| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Charles D. Thompson Jr. and Melinda F. Wiggins, eds., The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy (Austin: University of Austin Press 2002).

STUDIES OF MIGRANT farm workers in the United States consistently place them on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Farm work is onerous and dangerous, pay hovers at the bottom of wage scales, living conditions are substandard, and access to such essentials as health care, education, and legal justice is severely limited. Many farm workers are illegal residents in the United States, compounding their exclusion from government programs and contributing to the dis- crimination they face as migrants and minorities. Nor has their situation improved much since Cesar Chavez's grape boycott and the farm workers' union organizing drives brought their plight to the attention of consumers and activists.

The Human Cost of Food details the exploitation of migrant farm workers and their families, concentrating on the southeastern United States, but it takes the argument beyond the academic realm. Readers are urged to become educated consumers and social activists, to help end "farmworker exploitation and injustices that persist today." (3) This book is a call to action and a practical guide for farm worker advocates.

Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF), one of the growing number of advocacy groups in the United States, commissioned this anthology from farm worker advocates and specialists. Emerging from a 1975 activist course at Duke University on social problems in the rural south, SAF today has a nation-wide reach linking university students and farm workers with community activists through internships, leadership training, social and legal supports, education and career counselling, and other programs to improve the lives of farm workers and their families. (http://www-cds.aas.duke.edu/saf/) SAF's emphasis is upon working with, rather than for, farm workers.

Translating this worthy goal into a teaching tool is not without complications. The authors are to be commended for grappling with and, for the most part, achieving a balance between SAF's philosophy of engagement with and respect for farm workers as activists, not victims, and practical advice for helping those defined by their need of guidance and assistance from non-farm-worker experts. As a text for increasing public awareness and for use in university courses on farm worker advocacy, The Human Cost of Food is designed to provoke concern and direct activism. It does both admirably.

Editors Charles D. Thompson, Jr. and Melinda F. Wiggins catalogue the problems besetting farm workers and outline the necessary steps toward their solutions. The message is clear and strong: readers must become educated about working and living conditions in food production and they must become activist advocates for ethical treatment and justice for farm workers and their families. The message, supported by specific instruction, is underscored throughout the volume. Contributors include farm workers and SAF interns, academics, and specialist professionals in such fields as history, law, health, housing, education, and labour organizing. Always, the emphasis is upon listening to the needs of farm workers, working in tandem with them, and facilitating their empowerment.

Readers are first introduced to the cultural context of farm workers and their families. Although Latinos predominate, Alejandra Okie Holt and Sister Evelyn Mattern emphasize cultural diversity and the complex ways farm workers adapt to and influence other cultures. Religion, family, and cultural expressions sustain farm workers, but often marginalize them and target them for social and economic discrimination. Combined with migrancy and language barriers, cultural distinctiveness challenges advocates to work as translators between farm workers and employers, agencies and local communities.

The historical context illustrates persisting farm worker exploitation. Charles D. Thompson Jr. compares the agricultural histories of the American south and Mexico, detailing how the growth of agribusiness resulted in a dramatic "loss of economic democracy" (56) for small farmers and growing streams of Mexican migrant labour to the United States. Cindy Hahamovitch's more concentrated historical study examines interactions between south Florida growers and farm workers during the 1930s and World War II. In her persuasive and well-documented chapter, she reveals how a range of government programs sought, variously, to regulate and control or to protect and assist farm workers. Ultimately, though, the well-being of farm workers took second place to that of growers and, especially in the hothouse wartime economy, agricultural production trumped farm worker gains.

Currently, farm workers face a host of legal disabilities, trapping them in a cycle of powerlessness and poverty. Garry Geffert examines the use of foreign-born migrants. The H-2A Guestworker Program was designed to regularize wages and working and living conditions to ensure temporary aliens would not displace American workers. The opposite has taken place. Poorly enforced, the program is used by employers and agribusiness lobbyists to increase the foreign migrant labour pool and to undercut wages and standards of the native-born. Greg Schell details the specific exclusion of farm workers from most labour legislation and workers' legal rights. He argues that farm workers and their advocates cannot match the resources of large agricultural employers and agribusiness lobbies in fights over specific conditions. Instead, they must work to eliminate the larger legal principle of farm worker exceptionalism.

Living conditions cannot be separated from farm work. Christopher Holden documents the substandard housing of most farm workers and their families, insisting that only systematic records can ensure effective allocation of scarce resources. Armed with up-to-date surveys of housing problems, advocates must pressure legislatures, government agencies, employers, and local communities to provide housing that is "safe, decent and affordable." (193) Health hazards facing farm workers and their families extend well beyond the dangers of substandard housing, as Colin Austin points out in his examination of a wide range of health issues. Heavy and stoop labour, unprotected equipment, and exposure to chemical pesticides and fertilisers pose direct dangers, compounded by chronic health problems due to inadequate health care, poor diets, and substandard housing. Advocates must ensure that cultural differences are incorporated into health care objectives and directed with the participation of farm workers and their families.

Farm workers are most actively involved in their own advocacy through education and labour unions, with sometimes contradictory goals. Education is the key to escape from farm work. Ramiro Arceo, Joy Kusserow, and Al Wright look primarily to the children and the youth, detailing the barriers of language, culture, poverty, and migrancy they face in school and the economic demands that keep them out. Activists must counter these problems and demonstrate the value of education to the children, their parents, and their communities. But for the great majority of farm workers, the road to improvement lies in union organizing. Paul Ortiz paints a dramatic picture of farm worker exploitation and resistance from slavery to the present, outlining the Herculean efforts of farm workers and organizers. Unionization is an elusive goal, but its greatest chance of success is through alliances between farm workers and their advocates.

The Human Cost of Food is a promising guide for farm worker advocacy. The brief quotations, poems, and writings by farm workers and SAF interns invoke sympathy and concern. The tightly focused articles present a common analysis, with the activist message clear on every page. Additional tools reiterate the book's purposes, with appendices on advocacy training, a 14-week interdisciplinary syllabus with readings, films, speakers, activities, and assignments, a lengthy list of addresses and websites for farm worker related agencies and organisations, and a recommended reading and video list. The full bibliography and index, uncommon in essay collections, are very useful.

This is not a book to provoke debate. But its chilling documentation of the ways public policy buttress and combine with private power to maintain inequities underscores the urgency of its message, and its practical strategies inspire confidence in the efficacy of advocacy with and for farm workers and their families.


Cecilia Danysk Western Washington University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.