When I was 9, my mother declared it was time for me to work. At that age she had picked cotton in south Texas as an undocumented child. Child labor was common among Mexican migrants during most of the 20th century, and sadly persists today in factories and slaughterhouses. I ended up dragging a rusty lawn mower around the neighborhood to cut lawns for 25 cents. We lived in a poor Mexican community in the San Gabriel Valley with dirt roads, no sidewalks, chickens and goats in backyards. There weren’t “lawns”—there were dirt yards with patches of grass and weeds.
My parents were highly educated in Mexico—my father was a school principal and my mother his secretary—but they were never recognized for their credentials in the United States. Instead, my dad worked in factories, construction, selling Bibles and pots and pans, and eventually retiring as a janitor. My mother served the super-exploitative garment industry, including doing piecework at home. I resented the industrial sewing machine that devoured so much of her time. In a poem I would write years later, in the eyes of a child narrator, the sewing machine became “The Monster.”
As a teenager I worked in a car wash, a discount store, a warehouse; as a busboy in a Mexican restaurant or driving a school bus and a bobtail truck for a lamp factory. I married at age 20 when my girlfriend was two months out of high school. That same year, I got a job at the Bethlehem Steel Mill in southeast Los Angeles—rotating shifts, stretches of “graveyard,” and even 16-hour days called “double shifts.” I started there as an “oiler-greaser” on massive machines, forges and furnaces. The doors had finally opened for Blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, and women to enter the skilled trades, jobs previously held mostly by white men. I became a millwright doing heavy mechanical repairs and rigging. I thought I had it made, sweating the big drops for the best pay and a union job.
However, due to the rise of new technologies and outsourcing, deindustrialization transformed the country in the 1970s and 1980s. Big companies sought cheaper labor markets due to increased union drives and regulation. The Midwest became the “Rust Belt” with the shuttering of auto and steel plants and stockyards. But industries in other regions suffered also: textiles in the Northeast, lumber in the Northwest, and mines in Appalachia and the Southwest. By 1992, Los Angeles had witnessed the loss of whole sectors of its economy, including auto and tire manufacturing and steel plants. Tens of thousands of union jobs disappeared.
After the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, sweatshops amassed along the U.S./Mexico border and in other parts of Mexico, as well as in Central America and Southeast Asia. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. began a steep decline in the late 1990s while the number of service jobs soared. The “Wal-Marting” of America had begun, leading to the proliferation of low-paid and mostly part-time jobs filled by workers who lacked the protection of unions.
