Steel and Identity: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Lorain, OH

"My sisters and I picked raspberries and currants on nearby farms during the summer months, along with the children of other poor families...We walked two blocks to East Thirty-first Street, each of us carrying a lunch of a bean taco and an egg sandwich, and waited with twenty-five or thirty others for the farm trucks to pick us up.  The mornings went rapidly.  The picked berries went into one-quart baskets, each worth a chit, to be converted to ash at the end of the short workday.  After lunch, we worked another hour or so and were driven back to town."  (Mendez, 26)

"For most of us, the berry-picking sessions were a diversion.  We escaped from our normal routines and carried on conversations away from the scrutiny of those of the older generation, who viewed the use of English as a conspiracy to encourage children to abandon the "old ways."  My siblings and I spoke English exclusively with each other and with our closest Chicano friends and acquaintances."  (Mendez, 26-27)

"At age seventeen, I earned thirty-five dollars a week as a laborer in the steel mill.  When the labor gang did a job in the Bessemer plant where my father worked, I spent the lunch breaks in monosyllabic talks with him and his coworkers.  After quitting time, the men met at a cantina to drink a few beers and continue the lunchtime conversations, talking endlessly about like in Mexico...I usually sat at the edge of these discussions, sipping a root beer and wondering how I could be so much a part of that culture and still not feel its attraction as powerfully as I felt the pull of the American midwest."  (Mendez, 39)