Harvestofanger part II PETER BAIRD ED MC OAUGHAN CULIACAN, MEXICO « I leave home at two or three in the morning and walk to the road where a company truck passes by. At four I climb up and ride with the pigs and cattle until we arrive at the ranch several hours later. I work until six or seven in the evening, then ,ride again on the truck and arrive back to my village at ten or eleven at night. I don't see my house or family by daylight». These wor,ds were spoken with slow determination by Jose Luis Zuniga, one of the ½ million wage-earning farm workers who toil the U.S. controlled agribusiness ranches of northwestern Mexico. Like scores of other campesinos, Jose Luis has been forced by poverty to become a day laborer on the vast vegetable growing operations of Sonora and Sinaloa. The tomatoes Jose Luis picks are sold thousands of miles away in U.S. supermarkets. Jose Luis' younger sisters and thousands of other young women work in the large packing sheds where conditions are hardly better than in the blistering fields. For S 16 a week they work in the 100 ,degree0plus weather to prepare the tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers for loading onto -refrigerated railcars and trucks for the 20 hour trip to Nogales, Arizona. There the shipments are met by buyers from Safeway, Lucky's, McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Ohicken and other U. S. food monopolies. Low pay and inhumane working conditions, coupled with runaway inflation and the recent devaluations of the Mexican peso have sparked a resurgence of efforts by farm workers of the Northwest to organize themselves into mHitant and independent unions. These efforts have paralleled the numerous fand occupation that have threatened to shut ·down the factories in the fields. 125
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