[Greg in LA]

It's funny that you mention, poverty as it applies to agriculture and agricultural labor.

I was talking to an elderly Armenian gentlemen at my church, He moved from NYC to Visalia, CA in the late 1940's or the early 1950's, with his parents. His relatives owned some type of farm in Visalia. He described being poor in NYC, but from his point of view people were poorer in Visalia. He described his relatives as not all having proper shoes to wear, and worn out clothes, and rarely having meat on the table. They were not migrant workers, they were land owners, yet from his point of view, they lived an extremely meager existence.
It's funny that the Armenian's from that era don't chalk their economic plight down to "racism", the way that Raul Ruiz does, in fact they do quite the opposite. If your ever read William Saroyan essays, he treats the whole central valley agricultural experience as quite playful and fun. I also don't think the Armenians from the Central valley would ever once have thought of requiring Armenian language in the schools, or voting booths or in public at all. They all learned English, and became Americans, end of story.

It's only the Mexicans that want to play the Brown race card.

And of course the large corporate owned farms that want the endless supply of cheap labor.

I also got the impression that in the early 1950's American farmers in California did their own work, and a plenty full supply of Mexican labor wasn't allowed.