Photo: David Bacon
This boy's parents work in the strawberry fields in Watsonville, Calif.
An early childhood teacher draws on her past while teaching children of migrant farmworkers
When I was a child, my mother couldn't help us with our homework. She had gone to work as a maid in a Mexican hacienda at age 11 and hadn't learned to read or write in Spanish. She was embarrassed when asked to sign her name. She worked in the farm labor fields of the Salinas Valley until she was 80 years old.
I thought a lot about my mother's life when I worked on a school-readiness project with the children of Mexican farmworkers in a migrant labor camp outside of Watsonville, Calif. I wanted the children I worked with to be proud of where they came from, and I wanted to help them develop literacy in Spanish before they were launched into kindergarten.
In some ways, the camp was a familiar setting. I grew up in migrant labor camps in California and Texas. My childhood camps share one big similarity with the camp I worked in; they are isolated and hidden from the world around them, and become small, contained little worlds for the inhabitants.