RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: TRUE HISTORY
A
Long Hard Road Part IV
They
came to California on a promise of jobs
Where
there was fruit on the vine and peaches
on
trees just ripe for the picking
But
there was way more refugees than
there
was jobs
And
there was a whole lot of people with skin
a
shade darker working those fields of plenty
long
before the dust bowl migration
They
gathered together in sprawling camps of
makeshift
shelters and worked like slaves of labor
Long
hard hours for little pay
Kicked
and spit at like stray dogs
When
the boss man came up short on his payroll
Or
got a little greedier than he usually was
He’d
call the immigration bulls
The
Mexicanos would go a running
Those
who weren’t fast enough or were
Just
too tired to run would be rounded up
Like
cattle and took down to the border
Sometimes
they took em in planes
A
man name of Woody sang about it:
The crops are all in and the peaches are
rotting
The oranges piled in the creosote dumps
They’re flying em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mes amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won’t have your names when you ride
the big airplane
and all they will call you will be deportee
You
might wonder how the poor white folk
couldn’t
see that what happened to them back
in
Oklahoma is what happened to the
Mexicans
here in California
Cheated
out of their homes and pushed off
their
land
You
might wonder how they couldn’t see that
What
happened to them happened to the
Cherokee
a way back in Tennessee
It
ain’t about the color of your skin
It’s
about how much you have in your pocket
It
ain’t about how you talk or where you’re from
It’s
about greed
It’s
about never being satisfied with what you
have
but always wanting more
It’s
about not caring who you have to cheat or
abuse
to get what you want
It’s
all connected
One
long hard road
It’s
all the same thing
And
we’re all in it together
This land is your land
This land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forest
to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for me and you
(for
Alan Arnopole and Woody Guthrie)