Ricky is an 11-year-old migrant worker. During the summer, he travels with his family from their home in Rio Grande City, Texas, to farms farther north. There they spend 10-12 hours a day in the hot sun picking fruit and vegetables and packing the harvest for market. Ricky is not protected by the federal laws that govern the hours, wages, and…

Journalist Isabel Valle lived and traveled for 1 year with the family of Raul and Maria Elena Martinez, migrant farmworkers who make their permanent home in south Texas. Her reports appeared every Sunday in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin's award-winning series "Fields of Toil." This book compiles those weekly reports, which reveal the…

Children and childhood are almost completely ignored in most history books, encyclopedias, anthologies, and almanacs, which concentrate on the achievement of the adult half of the world's population. This book is intended to fill the gap by focusing on childhood, and presents an array of facts, anecdotes, profiles, and observations about children…

For many years, farmworkers in Zimbabwe have been a marginalized and neglected community. This book describes the lives of hired farmworkers' children in their own words. Over 850 children aged 10-17 were interviewed or wrote essays in English or Shona. Nearly all the children were in elementary school in grades 4-7. Many farm children undergo…