Thursday, September 17, 2009

Re Farmingville


The main thing that surprised me in the film was how the local white people from the community were speaking about the day laborers portraying them to be sexual deviants and people who were causing harm to the community as a whole . This surprised me not because of the allegations but because the men in the film (the day laborers) seemed to be very good people who just wanted to make a a decent living and a chance to the make the type of money that their family needed back in Mexico.

I think some of the allegations made towards them were justifiable. One illegal drunk driver killed a mother from this community. I can only imagine what it would be like to go from not having any day laborers on street corners to having groups of them on most street corners. It's really not the way i would picture a safe neighborhood to look like.

One of the solutions to this issue was to create a hiring site for the day laborers so that they wouln't have to stand on the corners every day. I can understand why the residents of this community weren't too thrilled to be paying (with taxes) for a building entirely dedicated to hiring illegal immigrants. Although the immigrants are said to be day laborers the truth is likely to be that they are undocumented.
The entire question of living with so much illegal immigration is a tough subject to think about, especially for a young mexican women with a large extended family in the U.S.
Coincidentally i fell upon an article about hate crimes on latino immigrants in this month's issue of Latina Magazine. The article was about the growing rate of hate crimes against latino immigrants in this country.
A small feature on this subject can be found on their website : A Timeline of Intolerance