My latest ...
In the evening a strange thing happened; the 20 families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of a home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.
-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Long before Tom Joad and his family set out for California in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the West was a cradle of hope and tragedy for migrants seeking a new life in a strange land. It's still that way today. For many like the Joads, the West remains a place to re-invent themselves. Unfortunately, many discover a world that's even harder than the one they left behind.
Seventy years have passed since John Steinbeck described the odyssey of the Joads -- a family driving a Dodge jalopy filled with the salvage of their repossessed homes out of the Dust Bowl, fueled by California dreams of trees heavy with fruit and a little white house in an orchard somewhere. More...
By 9 a.m. on a cold Monday morning, Rafael Novarro has already put in a four-hour day waiting for work that never comes.
Laid off three months earlier as a carpet installer, the El Salvadoran immigrant regularly joins a group of immigrants standing at the edge of a gas station in Carbondale, Colo. They hope contractors will stop and offer jobs, even if the wages pale in comparison to just a few months ago. Every rumbling diesel truck offers hope, but each one pulls away again, and this crowd of 10 men, many wearing work boots, their work gloves stashed in their pockets, sweatshirt hoods pulled over their heads against the cold, remain behind. More....
The story of farming in the country, and in the West, has become a tale of two farmers. Countering the growth of small farms is a concentration of more and more agriculture in the hands of fewer and fewer mega-farms. The small farms serve a growing niche of farmer’s markets. The giant farms fill the supermarket. The middle is disappearing. More....
