here anyone who has even a patch of land plants tomatoes because tomatoes are the product that is most profitable and down here everything revolves around the tomato crop a constant cycle of small factories spring up to crush tomatoes and process them and then sell them to major food groups like Cirio as a result all these Africans come here to spend the summer working and what they find is very harsh living conditions because they work all day long and then at night many of them are forced to sleep in the countryside in abandoned houses without running water or electric power or any conveniences at all but it’s still an economic opportunity for them because if they work hard like this for a couple of years they think that they’ll be able to set aside a little savings and when they go back home it will allow them to rescue their families from starvation and poverty so the first ones to arrive here send for their compatriots from Ghana and Nigeria their neighbors and relatives and friends until in our region there are many thousands of Africans which is something that greatly disrupts the mindset of these small towns

in these towns for the most part the people hate blacks they revile them they can’t stand them because they consider them inferior beings in practical terms animal beasts even though those same people who hate immigrants so ferociously as a group and can’t stand to have them around if they happen to have a neighbor who is an African who comes to ask to borrow a cup of sugar a little water or some bread they’ll help them enthusiastically I’ve personally seen people who hated blacks and truly considered them to be animals make unexpectedly generous gestures for instance when one of the few husband and wife African couples around these parts had a baby the neighbors the very same neighbors who had always hated and despised black people now fell all over themselves to give them hand me downs that no longer fit their children car seats strollers and all the rest of that sort of stuff

which is to say while immigrants taken collectively are seen as an enemy immigrants taken individually are accepted and don’t bother anyone and soon everyone finds that they’re fine people it might happen that one evening at dinner at home you hear someone talk about a young man of color whom you know by sight and your mother tells the family that she heard from the neighbor who rented him a little room along with four other Nigerians that this young man back home where he comes from took a degree in electronic engineering and everyone murmurs poor boy what a misfortune even though he studied and took a degree he’s forced to do stoop labor in the fields then however it’s astonishing to see that the poor boys who work seven or eight or ten of them on your neighbor’s farm really are worked like animals and you see that those same people who were talking about them as unfortunate victims afterward on the job exploit them and mistreat them and sometimes even beat them and really do treat them like slaves