The Plum Plum Pickers

In the passage of Plum Plum Pickers, Raymond Barrio suggests that the life of immigration has been view of illustration to show what they really stand for into the society from past to now. It talks about the opinion of existence between the lowest and highest social class with kind of allusion and repetition. He describes character’s personality by substance of setting to irony the exploitation existing as very seriously.

According to the first section of passage, Barrio set up the image of a character named Manuel “was trapped in an endless maze of apricot trees, as though forever, neat rows of them, neatly planted, row after row, just like the blackest bars on the jails of hell.” It’s an amazing image to emphasize the character’s mood and create serious feeling of farm works, and then it shows the immigrations are plum pickers. Maybe plums mean the goal of dream or excellent thing. In the meanwhile, Manuel’s name can interpreted as man or Mexican, even of manual labor. And also the passage’s tone seems to represent as sad and lonely. It shows many images how the worker’s lives being, such as their plum picking and lunch time. There takes an important position to create a background of workers, which they work at the bad place, hot dry day and short lunch time and so on. Barrio narrates the existence being in the lowest working class, which stand for unfair benefit and rights. He used repetitions to emphasize farm worker’s situation.

In the middle of passage, the author describes another character that named Roberto Morales. According to Roberto Morales’s name, it’s antagonist of the story can be represented as moral less. Morales is not a good man, but he is looked as a kind of clever criminal and seems to be a lead of farm and the group people named gueros, which have no concern to everything with crime by their conception and religion. So there shows that they stand for an unnormal conception into their lives with moral less, loveless and selfish. They play a role of upper social class to enjoy the unjustifiable acts to last more distance during different social class people.

At the part of end, there’s an announcement to workers by Roberto Morales that he will take two cents from every buckets, and then Manuel comes out and insists his thought that Morales ever promises them to take nothing. Manuel says to against this unfair offer. For workers, those are the unjustifiable exploitation. As Maxist definitions, working class is individuals who sell their labor power for wages and who do not own the means of production. This is the situation what the farm owner does and the immigration always takes position as this working class with less skill to become the target of exploitation leader. It represents the unbalance society being with unfair creative existence in modernist.