Chasing the Harvest

Chasing the Harvest
Author: Gabriel Thompson
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017-05-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786632209

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.

Photographing Farmworkers in California

Photographing Farmworkers in California
Author: Richard Steven Street
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2004
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780804740920

The work of nearly every photographer of consequence since the nineteenth century is captured in this collection of photographs of California farmworkers, raising moral questions about the exploitation and colonization of an entire class of people.

Beasts of the Field

Beasts of the Field
Author: Richard Steven Street
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 944
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804738804

Written by one of America's preeminent labor historians, this book is the definitive account of one of the most spectacular, captivating, complex and strangely neglected stories in Western history--the emergence of migratory farmworkers and the development of California agriculture. Street has systematically worked his way through a mountain of archival materials--more than 500 manuscript collections, scattered in 22 states, including Spain and Mexico--to follow the farmworker story from its beginnings on Spanish missions into the second decade of the twentieth century. The result is a comprehensive tour de force. Scene by scene, the epic narrative clarifies and breathes new life into a controversial and instructive saga long surrounded by myth, conjecture, and scholarly neglect. With its panoramic view spanning 144 years and moving from the US-Mexico border to Oregon, Beasts of the Field reveals diverse patterns of life and labor in the fields that varied among different crops, regions, time periods, and racial and ethic groups. Enormous in scope, packed with surprising twists and turns, and devastating in impact, this compelling, revelatory work of American social history will inform generations to come of the history of California and the nation.

Factories in the Field

Factories in the Field
Author: Carey McWilliams
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2000-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520925181

This book was the first broad exposé of the social and environmental damage inflicted by the growth of corporate agriculture in California. Factories in the Field—together with the work of Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and John Steinbeck—dramatizes the misery of the dust bowl migrants hoping to find work in California agriculture. McWilliams starts with the scandals of the Spanish land grant purchases, and continues on to examine the experience of the various ethnic groups that have provided labor for California's agricultural industry—Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos, Armenians—the strikes, and the efforts to organize labor unions

Chasing the Harvest

Chasing the Harvest
Author: Voice of Witness
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1786632195

More than a million men, women, and children work in American agriculture, and yet their stories are rarely told, their low-wage jobs are not included in minimum-wage ordinances or campaigns, and their work remains unorganized by labor unions. This book of oral histories restores to visibility these workers, by telling stories of hardship but also bravery, solidarity, and improvisation in California's farm fields. The majority of American produce is picked in California, while workers there face wage theft and sexual harassment, pesticide exposure and lack of healthcare, the struggle to find affordable housing, and the special risks endured by the undocumented--as many as half of all farmworkers. The book also tells the story of a new generation of labor activists, who are pressing for a national Bill of Rights for farmworkers.

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies

Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies
Author: Seth M. Holmes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2023-11-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520399455

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.

The Farmworkers’ Journey

The Farmworkers’ Journey
Author: Ann Aurelia Lopez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2007-06-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520250737

Illuminating the dark side of economic globalization, this book gives an insider's view of the migrant farmworkers' binational circuit that stretches from the west central Mexico countryside to central California. Useful for all Americans, "The Farmworkers' Journey" traces the human consequences of our policy decisions.

Gordo

Gordo
Author: Jaime Cortez
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2021-08-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802158099

This debut story collection “masterfully navigates adverse conditions of migrant life while . . . managing to find joy and amusement, love and triumph” (San Francisco Chronicle). Gordo brings readers inside a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. At the heart of these interrelated stories is a young, probably gay, boy named Gordo, who must find a way to contend with the notions of manhood imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father’s drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants. We also meet Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist who runs away from home one day with her mother’s boyfriend, Manny. And then there are Los Tigres, the twins who show up every season and whose drunken brawl ends with one of them rushed to the emergency room in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck. These scenes from Steinbeck Country are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious questions: Who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency when grown adults must fear for their lives and livelihoods? Gordo “announces a vibrant new voice on the literary scene, at once wise and authentic and supremely gifted” (Booklist, starred review). Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction