Word: melon
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...crew I came to know worked on a melon machine. It looks like a large dinosaur or insect. It has a lower conveyor belt on which the melons are placed. The belt is periodically turned on by the machine operator and brings the melons to one end of the machine where a second conveyor belt with vertical slats brings the melons up and over into a truck parked at one end of the machine. The machine moves sideways through the field and people walk behind it picking up melons and placing them on the belt. I would walk with them...
...saqueros, melon-sack workers, have the hardest job and are the most militant workers. They move through the fields in a bent-over position, cut and pick melons, and load up a sack on their back. When full, it weighs 70-80 lbs. and they have to run up the planks to the truck and dump the melons. It can happen that, to keep the pace, the truck starts moving while someone is still on a plank, and he falls and injures himself...
...work. However the saqueros were so strong for the UFW that they wrote and signed a petition to the Agricultural Labor Relations Board to hold the elections a few days earlier. Facing about 170 signatures, nearly all of the affected workers, the NLRB divided the election so that the melon sack workers could vote at the end of the last work week, instead of the middle of the next week. Thanks mainly to the saqueros, we won the election...
...farm community northeast of Los Angeles, have a choice of potential disasters. Would they rather risk being drowned, or drying up and blowing away? State officials want to drain the 521 million-gal, reservoir behind the nearby Littlerock Dam, whose water irrigates the peach and pear groves and melon fields that give the town what little prosperity it has. But the 53-year-old dam sits virtually atop the San Andreas Fault. Although the structure has survived severe tremors in the past, seismologists say it is located where the next big quake is most likely to strike-and state engineers...
Stretching some 58 miles along the Rio Grande lies Starr County, Texas, a barren land of sagebrush and mesquite trees. Most of its 20,000 inhabitants are Mexican-Americans who scrape together a living as stoop laborers during the melon-picking season. Yet in the past two or three years, brick houses worth as much as $75,000 have sprung up among the pink and green shanties that line Route 83 between Roma-Los Saenz and Rio Grande City. Outside some of them sit new refrigerators still in their shipping cartons...