Harvest Of Shame

Harvest Of Shame, an interesting and touching black and white documentary from the early 1960’s, documents and exposes the deploring lives of thousands of American migrant cultural workers narrated and dissected by one of the best and first American broadcast journalists called Edward Roscoe Murrow. The principal objective of this movie is not only to show the poor and miserable lives that all of these people live, but to let all the other Americans who are above these workers on the social and wealth scale know that the people who pick up their fruits, vegetables, and grains have no voice, no power, and no help to battle the inequities and mistreatment they receive.

The movie opens up with rural images of thousands of migrant workers being transported in trucks with a short introduction by Edward Murrow and some occasional interventions of parts of an interview made to the secretary of labor after he saw the impacting images, and to the different people who have seen the lives the workers lead. Most of the secretary’s commentaries depict the exclusion that these people have since they are basically people who are silently crying out for assistance to stop harvesting the fields of their shame, or at least to hope for potential raises and better work conditions. From Florida to New Jersey, and from Mexico to Oregon, these people including women and children travel around the states following the sun and the demand from the seasonal goods while working around a hundred and thirty-six days earning and average of nine hundred dollars a year.

After this short but powerful preface, the documentary continues with two shocking interviews made by David Lowe to two under-educated women who are the heads of their families; Ms. Dobey, wh...

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... to exist in our days, needs to be changed more if we ever want to achieve a true progression in our economy and society where not only the rich get the biggest piece of the pie. After researching a little and analyzing numbers and statistics from the past and present, fifty-one years have done two basic things to the harvesters of shame, their wages have improved a little bit and the ethnicity of the workers has changed from poor whites and blacks to poor Hispanics, bringing new factors into play such as the pros and cons that hiring immigrant workers bring to companies. Even though, these potential improvements appear to be substantial and beneficial shifting the views many workers and farmers had in the past, not all people receive the same treatments and benefits some companies share, thousands of immigrant workers have become the new mute slaves of America.