Migrant Sun was written from the vantage point of a ten-year-old Mexican-American boy as his family traveled across the Western United States on back of a cattle truck. They traveled from harvest to labor camps—working in pesticide laced fields under scorching, dusty fields in the late 1940’s. The boys’ observations are stark and raw and no less relevant today as they were sixty years ago.

Your Fields

We’ve walked to your fields at dawn.
We labored in the noon-day sun.
We returned, spent from your fields at dusk.
We are a million browns
In the migrant fields,
At harvest time in America.

We’ve picked your tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce.
We’ve picked your apples, peaches and oranges.
We’ve eaten the dust of a thousand tractors;
The dust settling on us in delicate layers
Until our pesticide sweat
Ran like a burning yellow river
Down the valley of our backs.

We’ve lain in rat infested shacks
In winter so cold our brothers and sisters
Froze dead in their sleep.
We buried them on the outskirts
Of your cemeteries;
Too poor to buy them markers.
We can no longer find them
Anywhere, but in the troubled
Darkness of our nightmares.

We’ve come to your hospitals—in desperation,
Pleading for healing of our young.
We’ve placed them on your sterile altars—
Examination tables,
Only to watch them die from neglect,
In hidden, taupe colored rooms—alone.
They died waiting for the nurses to call,
And doctors who never showed,
Who never cared,
About the poor, brown
Children who waited,
And suffered;
To die like dogs,
Abandoned
By the side of the road.
Our young,

 

 

Your fields.