The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy

Conclusion: An Invocation to Act, by Melinda F. Wiggins

conclusion An Invocation to Act Melinda F. Wiggins As we began this book with Lucas Benitez’s reminder that ‘‘farmworkers are in desperate need of . . . [a] decent wage, the right to organize without fear of retaliation, [and] the right to earn overtime wages for overtime worked,’’ it is fitting that we conclude with his invocation to students, clergy, lay people, and everyday citizens to stand with farmworkers as they fight for change (Benitez 1998). As contributors and editors, we encourage you to continue to think critically about social and economic injustices facing farmworkers and to raise awareness of these injustices with others.We challenge you to reflect on your personal connections to those who harvest the food you eat. In addition to working to change the immediate problems faced by farmworkers, we also challenge you to support long-term efforts for systemic change, such as labor organization and legislative improvements for workers. In doing so, you will join a movement of farmworker advocates who have made connections between their own lives and those of farmworkers. By combining personal narratives with the theoretical analysis of our agricultural system, we hope to ‘‘engage listeners who might otherwise feel estranged, alienated’’ (hooks 1989, 77). I will include some personal narratives of these advocates below. But first, I will begin with my own story, claiming my working-class and agricultural roots as my connection with immigrant farmworkers. Claiming My Connection Despite being the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers and growing up on a cotton farm in rural Leflore County, Mississippi, I have only recently begun to connect my story with farmworkers in my community.Though I grew up in a place where there is more land than people and am aware of how human lives de- 279 Conclusion pend on the land and those who tend the land, I was estranged from the local African American workers who hoed cotton in fields surrounding my home. When I finally began making the connection, I was years and thousands of miles away from my Delta roots. After finishing college and leaving the Delta in 1992, I began to think critically about social injustices in the rural South. Having worked with migrant and seasonal farmworkers in the Carolinas since 1993, I now realize just how strongly my life is connected to those who harvest field crops in the southeastern United States. I grew up hearing my mom’s stories of working with her siblings and a half-dozen African American hired hands picking cotton during the harvest, and stories of my father’s family migrating from the hills to the Delta to work as sharecroppers. My mother’s parents started farming as sharecroppers in 1933. After nearly a decade of working on other people’s land, they were able to purchase eighty-four acres of their own for five thousand dollars through the Farmer’s Home Administration (FmHA). This New Deal outgrowth of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) enabled sharecroppers to buy small farms, thus reclassifying people like my grandparents as farmers. Corporate farms of today hardly resemble such small-acreage farms. For corporate ‘‘farms’’ perhaps we should revive the antebellum South’s nomenclature of ‘‘planter.’’ For example, companies like the Mt. Olive Pickle Company, which contracts with more than twelve hundred growers to raise cucumbers on more than twenty-eight thousand acres each year (Mt. Olive Pickle Company, Inc. n.d.), or Weyerhaeuser, which owns and grows timber on six hundred thousand acres in North Carolina alone, should be called plantations, not farms. Although my mom and her four siblings inherited the land my grandparents owned, none of them today are farmers. When farmers receive less than seventeen cents of every dollar paid for crops, and their net profit is much less than that, farming households such as those I am from must seek off-farm income or specialize in niche crops or livestock such as catfish. Even while cotton farming provided full-time work for my mom’s entire family, it did not bring in a living wage. My grandmother tailored clothing and upholstered furniture part-time to earn needed income for the family. The Delta of my childhood lacked the significant numbers of fieldworkers that created the plantation dynasty of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The introduction of machines, especially the cotton picker, left little need for a transient workforce, and thus local Afri- 280...