Apartment Choice

By Sarah Butrymowicz and Meredith Kolodner Alduha Leon and Jared Sanders, roommates at Savannah State University , dined on hot dogs in their apartment on Thanksgiving Day of their sophomore year. They had decided to skip feasting with family in Atlanta to pick up extra hours at their airport jobs loading luggage onto planes. Payday wasn’t until Friday, though, and Leon only had $5 left on his food stamps card . During the three years they spent at Savannah State , Sanders and Leon struggled to pay their tuition, fees and living expenses. They accumulated more than $50,000 in loans between the two of them, despite working up to 40 hours a week. After exhausting themselves working late or overnight shifts so they wouldn’t have to miss class, and finding their grades suffering, they dropped out in 2015, joining a growing pool of Georgians who have debt but no degree. More than 108,000 students who had taken out federal loans withdrew from Georgia’s public colleges and universities bet...

Editor’s note: The following has been excerpted from a longer chapter featuring the Arroyo family : Maria Ayala Arroyo (46), Pedro Ayala Hernandez (55) and Guadalupe Ayala Arroyo (21). Read more oral histories like it in Chasing the Harvest by Gabriel Thompson (2017 Verso Press). Read our interview with Thompson here. Farmwork is often a family affair. Parents bring their children to labor alongside them in the fields. Workers learn about a job opening and tell their relatives, the word spreading quickly from uncle to aunt to cousin. If a crew sticks together long enough, it may find that most members are related to each other in one way or another. Such is the case for the crew of the Arroyo- Hernandez family . Maria and Pedro came to the United States in 1994, 10 days after getting married in Mexico. Their plan was to stay for a couple of years, save money, and return to Mexico to open a business. Then they had their first child, Guadalupe, and those plans changed. For more tha...