Kelly Harris was born and raised in Tule Lake, a town in northern Siskiyou County, a small community of farm workers, most of them Latino, where they are seen as just that, employees, not as people.
This was denounced by Harris, the organization's general director. TEACH ‒Training, Employment, and Community Help‒ (Training, Employment, and Community Help) Inc., who over the years has seen injustices and abuses against the Spanish-speaking community in the area.
“The Hispanic population has never been respected in this community; they are considered workers, not people,” he told journalists Manuel Ortiz and Peter Schurmann, for a joint project between Peninsula 360 Press and Ethnic Media Services.
The farms that fill the spaces of Tule Lake are owned by whites, who pass on their land to their children, and they in turn pass it on to theirs, perpetuating a space where there is no room for Latinos, at least not as anything other than workers.
“The people who own the farms haven’t changed, they’ve been passed down through generations. And these white farmers have taken their children out of the school districts here and put them in schools in Oregon, which are predominantly white. I think it’s a very racist place,” she said.
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