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Fully revised and updated through 2024, my book Finding America's Farmworkers: Reaching Out in North Carolina is now available in a web version. To begin reading visit findingamericasfarmworkers.com When I moved to North Carolina from Chicago in 2005, I had no idea that so much of our nation's food was still harvested by hand. Now, … Continue reading Finding America’s Farmworkers
It's a sad truth that tens of millions of people in the United States depend on free food to keep their families from going hungry. Many of these moms and dads plant and harvest fruits and vegetables or raise and package chicken and other meats, all for the lowest possible wage. As a result, the … Continue reading To Feed Those Who Feed Us
We know he was 30 years old, a citizen of Mexico, working at a North Carolina tobacco and sweet potato farm. It was just the second week of his first year working there, authorized by an H-2A temporary seasonal work visa. We know area temperatures neared 100 on the fifth day of September. It was … Continue reading The Death of a Farmworker
In 1981, the travel writer Tom Miller made a spot-on prediction. President Reagan was then planning an experimental program to allow US growers to hire 50 thousand Mexican farmworkers each season on temporary contracts, a program that would be enacted into law in 1986 as the H-2A visa program. Writing in The New York Times, … Continue reading The New Bracero
"Qué tipo de cultivo están cultivando aquí?" I asked the men. “What type of crop are you growing here?” We were huddled in the frigid and rundown trailer where these North Carolina farmworkers cooked and ate their meals. I was just starting some research for a book, visiting labor camps to introduce myself. It was … Continue reading You grow what?
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore... He's collected a small mountain of donated toothbrushes and T-shirts but what he really needs are pants: About four thousand pair. Father Jesus Antonio Rojas, known by all as Father Tony, runs the Episcopal Farmworker Ministry in Dunn, North Carolina. From an airy facility about an hour south … Continue reading Father Tony
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore... For many migrant farmworkers, things haven’t changed much since the 1970s when the legendary activist Cesar Chavez co-founded, with Dolores Huerta, the union known today as the United Farm Workers. Today in North Carolina and surrounding states, some of the people working one of the most dangerous jobs … Continue reading A Chavez for here and now
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore... We were lost. That’s what I concluded from the back of the minivan going up and down mountain roads in western North Carolina, past tiny homes and trailer parks that tourists rarely see. “The note says look for an RV next to a dumpster.” Devereaux was in the … Continue reading These vecinos are more than just neighbors
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore... Like many farmworker advocates, Melinda Wiggins can rattle off a long list of injustices faced by the people who harvest America’s food -- stagnant wages, unsafe working conditions, housing often unfit for human habitation, and one she finds particularly unconscionable: Many farmworkers aren't allowed visitors in the camps … Continue reading Cultivating farmworker advocates, one student at a time
From my 2014 blog The Considerate Omnivore... Last night, a 13-year old farmworker spoke to the panel from experience: She’s been working in the fields of North Carolina since the age of 7. Now she just wants to finish high school and go to college, but knows her parents can’t afford it. Another farmworker held … Continue reading Land of the free? Not for U.S. farmworkers according to visiting British MPs
Michael Durbin 