| Simone - Fotos
del Pueblo Gallery / 5-c05-construction Susan Simone (c) |
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There is one over-riding reason that Hispanic laborers are coming to North Carolina: They are in search of work to support their families. The weak economies of Mexico, Central and South America have forced men to leave their families, daughters to leave the protection of home, and new wives to follow young husbands to a place where they have no language skills and few friends to turn to if there is trouble. Life in North Carolina can be rich in many ways, but, for Hispanic workers, it is always a life initiated because of hardship.
“I have a family of six children and a wife that I left behind,” one hotel worker told me. “I have not seen them for eight years.”
In Los Obreros, I have used the hard gravel as a background to reflect the long days of work in the hot sun. I created wooden frames by selecting and sizing pieces of wood from photographs taken at the same building sites in Chapel Hill and Carrboro where the black and white photographs were taken. I put each worker in a frame to emphasize the separation, the way in which each man must come here to find his own solution to his own problems, making his own adjustments, under-taking his own risks and developing his own job skills.