"He had come to this country not with his real surname, Hovesepian, but with the pen name of Arax, the mother river of the murdered nation of Armenia.
The uncle who had lured him to America waited a few days and then put my grandfather on another road -- down the long, hot valley to the town of Weedpatch.
There, long before the Okies and Steinbeck arrived, he dropped to his hands and knees and started picking.
There, 85 years later in the powdery loam, I found a young Mixteca who had arrived the week before from deep in Mexico, her land turning to dust.
She had been smuggled in the back of a Suburban and was using her wages from the bell pepper fields to pay off a $1,900 debt to the coyote, a trafficker of humanity.
I asked her why she had come and she began to tear up.
She had left two young children in their village with her mother.
'For their future,' she told me."
~ Mark Arax, page 10, "West of the West"
"West Of The West by Mark Arax | Goodreads"
No comments:
Post a Comment