Discusses the history and economics of migrant labor, describes the impact of the Great Depression, and recounts the efforts of migrant workers to improve their lot through boycotts and strikes
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a substantive new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a current examination of the challenges facing farmworkers and the lives and resistance of the protagonists featured in the book.
Lives from an invisible community—the migrant farmworkers of the United States The Grapes of Wrath brought national attention to the condition of California’s migrant farmworkers in the 1930s. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ grape and lettuce boycotts captured the imagination of the United States in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet today, the stories of the more than 800,000 men, women, and children working in California’s fields—one third of the nation’s agricultural work force—are rarely heard, despite the persistence of wage theft, dangerous working conditions, and uncertain futures. This book of oral histories makes the reality of farm work visible in accounts of hardship, bravery, solidarity, and creativity in California’s fields, as real people struggle to win new opportunities for future generations. Among the narrators: Maricruz, a single mother fired from a packing plant after filing a sexual assault complaint against her supervisor. Roberto, a vineyard laborer in the scorching Coachella Valley who became an advocate for more humane working conditions after his teenage son almost died of heatstroke. Oscar, an elementary school teacher in Salinas who wants to free his students from a life in the fields, the fate that once awaited him as a child.
Migrant and seasonal farmworkers are largely Latinx men, women, and children. They work in crop, dairy, and livestock production, and are essential to the U.S. agricultural economy—one of the most hazardous and least regulated industries in the United States. Latinx migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the eastern United States experience high rates of illness, injury, and death, indicating widespread occupational injustice. This second edition takes a social justice stance and integrates the past ten years of research and intervention to address health, safety, and justice issues for farmworkers. Contributors cover all major areas of health and safety research for migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families, explore the factors that affect the health and safety of farmworkers and their families, and suggest approaches for further research and educational and policy intervention needed to improve the health and safety of Latinx farmworkers and their families. Among the chapter topics are: Occupational injury and illness in Latinx farmworkers in the eastern United States Mental health among Latinx farmworkers in the eastern United States The health of women farmworkers and women in farmworker families in the eastern United States The health of children in the Latinx farmworker community in the eastern United States Community-based participatory research with Latinx farmworker communities in the eastern United States Farm labor and the struggle for justice in the eastern United States Accessibly written and comprehensive in its scope, this second edition of Latinx Farmworkers in the Eastern United States: Health, Safety, and Justice will find an engaged audience among researchers, students, and practitioners in public health, occupational health, public policy, and social and behavioral sciences, as well as labor advocates and healthcare providers.
Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire is the first in-depth look at the experiences of Puerto Rican migrant workers in continental U.S. agriculture in the twentieth century. The Farm Labor Program, established by the government of Puerto Rico in 1947, placed hundreds of thousands of migrant workers on U.S. farms and fostered the emergence of many stateside Puerto Rican communities. Ismael García-Colón investigates the origins and development of this program and uncovers the unique challenges faced by its participants. A labor history and an ethnography, Colonial Migrants evokes the violence, fieldwork, food, lodging, surveillance, and coercion that these workers experienced on farms and conveys their hopes and struggles to overcome poverty. Island farmworkers encountered a unique form of prejudice and racism arising from their dual status as both U.S. citizens and as “foreign others,” and their experiences were further shaped by evolving immigration policies. Despite these challenges, many Puerto Rican farmworkers ultimately chose to settle in rural U.S. communities, contributing to the production of food and the Latinization of the U.S. farm labor force.
A work which traces the development of US Government programmes designed to help migrant farm workers, showing how the programmes operate today and explaining why they are failing to remedy the problems they were designed to solve.