Imagine being confined to a crowded room without adequate ventilation with hundreds of other people. The last time you saw daylight was more than 10 hours ago. Frantically, you run the fabric through a sewing machine as if you were competing for Olympic gold. Only in these close combats is there no gold to be won. You can smell and almost feel the sweat of the worker next to you. And day after day, your hard work yields little reward earning you just a few dollars or even cents. Welcome to a modern sweatshop. This unfortunate truth happens all over the world, including the United States. The 2002 film, Real Women Have Curves, starring America Ferrera, while not as extreme as the example above, provides a great take on what workers at a Los Angeles clothing store had to endure. Ana Garcia (America Ferrera) and the women of her family work in her aunt's clothing store, located in Los Angeles. But the Garcias are not the only Latino workers in the United States to endure poor and harsh work experiences that have negatively impacted their lives. Indeed, there is a long history of the use and recruitment of Mexican-American labor in the United States that can be interpreted by this film. Various Latino groups, such as Mexican Americans, Cubans, and Dominicans, have had unique national, gender, political, legal, and environmental experiences that have impacted their lives as workers in the United States. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The United States and Mexican Americans have a long history that can be traced back to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and through World War II. As the United States fought on two battlefronts and rationed at home, cheap labor to support the war effort was in high demand. The federal government turned to its neighbor to the south and enacted the Bracero Program which allowed thousands of Mexicans to enter the United States to work as laborers. However, those who decided to take advantage of this attractive program experienced horrible working conditions. Soon, Mexican-American workers grew tired of this mistreatment, and several Mexican-American labor groups were created to advocate for safer working conditions, fair wages, etc. People Organized in Defense of the Earth and Her Resources (PODER), South West Organizing Project (SWOP), the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ) (Marquez 2012, 164-168) were just some of the many working groups organized to fight for underrepresented Mexican-American workers. Among these newly created groups arose political action leaders, such as Cesar Chavez, who began to lead the fight for equality in the working-class workforce. Chavez believed that the problem of labor inequality was that Latino workers were narcotized by the environmental conditions they endured. He said: “We have adapted, as humans do, to working conditions that few other Americans would accept. We work in open-air factories where temperatures rise to 115 degrees. We had to accept the great humiliations of the labor camps and of being looked down upon as “stupid Mexicans” (Oboler 1995, 60). In the film, Ana makes several comments regarding the conditions of the clothing store, such as: "it's so hot in here, I seriously feel like I'm in hell... all this steam makes me sweat like a pig" (Real Women Have Curves ). After Ana made these commentsand took off her shirt, the other women in the factory seem to accept these conditions, as that is all they knew. The actual “sweat” shop environment seen in the film is a great interpretation of the scenarios the Latino workforce experienced. While Mexican Americans faced hardships as workers in the United States, immigrants from the Dominican Republic faced challenges of their own. Since the late 80s of the 19th century, the United States has exerted significant influence over the Dominican Republic. Levitt explains, “As the Dominican state fell deeper and deeper into debt to its U.S. creditors during the first half of the 1900s, the U.S. government literally ran the country or managed its affairs from afar” (Levitt 2005, 230). By the mid-1920s, U.S. sugar companies and investors controlled nearly a quarter of the country's farmland. In 1930, the Republic elected a new president, Rafael Trujillo, who changed the direction of the agricultural, predominantly sugar economy, to an industrial economy. This change caused large-scale unemployment across the country. Starting in the 1960s, over 10,000 Dominicans left the Republic for the United States and continued every year, while the country's economy was in disarray. New immigrants to America had difficulty graduating from high school and earning college degrees, like many other Latino groups. Compared to Puerto Ricans and Cubans, Dominicans earned less money per year on average (Levitt 2005, 238-240). But when Dominicans began working in the United States, much of the money they earned was sent home to help families still in the Dominican Republic. While many Latino groups may send money back home, Dominican American communities do so more than any other group. A term called “transnational actor” is what describes the practice of continuing to help and maintaining a close connection to one's homeland. There is a strong correlation between the Mexican American garment workers portrayed in the film and the Dominicans. Each group had difficulty finding quality employment in the United States with fair wages. Dominicans, just like the women workers in the film, work in low-wage jobs in substandard conditions. Both Dominican Republicans and Mexican Americans have faced difficult times working in the United States, and Cuban-Americans are no exception. Cuban immigration to the United States began in a series of waves beginning in the 1950s. The first wave was made up of wealthier, upper-class Cubans who saw the signs of the revolution and left before they became too dangerous. Since this group could afford the expenses of leaving, they intended to return once it was safe. Unfortunately, Castro came to power and implemented Marxist-Leninist policies that prevented the first group from returning to their homeland. The second wave of leaving Cuba, “Those Who Seek,” sought better economic opportunities than those provided in Cuban socialist society. In response to “President Lyndon Johnson's “open door” policy that welcomed refugees from communism… for eight years, the governments of the United States and Cuba administered… the Freedom Flights, which brought Cubans from Varadero to Miami daily” ( Pedraza 1996, 267). This wave of Cuban immigrants provided additional cheap labor opportunities, making Cubans vulnerable to exploitation. Likewise, in the film, we see the hardships that Ana's mother faced as a first-generation Mexican-American immigrant working in a clothing store. With the new Cuban leader spreading the.