| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Daniel Rothenberg, With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farm Workers Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)

AT A TIME when consumers are readily enlisted in the "fast-food nation" (the title of a recent bestseller), when bio-technological patents are a significant source of corporate power and profits, and when family farms are relentlessly displaced by industrial production, the work of cultivating a critical mindfulness about what we eat is especially urgent: who produces food, and under what conditions? In that work, Daniel Rothenberg's fine study of migrant farm workers in the United States will be essential reading. It is aimed directly at what he calls a "form of social forgetting" that is reinforced by the geographic isolation of urbanization and class. (326) While North American supermarkets are filled with produce "as if by magic,... few people realize that virtually every vegetable and piece of fruit we eat was handpicked by a farmworker" (xvii); one of a poorly-paid, poorly-protected caste of at least two million, mostly men, mostly immigrant, mostly invisible, but still essential to a continental food system. For the paradox of large-scale commercial agriculture, capital-intensive, and technologically-advanced, is that it "cannot do without hand labor, people willing to stoop in the fields; climb ladders in orchards; and fill buckets, baskets, bins, and tubs with fruits and vegetables." (326–27) Not only that: migrant workers — often entire families — continue to bear the costs of travel from job to job, the risks of bad weather, pesticides, and, in the 1990s, the downward pressures on wages and working conditions created by an abundance of recruits from Mexico and Central America.	1
The story of migrant farmworkers is as old as Steinbeck's fiction and as infused with righteous anger as the grape boycotts organized by Cesar Chavez's union movement a generation ago. To this story Rothenberg makes several distinct contributions. At one level, he documents the changes in fruit and vegetable production, in public policy, and in the demographic composition of the migrant labour sector, partly, no doubt, to dispel a complacent popular assumption since the 1970s that the situation must have continued to improve. Instead, Rothenberg shows readers a world marked by fear, intimidation, and dehumanization, especially in the transition to agribusiness corporations to whom, as one worker puts it, "you're just a machine to get fruit from the tree"; at its extreme are forms of old-fashioned debt slavery.	2
At another level, this book sketches some of the social and culture consequences of political- economic interdependence in a continental food system. While the US-Mexico border remains a dangerous "symbolic space" — the domain of smugglers and guards — there are subtler, profounder changes at work across it. One is the formation of networks linking Mexican workers to jobs and resources in the US, which for Rothenberg is a more significant factor in increased migration than economic desperation alone. Another is the reconstitution of once insular rural Mexican communities around the cyclical demands of farmwork: absent males, individualism, disparities of wealth, and new patterns of consumption (cars, appliances, satellite dishes) afforded by success in the North. A third is the little-noticed "Latinization" of large parts of the rural US where migrant workers have begun to settle, sometimes overwhelming social agencies and stirring racial tensions, but also bringing the promise of local revitalization.	3
Ultimately, what gives With These Hands its strength (and, in places, its incongruous beauty) are the extensive field-work interviews that are interspersed throughout each chapter. An activist and anthropologist, Rothenberg may not be an ambitious social theorist, to judge from this book, but he must be a first-rate, tireless, and sometimes fearless interviewer — one for whom intellectual inquiry is a deeply moral undertaking. He successfully invests farmworkers of all kinds with dignity and intelligence. He lets them speak for themselves about their histories and the changes in their industry, about their skills, their aspirations, their need of respect, their sense of obligation, and in some cases the freedom they find in mobility or the peace they find in working the land — so long as "you're getting paid for it." (44) These farmworkers are seldom mere victims. Sometimes they are lifelong union organizers. Sometimes they are children who, more adept at learning a new language, serve as translators and negotiators for their parents, or who, educated in spite of great obstacles, return from university to teach summer school programs in the field. Sometimes they find an entrepreneurial way out, like the woman who used her savings from years of farmwork to buy a small restaurant, feeling she had "finally arrived," but acutely aware of the locals' wariness of migrants and hopeful that through her own business "I could be the one that makes everyone realize, 'Lord, have mercy, those tomatoes I ate yesterday? Somebody picked them with their own hands.'"(204)	4
Rothenberg's interviews with others in the same food system invest their lives and choices with complexity if nothing else. It would be impossible not to sympathize with some of the small, struggling growers who employ migrants: the pepper farmer who provides year-round contracts, higher wages, medical coverage, and good housing — but quietly, in order not to offend his neighbours; or the corn-and-soybean producer who works alongside the migrant families that return annually, who speaks of shared family and rural community values, but who worries about the threat to her own livelihood posed by corporate farms. If there is a hint of paternalism here, the mentality nonetheless is vastly different from that expressed by the large operators who extol the virtues of competition and choice against meddling bureaucrats. Rothenberg allows them to speak for themselves too. He gives flesh, blood, and voice to the small-time labour contractors who operate at the edge of transportation, insurance, and labour-standards regulations; to the Mexico-based human smuggler, age 24, who claims to make as much as a doctor; and even to the Washington lobbyist for a growers' association who sees her members as "victims" of "class-war litigation." (213)	5
In the end, With These Hands is not so much a manifesto as it is a richly-drawn documentary of a world that is scarcely known to those who consume its oranges, bell peppers, and tomatoes. The key characteristic of that world, however, is that "[f]armworkers have long been the poorest of America's workers, recruited from among the most powerless among us, historically denied equal protections, and still, after repeated exposes, campaigns, and legislative acts, their poverty and marginalization continues." (325) This is troubling enough, and the requisite structural change in the farm-labour system for which Rothenberg calls is, by his admission, unimaginable in the short term. Rather, if the era of migrant farmworker exceptionalism is passing, he suggests, it is because manual workers in the service and other sectors now increasingly are employed under similar conditions: "uncertain, shifting, temporary jobs" — arranged by contractors and subcontractors — "that provide no benefits and often do not pay enough to keep workers and their families above the poverty line." (325) Contrary to the great weight of modernist prejudice, the implications of an emerging political-economic order are sometimes still disclosed most clearly in the countryside — all the more reason for this book to have a broad, sustained, and careful reading.	6
Roger Epp Augustana University College

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