Gabriel Thompson's Blog, page 5

Salad Days in Yuma

Before relocating to the Arizona city of Yuma, the only thing I knew about the area was that it was both where Cesar Chavez was born and died. And, in fact, on my very first day in the lettuce fields I joined my new crew just west of a street named after Chavez. But aside from the Chavez connection, Yuma was a mystery. Only later, when doing research, did I learn that it happened to be the "winter lettuce capital" of the world. Not exactly the punchiest phrase, and certainly not likely to...

Columbus Go Home

So it turns out that the idiotic brawl I wrote about yesterday in Florida occurred within the context of a national campaign by teabaggers who were targeting pro-alien forces or some such threat to our way of life. In Minnesota, the tea sippers listened to the following speech and got appropriately riled up.

Lou Dobbs Says Goodbye: 'I Won't Rest Until All of Us – Not Just the Illegals – Have the Opportunity to Sell Oranges Along the Side of the Highway'

Being an old fart, I wasn't able to stay up last night to watch Lou Dobbs on the Daily Show, but I'm going to imagine it went something like this:

more about "SNL's Lou Dobbs Says Goodbye: 'I Won'…", posted with vodpod

New Trends! And a Sidewalk Brawl!

Earlier, I discussed a trend that could very well not be a trend–Anglos showing up at day labor pickup sites for work. Well, I recently came across another trend piece that seems suspicious as well.

The article, found here, is about the growth of reverse remittances, or money sent from Mexico to the US to help struggling family members who are unable to find work. A few families are interviewed to bolster the case, which I don't find convincing: I remember seeing people sending small amounts...

Friday Photos

For this Friday I've included a photo from each job location–New York, Arizona, and Alabama. Have a good weekend! Hope to have some new video up next week…

ANYONE HUNGRY?

One of the interesting aspects of restaurant work is the hierarchies between various kitchen employees. Waiters are upper-class: they receive the most tips and actually don't serve all that much food. The folks who do the serving are called "runners"; they bring out the food and do a lot of the heavy lifting. Runners are...

The Demise of Lou Dobbs

In April of 2005, I spent a week on the US-Mexico border to report on the Minuteman Project. If you're lucky enough to have forgotten the ragtag group, they came to the border because, in the words of their founder, Jim Gilchrist, our country was being "devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens."

Gilchrist was able to attract about 100 people, an impressive achievement considering many of the volunteers came from far away and had to cover their own...

My First El Blurbo!

Folks in the book publishing industry are always trying to figure out how to increase book sales. Will a short video about the book, posted on a book's web site, somehow generate sales? Is there a point, even, for a book to have a web site? Will a positive review really help? And what about blurbs: does anyone actually buy a book because it features a glowing blurb from a favorite author?

I have no idea what the answers might be to any of these questions. What I do know is that I am extremely...

Worst. Job. Ever.

Although the only true cure to a terrible job is to quit, temporary relief can often be found through the age-old art of bitching. Which is why, though the jobs I did for the book have all ended, I still enjoy complaining whenever someone asks me, "So, what was the worst job you did?"

Strangely, it wasn't the time I looked like a germ-phobic serial killer, getting ready to carve up a body in a room that I'd already disinfected and covered with plastic wrap.

Nor was my worst job stooped over...

Day Labor & South Korea

Faced with a Thursday and little desire to write something myself, here are two links to articles I've been reading:

Are white people starting to hang around the parking lots of Home Depot looking for work? This is one of those stories that could very well be a non-story (I noticed the reporter only speaks to one actual person who fits the profile for this "trend" piece). But who knows? An enterprising white reporter could probably go hang around Long Island day labor spots and try to get...

Big Agriculture=Good for Workers?

Here's a very cool and counterintuitive piece about the agricultural industry, looking at why farmworkers are usually better off working for giant companies than smaller farms. The writer, Tracie McMillan, is a friend who has a related book coming out in 2011 about the food system. It's called Foodless: On (Not) Eating Well in America. (If you haven't noticed, parenthetical insertions are (very) popular in book subtitles).

I say related because her book also deals with food, but in a much...