This diary was written by the 12-year-old daughter of a Mexican immigrant dairy worker. Her name has been changed to protect her identity. Click here to go to the main story to read more about her family and to listen to a radio piece about immigrants and dairy farmers by FI2W‘s Valeria Fernández for NPR’s Latino USA.
Well, my name is Laura. I was born in Arizona and lived here for about a year or so when I moved to the dairy. So I’ve been living here for most of my life.
I live here with my mom, and dad, my two brothers and my little sister. It can be fun and boring living in a dairy.
For the first part, I don’t like living here ’cause the smell!! Yes, there’s times when it smells really awful. And times you can really smell nothing.
Also most the time there’s nothing to do! Well, like, there’s not much trailers here, only like 5! Also there’s not much kids my age around here.
Then sometimes I am really bored and can’t just walk to a friend’s house or something: it’s too far! So I might feel left out most of the time.
Now, the thing I do kinda like is that you can take a walk and see the cows; now I think that’s pretty fun to walk around. Also there’s a lot of open space here! In most houses there’s not a lot of space.
So here you can have a party and barbecue. Okay, so that’s partly most of my life. I’m mostly used to it, so I don’t mind much.
I hope my dad doesn’t lose his job and (we) live here for a couple more years or so. And I hope for those people that don’t want Mexicans here to think it over, ’cause Mexicans have done a big difference to this country to make it a better place.