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READING LEVEL 8
Hispanic People Do the Harder Jobs
Miriam Reyes
A few months after I moved here from Mexico, I got a job at a chicken plant. A lot of Hispanic people worked there. At the chicken plant, we cut the chicken breasts and weighed them. It was a simple job, but the difficult part was working in the cold and standing up for more than eight hours.
In that chicken plant, I understood that being Hispanic meant working harder than other races because the bosses would always send the Hispanic people to do the harder jobs. Even the Hispanic bosses sent Hispanic people to do the harder jobs. However, we didn’t mind doing the hardest jobs because we came to this country to improve our lives.
Every year, more and more Hispanic people graduate from college, and I feel very happy and grateful because that means Hispanic people aren’t just useful for hard jobs. I am hopeful that future generations of Hispanic immigrants will be treated with more respect than what I have experienced so far. Meanwhile, we must demonstrate to our children through our actions that hard work and education are valuable assets that will provide them with opportunities and confidence that many of us did not have when we arrived in the U.S.
Miriam Reyes is a student at the Fort Smith Adult Education Center in Fort Smith, AR. She is from Mexico. She is happily married and has three wonderful children.