Geneseo Migrant Center: Needful Labor

The origins of the Geneseo Migrant Center (GMC) date to the mid-1960s, and during much of the following fifty years it advocated for agricultural workers whose residency in the Genesee Valley was seasonal. As historian Cindy Hahamovitch bluntly explains, beginning in the late 19^th century “farm owners relied on men, women, and children who would appear in time for the harvest and disappear thereafter.” One thing has been consistent through the years, though: an often tense relationship between farmers and a class of people earlier known as hands, hired help, laborers, boys, gangs, hirelings, Irishmen, and other now-forgotten terms. How similar were those earlier lives to the experiences of migrant workers during the last half century?

This exhibit revisits the history of hired agricultural labor in the Genesee Valley. It’s incredibly difficult to find any direct testimony of farmworkers on their own behalf—that was one of the most powerful achievements of the Migrant Center—and the same was true during the 19^th century, as well. Farmers “so much occupied with their needful labor” felt trapped between volatile national commodities markets, and managing what one writer dismissed as the “careless or incompetent hands” in their fields. Using a digitized archive of The Genesee Farmer between 1840-65, we developed a body of writing relevant to our subject, albeit mostly authored by farmers.

When it wasn’t being rendered invisible, the tendency was to simplify migrant labor...as if the hands picking potatoes weren't doing anything else. The five sections of “Needful Labor” therefore acknowledge hired farmworkers through concentric perspectives that aren’t mutually exclusive: 1) the agricultural work they performed; 2) their material and social lives on the farm; 3) their relations to farmers and landholders; 4) the impacts of economic and social changes; and 5) their embeddedness in ecosystems, both on and beyond the farm. To borrow a metaphor from permaculture theorist Bill Mollison, it is a kind of stacking to discern different levels of American agriculture.