“Gainesville [Georgia] isn’t quite Mayberry. It’s a bigger southern town that plausibly calls itself the Poultry Capital of the World. The economy here ebbs and flows with the fortunes of big chicken companies like Coleman Natural Foods, Prime Pak, Victory, Kock Foods, and Fieldale Farms. On one side of town, you can’t miss the smell, even with the windows rolled up.” “Once upon a time, most of the hardest labor in the chicken plants was done by black workers, and back then the area the workers lived in was called Niggertown. Then, after the Vietnam War, the town ghetto gained a Southeast Asian flavor with an influx of refugees, and the plants were suddenly manned by Vietnamese.” “In there [Vietnamese] place came the Latinos, mostly from Mexico. Two decades ago Latinos made up 8 percent of the population here. By 2010 that number was 42 percent.” “But now the Latinos, too, are starting to leave, which may be part of a larger trend of Latino immigrants returning home as the American economy worsens, making the country’s less appealing sides less worth putting up with. In this small Georgia community, for instance, the endless roadblocks and car stops mean that most local Latino residents get around using an exhausting regime of taxis, buses, and bicycles, and the constant harassment wears on them. ‘People are leaving,’ says Aaron Rico, Jose’s brother and another Fiesta cabdriver. ‘Go to a city or something. It is getting to be too much.’” Matt Taibbi “DIVIDE: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap” Page 208
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:09:14 +0000