RASCOE: You know, so now you're doing this work. And that's kind of when we had to take it seriously and, like, actually work and not just be there following our parents around. And then once we were around 13, 14, 15, we started asking to get paid. And so when we were younger, maybe younger than 13, probably, none of us were paid. And I think to a degree, he understood that the parents just had no other choice. He really cared about the children that came to the farm. It was a very small farm, maybe less than 20 employees, probably. LOPEZ GONZALEZ: So at the hog farm, they did. RASCOE: Did the people at the farms know that, you know, you were a kid, and you were working?
And just the impact seeped into every part of our life. But at the time, I wanted nothing more than to be like everyone else and not have - like, not only be extremely different in the way that I looked, being, you know, brown and Latina and immigrant but to having everybody know what my parents did and what I did. And I hated it because the bus would pick us up from school, and there was no hiding that part of us. I remember growing up and my dad's hands always smelling that - like the smell of the feed, and the smell just lingers. MARIA LOPEZ GONZALEZ: The smell stays with you. She would put together bales of hay or pick blueberries alongside her parents, but it's the long days of working on a hog farm that stays with her. She is the deputy director of El Pueblo, a nonprofit based in North Carolina that advocates for migrant workers' rights.
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