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 people.
This was reported by Harris, general director of the organization TEACH ?Training, Employment, and Community Help? (Training, Employment and Community Assistance) 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 work between Península 360 Press and Ethnic Media Services.
The farms that fill the spaces of Tule Lake are owned by white people, who inherit their children, and they in turn inherit theirs, perpetuating a space where there is no room to be Latino, not at least as something more than workers. .
?The people who own the farms have not changed, they inherit them from generation to generation. And these white farmers have taken their children out of the school districts here and put them in Oregon schools, where they are predominantly white. “I think it is a very racist place,” he said.
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