Los Trabajadores: still working

I've been making prints about the farm workers in the valley here in Las Cruces for almost two years now. It's the kind of work that I feel is important and for a long time I guess I had made assumptions about the people who would take this kind of work. I had yet to meet the workers themselves, and my language barrier does not help when I'm trying to communicate or ask questions.

One advantage of my latest living situation is that I go out almost every day into the fields. My favorite place to run is along the irrigation canals, and I even made this my subject matter for a while, but it didn't amount to much. The other day, there was a ho crew working in an onion field, so I ran home as quick as I could, and I returned to take pictures and to speak to the workers themselves. After staring at their images for so long, and spending hours creating life size depictions of them, I finally got up the confidence to just go out into the field and to speak up. I spent about two hours traveling from end to end of that onion field. I met them all, spoke to a few, and even found myself to lean over and pick out a weed or two that someone had missed.

What I found was simple actually. One guy, Vincente Rodriguez, 24, spoke English and he made a simple case for why he does this work. He travels two hours to and from work every day from south Juarez. They cross the border to and from home six days a week. He said that he had a baby, and that was his reason to drop out of school. Because there's no work in Juarez, he chose to come to work the fields, like his brother and his father. This picture shows all three of them, a family portrait. It was a simple choice. He had a child and wife to support, and this was work he could get. He said that he would work those fields for the rest of his life. To know that he would be in those fields for the next 50 years has stuck with me. We in this country take pride in always wanting more, to always rise farther and farther up, to have more than our parents, etc. I'll be sitting with his words on my mind for years to come. More than ever, I feel that it is important work. It is something that I want others to know. That out there, working for a small amount of money, are people who have no hope of doing anything but what they do. And what they do is hard work, unforgiving, and unnoticed.