Welcome! We hope you enjoy your visit.

Lobby Photos Stories Community Forum Chat Room Guest Book

Exhibit Overview: The purposes for creating this exhibit are to amplify the the voices of low-wage workers and to create community by inviting workers into a dialog with one another and others who wish to exchange ideas, information and opinions with regards to low-wage work here in the Southwest.

If you do not have a Media Player, you may need to download one if you wish to listen to low-wage worker interviews and music from the worker's movement. However, there are plenty of other interesting things to visit within this exhibit that do not require any additional software.

Get Windows Media Player>>>

Within this exhibit you will have an opportunity to see images taken by day laborers, migrant laborers, homeless and others whose lives go unseen and ignored in commercial media, public policy decisions, board rooms and daily interactions. Tucson day laborers and artists participated in a 5 week bilingual photography class and exhibited their work in conjunction with a national exhibit at the University of Arizona in February 2005.

In the words of Hector Emilio Zeyloya, photojournalist and Tucson day laborer, " You don't need to know Spanish or English to understand a Photograph."

You will also have an opportunity to read and listen to the stories, poetry and prose, of low-wage workers here in the Southwest. Stories that reflect upon how we as a society often undervalue and overlook the daily physical and financial struggle that is reality for countless people in today's working poor economy.

In the words of William Grallo, former server for a national restaurant chain, " I've been told that in certain therapy groups, the patient is encouraged to scream out their frustrations and primal rages, sometimes directed at a surrogate inanimate object, such as a doll, or at a therapist in a mask representing some traumatic figure from the patient's past. Now if you've decided that the uniform I'm wearing, emblazoned with the some corporate logo you've seen at the same restaurants across the country, somehow qualifies me as one of these surrogate rage targets, then go for it. But pay me the going rate. I don't know what the doll makes an hour, but the therapist probably does pretty well."