Going Home provides us with a glimpse at the
physical realities of laboring as migrant farm workers.
Bunting acknowledges the ―heat in the strawberry
fields‖ and the ―sun pushing down between the rows
of tomatoes.‖ Bunting stops short of naming the farms
when she names the foods that are produced –
strawberries and tomatoes. The problem as presented
in this excerpt is the environmental conditions ―the
heat‖ and ―the sun pushing down‖ versus the owners
of the fields forcing workers to work in unsafe
working conditions. ―The work‖ is named as a noun
instead of ―working conditions‖ or ―working in the
fields.‖ This nominalization distances the reader from
the person working and also from the boss who makes
the working conditions. The excerpt closes with ―we
know too because we work on weekends and on
school vacations.‖ Bunting chooses to include child
labor in the text. The passage continues:
We see how tired Mama and Papa are at
night.
How Papa rubs Mama‘s shoulders.
How stiffly he moves.
―Why did you ever leave?‖ we ask.
―There is no work in La Perla. We are here for
the opportunities.‖
It is always the same answer.
The children observe their parents‘ physical pain. But
the specific cause – working fourteen hours a day
without breaks, without water, in sweltering heat – is
not named.
The lack of jobs in the book is decontextualized.
Bunting could have chosen to write, for example,
―now, there is no work in La Perla.‖ This would have
hinted at the changes in the global economy, a point
we return to in the conclusion.
As with the other books, in The Rag Coat we do
not see the lives of those profiting from the poverty of
this family -- the owners of the coal mine. The father
works long hours in the coal mine ―he worked down
in the black coal mines and didn‘t come up till the sun
was gone.‖ He ―gets sick with miner‘s cough and
couldn‘t work much.‖ Finally, the father dies. While
the working conditions of the mines are addressed,
the owners of the mines, those responsible for the
conditions, are not named.
Emotional Labor. Across the books, the reader is
confronted with another kind of labor – emotional
labor. Emotional labor might be thought of as the
management of feelings necessary to perform a job,
regardless of whether they are discrepant with
internal feelings. In Spuds, for example, Hesse (2007)
writes, ―Ma was workin‘ night shift. Our ma, she‘s
mighty fine, but lately it seems like she got nothin‘
left over, not even for us kids.‖ Similarly, in the book
Uncle Willie and the Soup Kitchen, the young boy
comments on how lonely the woman sleeping on the
bench looks and is relieved when he sees her come
into the soup kitchen. In Getting Through Thursday,
there is a dramatic scene in the book where the young
protagonist realizes that despite earning his place on
the honor roll at school, his mother could not provide
him with a party because she does not get paid until
Friday. The illustration captures him crying behind his
closed door. Through the words and illustrations, the