Transcript:

To ensure a steady flow of migrant farm workers, farm owners built labor camps where many manong and manang lived with their children. The design and condition of these housing units varied. Some were built as barracks where many transient men would live; others housed single families. Typically, they were maintained to barely passable conditions, but manong and manang transformed them into homes where they could relax and play. In this interview, Shirley Ancheta, the daughter of Julio Valiente and Delfina Rivera Ancheta, describes a typical scene in a labor camp. The interview is paired with a photograph from the Cawaling Family Collection, which depicts manong inside of a camp on their day off. 

Usually it was the same cook. There’ll be one person sitting at a table playing solitaire. […] There may be a Playboy calendar on the wall somewhere or a Mexican calendar on the wall somewhere from the grocery store. […] And there would be lots of food. The women who would come, like the wives, like my mom and others they get busy cooking the pastries, things that she would make out of the sweet rice flour and fry up and put the brown sugar and stuff on top of it and the coconut milk. So they would get busy doing that while the men did the butchering and the— They’d go down to the beach if, if it was low tide and do the mussels. […] My brother and I, you know, when our parents would say “Okay, we’re going to camp” and we thought, “Oh why, when are we going to go to the real camp?” Cause we’re thinking summer camp. “ You always say we’re gonna go camping, but we’re gonna go see those guys.” And my mom would say “Don’t talk like that cuz these are our friends. […] They got stuck over here. This is their life.