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A Photographic Chronicle of America's Working Poor (Smithsonian)
DECEMBER 2016
Smithsonian journeyed from Maine to California to update a landmark study of American life
Just north of Sacramento is a tiny settlement that residents call La Tijera, The Scissors, because two roads come together there at a sharp angle. On the dusty triangle of ground between the blades sit more than a dozen dwellings: trailers, flimsy clapboard cabins, micro duplexes. A mattress under a mulberry tree lies amid broken-down cars and other castoffs. Roosters crow. Traffic roars past. Heat ripples off the pavement, a reminder of California’s epic drought.
Martha, 51, emerges from one of the tiny duplexes to greet me and Juanita Ontiveros, a farmworker organizer, who’d telephoned ahead. Martha’s hair is slicked back and she wears freshly applied eye shadow. Yet she looks weary. I ask her about work. Martha replies in a mixture of Spanish and English that she will soon begin a stint in a watermelon-packing plant. The job will last two months, for $10.50 an hour.
<snip>
Martha, originally from Tijuana, and Arturo, from Mexicali, are undocumented workers who have been in the United States most of their lives. (Martha came at age 8.) They are three months behind on the $460 rent. “Maybe I’ll marry Donald Trump,” she says, deadpan, then laughs. “I volunteer at the church. I bag food for families.” Because she volunteers, the church gives her extra food. “So I share,” she says of the goods she passes along to neighbors. “Helping people, God helps you more.”
I went to The Scissors, driving by vast walnut groves and endless fields of safflower, tomatoes and rice, to report on a particular kind of poverty in the country right now, and I did so with an amazing, strange American artwork in mind. It was 75 years ago that the writer James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans published the most lyrical chronicle of the lives of poor Americans ever produced, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and to consider even briefly some of the notions raised in that landmark book seemed a useful thing to do, and a necessary one in this age of widening income disparity.
...
Just north of Sacramento is a tiny settlement that residents call La Tijera, The Scissors, because two roads come together there at a sharp angle. On the dusty triangle of ground between the blades sit more than a dozen dwellings: trailers, flimsy clapboard cabins, micro duplexes. A mattress under a mulberry tree lies amid broken-down cars and other castoffs. Roosters crow. Traffic roars past. Heat ripples off the pavement, a reminder of California’s epic drought.
Martha, 51, emerges from one of the tiny duplexes to greet me and Juanita Ontiveros, a farmworker organizer, who’d telephoned ahead. Martha’s hair is slicked back and she wears freshly applied eye shadow. Yet she looks weary. I ask her about work. Martha replies in a mixture of Spanish and English that she will soon begin a stint in a watermelon-packing plant. The job will last two months, for $10.50 an hour.
<snip>
Martha, originally from Tijuana, and Arturo, from Mexicali, are undocumented workers who have been in the United States most of their lives. (Martha came at age 8.) They are three months behind on the $460 rent. “Maybe I’ll marry Donald Trump,” she says, deadpan, then laughs. “I volunteer at the church. I bag food for families.” Because she volunteers, the church gives her extra food. “So I share,” she says of the goods she passes along to neighbors. “Helping people, God helps you more.”
I went to The Scissors, driving by vast walnut groves and endless fields of safflower, tomatoes and rice, to report on a particular kind of poverty in the country right now, and I did so with an amazing, strange American artwork in mind. It was 75 years ago that the writer James Agee and the photographer Walker Evans published the most lyrical chronicle of the lives of poor Americans ever produced, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and to consider even briefly some of the notions raised in that landmark book seemed a useful thing to do, and a necessary one in this age of widening income disparity.
...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/photographic-chronicle-america-working-poor-180961147/
Scroll down the linked page for photos. The article is a very long one.
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