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Tomato machines carry farmworkers to sort newly-picked tomatoes in the fields of Stanislaus County, near the Westley Head Start center. Years ago, center supervisor Ismelda Cantu decided she didn't want to make the hot, dusty labor on the tomato machines her life work.

Migrant Head Start: Following the Seasons of the Soil

WESTLEY, California – Just as farmwork has changed, so has care for children of those who work in America’s fields. Head Start, for migrant farmworkers’ children, follows their parents’ seasons on the soil. A father weary after a day in the fields picks

Kay Mills February 15, 1996
The soul of the new ghetto lies in service workers like Mourtala Sall and his wife. He drives taxis six nights a week, and she cares for their two-year-old daughter while earning up to $50 an hour braiding hair for African-American women in their kitchens. They are saving to open a Senegalese restaurant, the first one, Mourtala hopes, to cross out of Harlem and into middle-class Manhattan. "Americans like our food," Mourtala says. "But white people won't go to Harlem."

Caste Party: Africa Arrives in America

The United Gnegnos of America held their annual ball recently at the Bronx’s Parkside Plaza. Gnegnos (pronounced “NYE nyose”) are a caste, actually the lowest caste, among the city’s 20,000-odd Senegalese immigrants. To attend a Gnegnos function, to have even heard of it

Joel Millman February 7, 1996
Denis Goldberg left South Africa after spending 22 years in prison. AP Wirephotos

South African Exiles

In exile, now, and far away, it is still easy to recall clearly the joy of sitting alone beside a waterhole, silently listening to the sounds of wild game. Waiting patiently, I anticipated and watched the movements of buck, of lion, of elephant

Steven Mufson July 25, 1995
William J. Schilling at a deposition of Jones Day attorneys in a lawsuit involving the Keating savings and loan.

In Whose Best Interests?

Mark J. Saladino was on the spot. Under professional ethics rules, the young attorney was required to maintain the confidences of his law firm’s clients. However, a coworker — a secretary to a powerful partner in his office — had come to him

Rita Jensen May 23, 1995
The aged members of the burial society sit in the Ceremonial Hall of the Jewish cemetery in Prague. Most of the 1,000 registered Jews in Prague are in their 70's and 80's. The chief of the cemetery, Arthur Radvanské, stands at right. He tended the bathrooms of the SS hospital in Auschwitz. He was ordered to massage Josef Mengel every Monday and Friday from 1942-1945 at Auchwitz.

Judenrein

Text and photos by Jill Freedman The Old New Synagogue in Prague is the oldest surviving synagogue north of the Alps and is barely functioning. It dates from the late 13th century. Most of the religious observant Jews in Prague are in their

Jill Freedman May 17, 1995
Clara and Elery Corson 1983. Husband and wife.

Time And Time Again: Poverty In A Maine Village

Photographers enter people’s lives for periods as short as minutes or as long as weeks. Constrained by deadlines and journalism’s compressed time, the assignment ends and we leave. We never stay, we rarely know what becomes of the people we photograph. Editors may

Steve Rubin May 17, 1995
A few miles from Nyeri, the heart of Mau Mau land, these Kikuyu children beg money from a passerby. Behind them are seen the round mud huts clustered together in protection against Mau Mau raids.

Kenya: Barely Escaping Rwanda

By Bill Berkeley and Photos by AP/Wide World Photos By the benighted standards of East Africa, the spectacle of refugees is all too grimly familiar. In a dense labyrinth of makeshift huts with scrap-metal walls and roofs fashioned from black plastic sheeting, children

Bill Berkeley May 17, 1995
Chris and her kids are crushed by the AIDS-related death of the two-year-old son of a close friend they met at an AIDS family support group. The death of the little boy, Jesse, makes Chris wonder if she can survive the death of her own children. Weeks later, despair gives way to practical considerations. She begins to plan custody arrangements for her children should she die before them. Photo by Randy Olson

An American Family Lives with AIDS

In the last three months of her life, Christine Skubis Whitman passed through the layers of dying from the AIDS virus in much the same way a newborn infant learns to live. Megan and Melody are six-year-olds fraternal twins living markedly different lives

Doug Root and Randy Olson May 16, 1995
Against a backdrop of children's artwork, Santee School kindergarten teacher Margie Oyama (right) tell Tin Hour, his daughter Marina and head Start transition project family advocate Nisseth Sath how well Marina is progressing.

Head Start: Keeping The Edge

SAN JOSE–Tin Hout sits in one of the pint-sized chairs in which parents inevitably find themselves when they confer with their child’s kindergarten teacher. His five-year-old daughter Marina stands shyly, but attentively, beside him as Santee School teacher Margie Oyama reports that the

Kay Mills May 15, 1995
The Jamaica Progressive League attracted more than 300 people in a new voter/citizens drive held a Guayanan retaurant in Brooklyn's Flatbush section this March. Would-be citizens paid $120 each for photographs, fingerprints and notarized registration forms. The first citizens will be sworn in this summer. Photo by Rachel L. Cobb

Brooklyn’s Anti-Poverty Workers: Caribbean Immigrants

Family values, religion and community renewal are among the pillars of conservative ideology, and rallying-points of Republican legislators who tend to represent districts that are rural, white and affluent. In Democratic Brooklyn, particularly the mainly black, mainly poor neighborhood called Fort Greene, the

Joel Millman May 13, 1995
A barge in the Snake River, near Lewiston, Idaho.

Slackwater

Photos and article by APF Fellow Blaine Harden   LEWISTON, Idaho — We sailed west at sunset on water the color of dark chocolate. The sun disappeared slowly into the downstream distance, notching itself between knobby, bald hills and burning out in a

Blaine Harden May 30, 1994
Denise Turner, 34 and her niece, Delenna Williams, and nephew, Derrick Williams. The two children were disfigured in a fire that killed their mother. Four years later, Delenna was shot in the chest, wrist and forehead while she and her aunt were searching for a new apartment to live in. Photo by John Sundlof

Getting Caught Up: Families Pay The Price

CHICAGO–“Oh, he’s a nice-looking young man,” Rose Doyle said softly, of the tall, muscular 24-year-old in jail togs who was being escorted into the courtroom by a sheriff’s deputy. The man was Deron Jones. On the night of March 4, 1993, he pumped

Steve Bogira May 28, 1994
Umulisa is an orphan in the displaced camp in Rutare in northern Rwanda. Too young to know her own name and unaccompanied by relatives, she has been named by people in the camp.

Terror Surrounds Rwanda’s Orphans

By Bill Berkeley and Photos by Mary Jane Camejo Sitting cross-legged on a wooden bench in an abandoned school tucked amid the steep mountain slopes of central Rwanda, 13-year-old Reveriani Rurangwa delicately runs a finger along the smooth, shiny scar that wraps around

Bill Berkeley May 16, 1994
This huge sawdust pile behind this West Athens saw mill shows the prosperity reached in the late 19th century. Photo courtesy of the Athens Historical Society

The Timber Industry and the Felling of West Athens, Maine

Everett York leans back and rests his massive weight on a worn Lazy Boy recliner that belongs indoors but looks right at home amidst the miscellaneous junk, cars and car parts that litter his trailer’s yard. Close by, his wife, Rena, reclines on

Steve Rubin February 24, 1994
Judge Kenneth Turner has ruled the Shelby County (TN) Juvenile Court for 30 years. Photo by The Memphis Commercial Appeal

Misery Funds a Legal Fiefdom

Memphis, Tennessee – Bronze dogs guard the neo-classical facade of the Shelby County Juvenile Court. Mahogany desks and softly-lit oil paintings grace the administration offices. It is immaculate, from the gleam of the main lobby floor to the glare off the bullet-proof glass

Nina Bernstein February 20, 1994
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni gives a speech in Wobulenzi in the Luwero Triangle. The President has put reconcilliation above retribution for the country's past massacres. Perhaps a million Ugandans were killed in the last two decades. Photo by Mary Jane Camejo

Paying for Past Crimes: Uganda’s Murderous Lessons for Rwanda

On a Sunday morning in June in the ravaged Rwandan town of Kabuga, on the outskirts of Kigali, the capital, tens of thousands of hungry and bewildered men, women and children wandered aimlessly amid the wreckage of their lives. In the previous two

Bill Berkeley February 16, 1994
Buddy MacKay points to a headline in his hometown paper, the Ocala Star-Banner, proclaiming he won the Senate seat instead of Connie Mack. The photo appeared in the Palm Beach Post on Nov. 10, 1988 Photo by Bob Shanley, staff photographer, Palm Beach Post

A Tale of Weird Drop-Offs and Jump-Ups: Are Computer Vote Counts Honest?

TALLAHASSEE AND SOUTH FLORIDA–Speaking softly, but with an occasional “damn,” the lieutenant governor of Florida, Democrat Buddy McKay, said last spring in his office in the Florida State Capitol that he believed a seat in the U.S. Senate was stolen from him six

Ronnie Dugger February 16, 1994
Elvin Eldorado Harden, the author's great-grandfather.

Saved by the River

Arno Harden sneaked aboard a boxcar in Great Falls, Montana, in the late summer of 1932. He was twenty-one, fresh out of work, alone, and heading West. Everything he owned he carried with him. He had a bedroll and a pillowcase half-stuffed with

Blaine Harden February 9, 1994
Boggan found that exercising his right to a jury tial resulted in years more imprisonment than most of his fellow inmates who committed crimes where victims were injured or killed. He is scheduled to remain in Illinois prisons until 2025. Photo by John Sundlof

Using Your Rights Means Extra Years in Prison

Vincent Boggan is among the few inmates in the Pontiac Correctional Center–a maximum-security prison in Pontiac, Illinois–who avail themselves of the free classes offered. He has already earned an “Associate of Applied Science”–a vocational degree–and now is working on an “Associate in General

Steve Bogira February 2, 1994