Ellis Island is located right in front of NY City. The Statue of Liberty is not very far away. I have been to NY and visited the Statue of Liberty, but today I found a link about its origin and history that I would like to share :
http://education.eastmanhouse.org/discover/kits/imageNotes.php?id=8
Lewis Hine took pictures of immigrants arriving to US from all over Europe from 1905. You can see Italians, Jews, Slavic people, Germans, etc. All of them after a very hard trip in awful conditions, passing the medical tests at Ellis Island and starting a new life in a new country. He also describes the kind of work they did after that, the children working in mines and cotton factories, people without one arm after work accidents, etc. I cannot help but remember the stories from grandparents here in Spain and the job conditions they had after a disastrous civil war.
In this small part of the world we have overcome this (no matter the economic crisis we are "suffering") but we cannot forget that with our lifestyle is based on these conditions still existing in some other countries. Our wonderful cheap clothes, that we happily use for a couple of years and throw to the basket, are done in India, in China, in Thailand, where there is no right for workers or children. Is this situation creating some kind of wealthness for them, or huge firms and consumers are the only ones to profit? Do we really care in our noisy date-to-date? Can we do something?
Some movies about this :
- Voces contra la globalización : Otro mundo es posible
- Invisibles / The Invisibles
- La pesadilla de Darwin / Darwin's nightmare : This one is a tough one, gosh! It also has a web page : http://www.darwinsnightmare.com
... and a very clarifying slideshow on how trade in our globalised world works :
http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/trade/rigged_rules
I also saw something in the pictures by Lewis Hine that we may have lost... Humanity.
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