After living for some time in Central California, America’s top farming region – where more than 250 different fruits and vegetables are grown! – you can’t help but notice the disparities and imbalance. On one side, the farmworkers, who often earn wages well below the poverty line – because farm labor is a seasonal occupation and because it pays little. …
PHOTOS: Dance of the devils
The residents of Campo Nebraska on the outskirts of Fresno in California’s Central Valley live in shabby houses, in near complete isolation. The migrant camp, hemmed in front all sides by vineyards and fields, is owned by a Mexican mayordomo and houses immigrants from the village San Miguel Cuevas, Oaxaca. They are indigenous people, most of them Mixtecos who speak …
PHOTOS: Fragments, China Alley
The smell is musty, the wooden floorboards rotten, the original owners long dead. But the century-old Chinese herb shop with its towering armoire of small wooden drawers can still be found nearly intact behind a set of heavy metal doors. Herb bundles sit on dust-coated shelves; wafer-thin paper used by the doctor to wrap the herbs hangs on a rack by …
To Sand
On the 10th anniversary of the American-led invasion of Iraq, I would like to offer a poem. It was written by Brian Turner, a poet who was born in central California and went to Fresno State University. Turner is a U.S. Army veteran who served as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. His …