Fifty years later

Believe it or not, more than fifty years later, the life of a migrant laborer is still an ordeal. And not just for adults. Perhaps as many as half a million children, some as young as seven years old, are out in the fields and orchards working nine to ten hour days under brutal conditions. That was one of the most traumatic things growing up. You see, being poor is in and of itself not traumatic. It's an inconvenience, but being poor and powerless to withstand the mistreatment, to watch my mom and dad be mistreated and are being fooled about the wages and exactly stolen from us.There was no way for us to complain. No way for us to appeal to anyone. the racial humiliation, the racial snubs and epithets. Well, the verbal mistreatment of my mom, and, was something that's very, was very hard to take.
NAFTA, signed by President Clinton in 1993. That devastated the Mexican countryside. Just in the commodity of corn. Which is a staple in Mexico. Everybody grows corn in Mexico. And they grow it for their local use, for themselves. And then the excess, they tried to sell it in the local market. So when NAFTA opened the borders to North American corn, those small corner farmers in Mexico couldn't help to compete with U.S. farmers. They're highly mechanized and highly subsidized.
Ted Rudow III, MA