Alex Sánchez

Today will go down in history as the day Colorado lawmakers decided that farmworkers should work 56 hours before they earn overtime pay. It is a slap in the face to overworked and already underpaid immigrants who do the backbreaking work this country depends on, work most Americans no longer do. I do not have easy words to describe what many Latinos are feeling tonight. It is grief. It is anger. It is betrayal. People who have never had their community singled out by hostile policies may...

For many of us on Colorado’s Western Slope, the struggle for farmworker dignity is deeply personal. My father was a farmworker when he first moved to this country, working as an undocumented laborer in the orchards around Hotchkiss and Delta in the 1970s. He worked in the fields of California as well, where I was born, not very far from the birthplace of America’s farmworkers movement. So when I see Colorado’s state legislature advancing a bill that undermines the dignity of farmworkers by...

Truth, we have learned, is short-lived. Facts can be fleeting. Reality is easily distorted. This is the world in which we live, the nation where the president threatens “the day of reckoning and retribution” and then proclaims innocence when it arrives with deadly certainty. Twice. Still, we have our own eyes. And the cameras are everywhere. So we know better than to believe that Alex Pretti, the man murdered by federal agents in the streets of Minneapolis last month, was a “would-be...