This is an entry I wrote a while ago and, due to limited internet access, am just now uploading it to the blog...
July 4th - El Dia de la Independencia - was a solemn one for me. The night before, I went camping down in Kiptopeke Park with a Honduran family. I learned a new card game which was sort of like slaps in that their only similarity is that you suffer severe bodily harm by the end of the game. I also heard a lot of "vos," which is Central American Spanish for the "tu" normally thought to mean "you" in English.
On Saturday, July 4, I drove up to Silver Springs, MD, for a quinceanera for a daughter from a family from Guerrero, Mexico. On the drive up from the bottom of the Eastern Shore (where Kiptopeke is) toward the peninsula's point of contact with the mainland, there was the normal July 4 traffic with people rushing to get to their cookouts and pools before too much of the day was gone. Can't miss the fireworks! Cars with license plates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Virginia littered US-13, apparently one of the deadliest highways in the US.
Amidst the vacationers and travelers, however, I saw a different type of traffic. Practically rundown school buses, some white, others painted bright green, others with small Mexican flags on the side, showed a different side of our nation's Independence Day. Those buses were full of migrant farmworkers, going to work to pick tomatoes while we enjoyed the fights of our ancestors for our freedom to drink beer, get sunburnt while playing on the beach, and shoot fireworks. It makes me wonder how really independent we are. We are dependent on a group of people who have no choice but to break their backs and their families to come to a country they don't know, to work in one of the most dangerous jobs, and sacrifice the chance for a life even half as comfortable as ours, for us to be able to put tomatoes on our hamburgers. We have certainly based our freedoms and independence on making others dependent on us. We have raped them of their ability to provide for themselves and we say that we are their saviors because we offer them work. The work that no one else would want to do. The work that we are too "good" for.
I am one of the guilty ones, too, though. I wish I would've stopped by car at one of the fields and asked if I could work in the fields. I'm sure I would've been the weakest worker out there, but maybe showing a bit of solidarity would have been one step forward to a new type of Independence Day for our nation, where we stop the exploitation and the outright negligence of the people who help to bring us our most basic necessity: food.
