migrant farmworkers are an indispensable part of American agriculture, yet by every measure these people who follow the crops are our most depressed workers. They live in grim laborers' barracks or dilapidated shacks and work from sunrise until dark under unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Over one thousand deaths and ninety thousand injuries from pesticide poisoning occur annually. The average life expectancy of a migrant farmworker if forty nine years, compared to seventy-four for the general population. Migrant family income is one-fifth the national average. By the age of four months migrant children spend at least part of their time working in the fields only one in ten graduate from high school. DARK HARVEST examines the tragic world of migrants today. It provides an in-depth look at these invisible people," at the individual courage that sometimes enables them to triumph over a cruel system, and at ways to curb migrant injustices that are a blot of America.
Date Published: 1993
Every year more than a million men, women, and children travel across America to harvest the nation's fruits and vegetables. Machines have not been invented that can replace human hands in gathering many of our vital foods. Migrant farmworkers are an indispensable part of American agriculture, yet by every measure these people who follow the crops are our most depressed workers. They live in grim laborers' barracks or dilapidated shacks and work from sunrise until dark under unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Over one thousand deaths and ninety thousand injuries from pesticide poisoning occur annually. The average life expectancy of a migrant farmworker if forty nine years, compared to seventy-four for the general population. Migrant family income is one-fifth the national average. By the age of four months migrant children spend at least part of their time working in the fields only one in ten graduate from high school. DARK HARVEST examines the tragic world of migrants today. It provides an in-depth look at these invisible people," at the individual courage that sometimes enables them to triumph over a cruel system, and at ways to curb migrant injustices that are a blot of America.
