Harvest Pilgrims: Mexican and Caribbean Migrant Farm Workers in Canada (review)

With the increasing concern surrounding produce and its supply in public discourse, a Foodland Ontario stamp adds a sense of reassurance to the act of purchasing produce. The provincial marketing board eagerly emphasises the localness and freshness of domestic produce, often linking it to pictures of the expansive (and largely empty) Ontario countryside. Through advertisements and publications, the board constructs buying local as a conscientious response to the environmental and economic challenges arising from the transportation of food and as a means to fostering healthy communities.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo’s documentary photographic collection Harvest Pilgrims complicates both the pastoral and local constructions of Ontario farms by inserting Mexican and Caribbean labourers into the fields; it captures their difficult working conditions and the financial precariousness of their situation. As a work intended for a broad readership that seeks to unveil worker lives, its readers have no defined thesis to directly evaluate. Nevertheless, its vivid illustration of the ‘harvest pilgrim’ phenomenon that has shaped Canadian farming since the 1960s is an important contribution in itself. By presenting an array of striking photographs, the book admirably fulfills one of Pietropaolo’s stated objectives: to re-insert the migrant worker into debates over the merits of local food production. (20)

Four introductory pieces and a brief essay accompany Pietropaolo’s 79 photographs. The photos themselves were taken between 1984 and 2006, documenting the predominately male migrants who were a part of the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. The book’s subtitle, which suggests the work covers migrant workers from Canada as a whole, is slightly deceptive, for the photography largely concerns farms in Ontario. Pietropaolo also followed some of the workers to their respective homes in Mexico and Jamaica. The photographs are presented chronologically without commentary, other than occasional quotations from interviews. The forward, by noted historian of photography Naomi Rosenblum, situates the collection in a long tradition of “socially useful photographic documentation,” such as the famous works of the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration taken during the Great Depression. (ix–x) Maia-Mari Sutnik, curator of photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, contributes a reflection on the role of the documentary photographer as social critic. She draws attention to the shifting definition of documentary photography as questions of the ‘truth’ in the photograph give way to evaluation of images and “the critical ideas that make them stand apart.” (3) Pietropaolo’s inclusion of a 1974 photo of César Chávez in his introduction makes it abundantly clear that his photograph collection connects to a long story of struggle and exploitation as documented through photography. He acknowledges funding from the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada union as “crucial” to publication, thereby highlighting his ties to a broader labour movement. (xiii) Thus, he is a person who has the opportunity to provide realistic, yet interested, images that tell powerful stories. (7) Finally, the brief “An Imaginary Letter to a Migrant Farm Worker” creatively contemplates the patterns of a migrant worker’s life, and foregrounds the author’s very personal stake in the project.

Pietropaolo’s essay, “Living Between Two Worlds,” together with his photographs, illustrate the key concepts of beholden labour, permanent temporariness, mutual dependency, and migration. The term ‘beholden’ evokes the tremendous power that farm owners hold over migrant workers. A series of photographs and quotations vividly convey the workers’ endurance during the cold of late season. (60–65) Migrants continue to toil despite the conditions, for their readmission to the country is contingent on the farmer’s favourable report. The ‘temporariness’ of the foreign worker program is rightly dismissed as a myth, since employers rely on the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program for cheap labour, while the migrants rely on the program for urgently needed wages. (10–12) The ramifications of permanent temporariness appear in photos of living conditions—cramped and bereft of many personal possessions, but evidently built to last for years. Images of greenhouse growing towards the end of the book speak...