Hands-On High
Most urban Californians tend to think of the San Joaquin Valley as the flat piece of land that stretches between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s a 22,000-square-mile patchwork of dusty towns, truck stops, and irrigated fields stitched together by highways, railroads, and power lines. An 18-wheeler loaded with tomatoes can stay locked in a driver’s rearview mirror for what seems like hours. At the hub of the valley lies Fresno County, population 800,000. Home to hundreds of food-processing factories and distribution warehouses, the area can be broiling in summer and damp with fog in winter. But, if you ask Youa Her, it might just as well be the Promised Land.
Youa, a dark-eyed 17-year-old, still recalls fleeing persecution and fighting in her native Laos, a neighbor of Vietnam, more than a decade ago. Youa and her family seized their chance to escape the Communist country, slipping across the border to Thailand and literally running for their lives. “I remember this Thai guy was like an officer or something, and he carried me on his back running through the bushes,” says Youa, who was just 4 at the time. “Once he dropped me hard on the ground, and I remember I cried, and everybody was scared and trying to hush me up. They whispered: ‘Don’t cry! Don’t cry! Someone will hear us!’ ”
After living in Thailand for several years, the Hers eventually made their way to the San Joaquin Valley, where thousands of other Hmong refugees had come looking for jobs in fields and factories. Even early on, though, there were signs that life in the hoped-for Eden wasn’t going to be easy. Fresno County’s jobless rates were lodged stubbornly in the teens, and Southeast Asian and Mexican workers were hit hard as farm jobs fell prey to creeping...
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