Last November in the Mississippi Delta, William White, an African-American tractor driver on the old Miley Plantation, harvested a few hundred acres of cotton. Several months later in the Los Angeles downtown garment district, a man's dress shirt was made from some of this same cotton. Rosa Gomez, an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant put the final stitches into the shirt, operating a state-of-the-art Japanese-produced sewing machine. Ms Gomez had recently arrived in Los Angeles, only one month after her family fled economic deprivation and political terror in the barrios of Guatemala City. They left their homeland about the same time that the cotton was being harvested near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Now the Guatemalan seamstress completed the shirt in a cramped, hot, noisy factory employing about thirty other Latino men and women, run by Mr Su-Hoon Kim, himself an immigrant from Korea. Mr Kim's factory is located in a high-rise building owned by an Anglo family that has long been part of the Los Angeles political élite. Mr Kim, one of a dozen small Asian-American subcontractors in this building, makes shirts for a major US sportswear company which markets them under its brand name at malls and department stores across North America, and exports them under its label to Europe and Japan.