Mexican migrants find it's brutal here

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Sun, Dec. 05, 2004


BROWARD COUNTY


Mexican migrants find it's brutal here

Migrant workers from Mexico who formed a small community in Pompano Beach help feed their families back home.

By JEANNETTE RIVERA-LYLES
[e-mail]


Like inexpensive merchandise in a human bazaar, they line up every day before the crack of dawn at a gas station in Pompano Beach, hoping and waiting to get a day's work.Their brown skin, a legacy of their Mayan ancestors, burns beneath the Florida sun. Their hands grow calloused from 60-hour weeks of back-breaking labor.

But today, like every other day on the calendar, they've come back for more.

They are part of South Florida's growing population of Mexicans of Mayan ancestry who come here looking for work to support their families back home.

''I have a sick father in need of care, an elderly mother and children at home,'' José Jesús Gómez said. ``They didn't want us to come. But we just had to.''

While Mexican migrants from Central Mexico have lived in South Florida, particularly in the Homestead area, since the 1970s, the Pompano Beach group is different.

NEW DEVELOPMENT

The community has been around no more than three years by most estimates, and it is made up of people who have left their homeland for the first time.They come from the southeastern state of Chiapas, one of the poorest regions in Mexico, rendered even more so by the elimination of tariffs, letting huge U.S. firms sell corn there cheaper than local farmers can produce it, according to some analysts.
(snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/states/florida/counties/broward_county/10342289.htm
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So this NEW community of economic refugees from Central Mexico has been here around THREE YEARS, as a result of the elimination of tarriffs, and the flood of American corn which puts them all out of work IN THEIR OWN HOME COUNTRY.

God, that frosts a person, doesn't it? Same thing has happened with other crops in Mexico, as well, like SUGAR, while U.S. taxpayers are forced to pay artificially high prices to support the U.S. sugar industry in South Florida, bumping off Mexican sugar growers and workers.

Sure wish people realized the reason Mexican workers are having a hard time finding work AT HOME.

[ulysses]

1. another victory for NAFTA! Wheee!

[BeFree]

2. Outsourcing their corn

What goes around comes around. While some countries have taken jobs away from America, we have taken jobs from others.

Of course, the corn industry in the US is based upon cheap oil and it appears the age of cheap oil has ended. It may be a good thing we have some people in this country who know how to grow corn by hand? We may need their wisdom some day soon.