Abstract
This photo-essay illustrates the way in which a low-income household's struggle for shelter is conditioned by their search for an adequate income. It centres on the life of one Mexican family from Matamoros. First, it describes and illustrates the life of the mother and her eight children in August 1996, when the husband and the eldest son are in the United States working as migrant farm labourers. The mother and three of the children sort garbage at the city's municipal dump and the family lives in a home they have constructed nearby. The paper then describes how the mother and the children travelled to Florida to work with her husband and eldest son, where all but the youngest could work picking strawberries, and describes and illustrates their life there.