Hidden From Sight

Mrs. Moore and Roy Gibson Sort Potatoes at Moore Camp

The scene at right shows the sorting of tomatoes at harvest time on the Wayland, NY farm of Roy Gibson. It’s an unusual image for several reasons. First, it shows Gibson, the farm owner, doing the same work as his hired hands—in this case, the mother of his migrant camp crew leader Carl Moore. Whether or not the photo has been staged, Gibson was unusual for his reputation as a fair employer and proof “that you can make money and not exploit your workers.” Along with Moore, the labor camp was said to be “more tightly run and the crew boss is fair with his people. What they earn, they get” (Gallagher). A final feature is less obvious: it’s simply the visibility of farmworkers in the first place, a class of people who often are invisible even in the rural areas where they work.

During the 19^th century, when a majority of Americans worked in agriculture, it still was rare to encounter images or detailed descriptions of farmhands. As demonstrated elsewhere in this exhibit, it was more likely to see illustrations of hand tools or machinery, where emphasis was upon the equipment and at most a single operator. Similarly, there was no shortage of pictures showing fruit and vegetable varieties (without hands cultivating them), or pleasing illustrations of farmhouses, barns, and greenhouses (without workers inhabiting them).

The hazards of describing field workers in detail is suggested by a dispatch that was reprinted in The Genesee Farmer, written by the Englishman William Howard Russell. Visiting a sugar plantation in Louisiana he paints a scene of large slave “gangs” in the plowing between the canes, or “hoeing out the grass in the Indian corn—easy work enough.” Behind each gang stands “a black overseer, with a heavy-thonged whip over his shoulder.” Inside whitewashed cabins the interiors are “dingy and squalid—no glass in the windows, swarms of flies, some clothes hanging on nails in the boards, dressers with broken crockery, a beadstead of rough carpentry” (273). These somber observations, from a slave plantation in 1861, aren’t directly comparable to hired labor in the North—except when other oppressive tasks render the hoeing of corn “easy work enough.” Would that mean field hands in New York had an easy time of their work? Or to take another example: when an editor of the Genesee Farmer recommended that his readers grow carrots and beets for dairy cows because “Women can be hired to weed them by the acre at a cheap rate, after a cultivator has done its work between the rows,” did his blunt approval of exploited labor say too much?

Researching contemporary migrant labor camps, Kennedy Saldanha argues that labor’s invisibility originates in a “disconnect inherent in our food production, which does not recognize the important contributions of farmworkers”—even when local “farm-to-table” initiatives are highlighted. “The substandard, overcrowded, and hidden nature of the housing I observed is the shameful underbelly of the food system. After toiling all day workers do not even have space to recharge, recreational equipment, or entertainment opportunities for themselves or their children. They have difficulty procuring food materials or obtaining a good night’s sleep.” Based upon the absence of hired hands in earlier literature, it seems likely this isn’t a recent phenomenon; invisibility and exploitation have been practices of a single agricultural system.