2. Material & Social Lives

From an agricultural perspective, migrant farmworkers perform needful tasks that American citizens don’t want to do. From an economic perspective, hired labor is a cost to be calculated and minimized. So one of the big challenges facing food justice advocates is simply reminding eaters that migrant farmworkers are human. Here, a nameless couple identified only as Haitian is photographed when they’re not harvesting crops. Who are they, when they’re not labor? We can infer that the setting is outside of a cinder-block building in a migrant labor camp, the young woman perhaps washing laundry outside using a pair of repurposed buckets due to the temperatures. The young man holds a toddler...is the child their child? It’s likely that the two emigrated to the U.S. due to extreme political and economic disruptions in Haiti during the 1980s; fleeing the Duvalier regime’s violence and starvation, they joined the “Atlantic Stream” of migrant farmworkers.

This section explores the material lives of hired labor, dating back to the 1800s: the wages that they were paid, where and how they lived. It sketches out the social relationships where farmhands were under the control of both farmer and “crew boss” or “crew leader”—an intermediary with a great deal of power. Some of these conditions have remained much the same through the decades in their hardships. Others things have changed, like women’s shift from domestic work to harvesting work alongside the men, or child labor persisting but now in the shadows of legality. When it comes to any available leisure time, we’ve found attention focused almost solely on farmers and their families but have endeavored to infer the lives of hired hands from passing references. It's our hope that this information brings attention to the lives of migrant laborers and implores people who were once unaware to advocate for the human rights of an unseen portion of our workforce.