Sean Dwyer

5/8

WC: 345

“How unnatural can you get! Big juicy orange and you got to take it in forkfuls instead of letting all that juice run on your hands and then licking your fingers. But at the time I thought it was hip. For years I thought it was. Then one day back in South Carolina and I picked some figs and stuck them directly in my mouth. I didn’t dare tell anyone that I had been eating prosciutto and figs rolled together with a fork.” (Smart-Grosvenor 66)

“What you don’t see is tomato fields. But they are there, hidden behind ten-feet-tall berms covered in scruffy vegetation and broken sporadically by access roads festooned with “No Trespassing” signs and guarded by private security men. Less than an hour after leaving Naples, you round a long curve and enter the city of Immokalee.” (Estabrook 73)

“This subcontractor system enables a corporate farmer to avoid direct responsibility for day-to-day abuses that occur in his fields.” (Estabrook 101)

“Because of the crucial role played by victims and witnesses in the Flores case, congressional legislators inserted a clause in the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act allowing victims of slavery who cooperate with law enforcement officials to receive T-1 visas, documents that allow them to stay and work in the country for four years and can lead to permanent residency. In the Navarrete case, Lucas Domingo and his fellow slaves agreed to testify against the family that had brutalized them in return for T-1 visas, even though they feared for their lives, especially if the brothers were acquitted.”  (Estabrook 92)

Yates Set to Testify about White House Meeting

Barrett, D., & Horwitz, S. (2017, May 08). Yates says she expected White House to take action on Flynn. Retrieved May 08, 2017, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/yates-set-to-testify-about-white-house-meeting/2017/05/08/ade2ca2c-33f7-11e7-b4ee-434b6d506b37_story.html?utm_term=.80e82fbf4ca6

The assigned reading this week had a theme of personal affliction even when it is not presented as such. As the daughter of Steven F. Grover reaches out to strangers, her dad coerces them. As the Navarette brother breaks down and pleads guilty to five of the less serious charges involving harboring aliens, Don Pacito drinks quietly in the streets living in fear of Navarretes’ friends. In Tomatoland, the assigned chapters started with the funny-money prices of the homes in Naples and I couldn’t help but notice the contrast to what the Navarretes did to other humans to steal some of the hardest earned $240,000 from people working in a dishonest system for honest reasons. The first quote regarding the tomato fields describe the hidden signs that are shown in plain sight, and in the context of the second quote from Tomatoland, the subcontractor system separates the handle of the whip from the tassels with one hour long drive from Immokalee.The first quote describes her change in perspective returning to South Carolina from Paris, where wealth set the trend of swanky to flaunt the normative with absurdity, to enjoy the metaphoric orange juice making her fingers sticky just to lick the juice off. In Vibration Cooking, Vertemae touches upon her experience questioning what man would want a 6-foot-tall woman.  She decided that the bohemian life was the only one for her because they were tolerant of everyone, and she couldn’t have been more right when she was learning to cook on an alcohol burner with a six-foot-tall Swedish girl in Paris. As described in the final listed quote, Lucas Domingo and his fellow slaves are getting oppressed in a system that creates pathways for exploitation and provides a laughable jail sentence for inhumane crimes if the slave drivers are convicted. A T-1 visa allows them a chance to be exploited less, as the indentured servants did hundreds of years ago, for they have survived the first wave – and must continue navigating rough surf to eventually be able to exist with several unjust stipulations.