Voice of Witness

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A few weeks ago, I took Amtrak from San Jose, California to Los Angeles. While looking out the window at the strawberry farms in the Central Valley, I saw the migrant farm workers hunched over or kneeling in the hot sun as they picked strawberries. As a child and teenager, going strawberry picking at the pick-it-yourself farms in Watsonville, near Santa Cruz, was always a fun trip for me and I looked forward to going. For these workers, the strawberries were their sustenance, not a weekend family outing. Despite my yearly trips to the farm country, I never knew much about how these farm workers lived until I read their personal accounts in the book, Underground America.

The book does an excellent job of showing the human side of …

Oscar Villalon of the San Francisco Chronicle hailed Underground America as an “excellent introduction to an ongoing social disaster.” He reviewed the book for KQED’s California Report. You can listen to a stream of the show on the California Report archive here. The full transcript is as follows:

 One thing is clear from Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. The U.S. is a doing a lousy job in how it treats the workers who toil in its fields, factories, and restaurants—even its offices and nurseries—but don’t have the papers saying they’re allowed to do what they’ve already been doing for so long. Beyond that, this surprising book presents a nuanced understanding of the problem. One so thoughtful, it may help us sort out what does remain unclear: how to improve the situation. 

Novelist and teacher Peter Orner, and

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By Susan Salter Reynolds

“UNDOCUMENTED immigrants,” Luis Alberto Urrea writes in his foreword, “have no way to tell you what they have experienced. . . . They are, by the very nature of their experience, invisible.”

There are 24 stories documented here. Editor Peter Orner and a team of graduate students from San Francisco State University went looking for stories for Voice of Witness, which publishes “oral histories of people around the world who have had their human and civil rights violated.” The storytellers hold many different jobs, have different reasons for leaving home and different expectations about U.S. life. Mr. Lai left China after officials found that he and his wife had violated the one-child policy. Saleem, 54, was summarily deported to Pakistan after Sept. 11. Roberto came from Mexico at 14; it took him 30 years to get a green …