In class yesterday after our activity, the discussion about hispanics being landscapers arose. I have to admit, I was the one that wrote it on the piece of paper of how they mow lawns. I live in an all white subdivision of my neighborhood, Elk Grove Village. My neighbors always hired hispanics to mow their lawns every week. As a child, that's all I saw hispanics doing. In fact, I was rather annoyed because they would always wake me up at 7 am when they were mowing my neighbor's lawns.

My dad is Vice President of a packaging company. In the warehouse, it is predominantly hispanics. My dad is more conservative, and doesn't give them much respect. Some he hired were illegal, and many others didn't even get paid minimum wage. My mom and I always had issues with this. 2 summers ago I didn't have a "real" summer job. I was just doing temp work here and there. There was a project in the warehouse my dad needed extra help on, and it would have been cheaper hiring me and some friends to make cash then bringing in temp workers. I was the only white person in this large warehouse. I took 5 years of Spanish, so I knew how to vaguely communicate with them. The warehouse was not air-conditioned, and in the hot summer months it was rather unbearable. All the workers were acting kind of weird towards me, one because my dad is a complete asshole in the workplace, and two because they felt if I had a bad impression of them, there goes their job. It was a rather unique experience. After a few weeks they realized I was just a nice, down to earth girl working just as hard as them to make some money. When my dad saw how miserable I was working in the warehouse in the heat, he made a $20,000 investment installing huge gigantic fans in the ceiling to cool the place off a little bit. It kind of sucked that my dad only did that because I started working there, but the hundreds of other employees in the warehouse greatly appreciated it! All in all, it was an interesting work experience I have on my resume and I was able to see first hand how low income families work in the workplace, and I was put in the position working right along next to them.