"Blood Wine" Corrido de Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez by Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez.

The stories of the people are told by the people, in poems, ballads and specifically in Mexico, with Corridos.

Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez with her Prometido, left her pueblo and family in Oaxaca, up on the Sierra Madre Occidental for California, hoping to earn some money with which to support the family they hoped to have, she was two months pregnant.

They call it "The American Dream", for some, I'm told, it becomes a reality, but for the overwhelming majority, there is the rude awakening to the "American Nightmare", in a land which values machines more than human beings, all in the pursuit of the "All-Mighty Dollar" Which will make their own "American Dream" A reality, leaving in their wake, pain, misery and often death.

As it was with María Isabel, on her third day of work, she collapsed of heat exhaustion in a farm that didn't provide human working conditions for workers laboring under a head-splitting sun in the fields of Lodi California. where the summer temperatures raise above 100 degrees, just like in the fateful day of her preventable and premature death.

"Jiménez was working in vineyards owned by West Coast Grape Farming, which is owned in part by Fred Franzia of California's Bronco Wine Co – the producer of the Charles Shaw brand, also known as Two Buck Chuck.

Her fiancée told officials that the supervisors did not call for medical help after Jimenez collapsed, didn't offer her water or shade, and later told him to lie to hospital staff about his fiancee's age and whom she was working for."

Her bosses didn't care and she didn't get a sendoff as big as the one that Tim Russert got, whom they say was a great man, but her compañeros Farm Workers remembered her on a march from Lodi to Sacramento where they demonstrated their outrage at the neglect to enforce Labor Laws in the fields by authorities (Cal OSHA), we learned that the same employer had been previously cited and fined for similar violations.

Elsewhere, many of us who also heard about her story, became sad, outraged, angry...

Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez and his audience talked about it in his program, he made the trip to Sacramento where he joined the marchers, made interviews, recorded them to share with us, but he wanted to do more so her story is passed on, so we don't forget that we must not let these crimes happen anymore.

He wrote a Corrido that he sings and where he includes some of the interviews he conducted during the march.

Here it is. (Bilingual, Spa & Eng)

En Memoria De Maria Isabel Jimenez Vázquez

Corrido de, y, por Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez

"Blood Wine" ("Vino Ensangrentado") ==>

Blood Wine Corrido by "Dr. Marcos Gutierrez of ""La Grande" KIQI 1010AM SF and KATD 990AM SAC, Hecho en California", free MP3 Download!

Our gente always sings our struggles and our victories, the Farm Workers left us 'canciones de lucha'

"No Nos Moveran" == >

I Second Dr. Marcos Gutiérrez and add: "Mejor morir luchando que vivir arrollidad@s"

Video: María's fiance Florentino Bautista talks about what happened on May 14./Video: El Prometido de Maria, Florentino Bautista, habla sobre lo que pasó el 14 de mayo

There is an investigation on her death and the abuses to the Farm Workers, her mother has filed a civil suit for wrongful death.

Teen farmworker's death, probed as heat-related, stirs outcry

When Vasquez Jimenez collapsed, she had been on the job three days, pruning vines for $8 an hour in a vineyard owned by West Coast Grape Farming.

During eight hours of work beginning at 6 a.m. in heat that topped 95 degrees, Bautista said that workers were given only one water break, at 10:30 a.m. And the water was a 10-minute walk away – too far, he said, to keep up with the crew and avoid being scolded.

Vasquez Jimenez collapsed at 3:30 p.m., Bautista said, and for at least five minutes, the foreman did nothing but stare at the couple while Bautista cradled her.

Bautista said the foreman told him to place the teenager in the back seat of a van, which was hot inside, and put a wet cloth on her.

Later, Bautista said, the foreman told a driver to take the pair to a store to buy rubbing alcohol and apply it to see if it would revive Maria Isabel Jiménez Vázquez. When that failed, the driver took the couple to a clinic in Lodi, Bautista said, where her body temperature had reached more than 108 degrees.

"The foreman told me to say that she wasn't working for a contractor, that she got sick while exercising," Bautista said in Spanish. "He said she was underage, and it would cause a lot of problems."

Bautista and family members said that clinic staff rushed the girl to a hospital, where she was revived several times before finally succumbing two days later without ever regaining consciousness. Doctors later discovered she was two months pregnant.

The terror arrives in the morning… And that is only the beginning.

Immigration is a world-wide phenomenon whose effects are more noticeable at the local level, we see and heard of the loss of jobs and the separation of families, accompanied by the consequent terror of our undocumented sisters and brothers, fearful in the uncertainty that if today, agents of I.C.E. will knock on their door, the terror is greater in the children. than they ask themselves if today, or tomorrow, or the following day, their parents, brothers and sisters without documents that guarantee their legal stay will be taken away.

Those arrested are taken to detention centers where they are victims of insults and crimes, they suffer humiliations, negligence and sexual abuse, in at least 30 of 83 deaths from 2003, the death was due to lack of medical care and administrative practices devoid of consideration to the human condition, civil and legal rights.

Important to note, that while much is spoken of the raids, very little is said of what is happening in the detention centers, where in any given day, it is easy to count 33,000 prisoners, among them women and children, many are citizens of this country, there are cases of whole families in detention.

The immigrants are of all colors and nationalities that are reflected in the dead, Yusif Osman of Ghana, the transgender woman Victoria Arellano of Mexico, Arthur Suarez-Almenares of Cuba, Edmar Alves Araujo of Brazil, Young Sook Kim of Korea, Ms. Kenley of Barbados, Caesar Gonza'les-Baeza of Mexico, for others there is not even information on their places of origin like Reinaldo Prado-Arencilia, Yvel Fils-Aim, Abdoulai Sall, or Enríquez-Betancourt, of whom there is only last names.

Among the deaths, 13 are listed as suicides, 14 as a result of cardiac diseases and 9 related to H.I.V and A.I.D.S, the lists contain other cryptic definitions of the causes as “undetermined” or “unresponsive” , in too many cases these lists do not mention their nationalities or where they lived in the United States. Some names and date of birth are ineligibles.

Sexual violation to a Mexican transsexual woman in the detention center of Miami, where some women reported that the guards promised to release them in exchange for sex or to deport them if they refused, of the Pearsall center in Texas. there are reports of extensive and systematic sexual abuse from the guards, in the present, there are legal complaints, lawsuits and demands for exhaustive investigations on irregularities, abuses and crimes in those concentration camps, euphemistically called detention centers, which are managed by contractors working for private corporations.

The immigrant community faces a crisis of catastrophic magnitude where the efforts to remedy it run into a great segment of the population that ignores the reality, do not care or are in agreement with the policy of the US government.

Those of us who struggle to remedy, or at least to alleviate the situation, have different opinions on what to do to fight off the attacks or how to go about it, we debate weather our immigrant marches inflame the anti immigrant sentiments or alert the rest of the population on the tragedies, the opinions on the course to follow vary in all aspects and apparently the debate arrives to the point of choosing between this or that option as the most suitable or effective method.

Other difficulties derive from the consideration of the causes and effects of the artificial phenomenon that is the forced and massive mobilization of workers and families at a global level, on these points there is no disagreement that they are the result of economic agreements at an geopolitical level, but there is indeed a debate on the spheres of influences or jurisdiction where activities on corrective measures would have to be applied or which of them must have priority, taking into account the stark reality that the problem is caused as much by the countries receiving the immigrants as is their country of origin, since both entities are controlled by corporatist interests, they share the blame for the victims of their economic policies and transnational agreements which are the workers, farmers, small entrepreneurs and their families.

And this way, the debates continue while the tragedies increase, the crises multiply, the terror remains and it is institutionalized in a pernicious way, especially in our children, thus we arrive at the situation were we find ourselves in, where we agree that it is untenable and intolerable and that something has to be done, the only remaining questions are: What, where, and how.