Mobile Lab: Wednesday, April 10th

An Interview With Esperanza Ortega, Migrant Farm Worker 

GOAL: What was the migrant camp experience like for Esperanza and the thousands of real Mexican farm laborers who crossed the border in the 1930's? Your task is to research, develop, and present a "live" interview with Esperanza Ortega. The purpose of your interview is give your audience an understanding of the day-to-day challenges faced by Mexican migrants. Your interview must include 10 well-developed questions and answers.

To draw inspiration for your interview, listen to the taped interviews of Jose Flores and Augustus Martinez, two Mexican migrant workers interviewed in the 1930's. Esperanza Ortega is a "somewhat fictional character" (author Pam Munoz Ryan created Esperanza from her recollections of stories her grandmother told her about her own migration from Mexico to the fields of California). Jose Flores and Augustus Martinez, however, are real characters who labored as migrant farm-workers during the 1930's, just like Esperanza. Their interviews are now online at the Library of Congress's Voices of the Dust Bowl Collection: Interviews with Jose Flores and Augustus Martinez.