Growing up in Oklahoma, Mark James was introduced to the life of the migrant field hands who worked in the surrounding small town where he lived. Many of the workers were Mexican and labored on the local farms. As a teenager in the Fifties, Mark James witnessed the plight of these people and the discrimination and abuse they suffered. Later, as a laborer himself, in the canning factories of Washington State, he realized that little had changed. The author chronicles the travels and trials of a young man as he attempts to come to find some kind of resolution between his value system and that which is imposed upon him by a bigoted community, where the company is considered omnipotent by the townspeople. Mark, the main character, discovers that prejudice knows no boundaries, and the lengths to which some people and a town will go to protect their way of life, including murder.