NYT: Mexican-Americans Struggle for Jobs

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/national/13jobs.html?ei=5094&en=3c6c04f6cf766604&hp=&ex=1097640000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=

Ernestina Miranda left Mexico for the United States in 1979 in the trunk of a car.

She found a job sewing blue jeans in one of the dozens of clothing factories here. Work was steady, six days a week, 12 hours a day. She married and bought a trailer - without running water or electricity - on a plot of land. She was awarded citizenship in the late 1980's.

Now, those blue jeans jobs that brought Mrs. Miranda and thousands of others like her north have gone south, to Mexico.

"My American dream has turned into a nightmare," she said, over a glass of strawberry Kool-Aid in her listing trailer. Until recently, she had made a life on $7.50 an hour. She has become a temporary worker in a plastics plant that used to be based in Michigan, earning minimum wage, no benefits, no security. Her husband, Miguel, is unemployed. The mortgage on the slapdash home is in peril.

privileged workers getting benefits and stability and all the others from the U.S. to Mexico to China or India competing furiously with each other for scraps that the owners throw at them.

to be some ethnic divide?

than the overall number.