Farming: the Existential Crisis

            The readings for this course began with a feeling of optimism and idealism. Jefferson’s yeoman farmer is the perfect American citizen. Things darkened somewhat with Willa Cather, but at least remained nostalgic. She portrays farming as backbreaking, yes, but still meaningful and a source of as many joys as heartaches. Some more cynicism followed when we looked at the hilariously false advertising of Idaho, luring unsuspecting farmers into a land that did not want to be farmed. From there, we tumbled steeply downhill with Steinbeck. Unlike Ántonia’s family, the Joads don’t own the land they work; they are only allowed the means of scraping a living by the mercy of businessmen and bankers they’ve never even met before.

            We next studied Tomás Rivera, and got a glimpse at a side of farming just as depressing as Steinbeck’s. Unlike the Okies, Rivera’s migrant farmers had plenty of work to do, but the pay was barely enough to survive on, the conditions were appalling, and the bosses were suspicious, greedy tyrants. There seemed to be no justice for the child dying of heat stroke after working a ten-hour day in the fields, in Texas, in the middle of summer. Or for the child shot in the head for the crime of trying to quench his desperate thirst in the cows’ water trough. Ownership, then, seems to be the key to deriving fulfillment from working the earth. If the farmer doesn’t own the land he works, then he is nothing but a cog in a machine. Indistinctive, interchangeable, expendable. Still, even at that point, I thought “Well, the things Rivera wrote about happened decades ago. It isn’t like that anymore, right?” If only.

            According to a recent article on Cracked.com (which is mainly known for its humor articles, but has recently expanded to include a series of exposés about various sides of life the average middle class American has no knowledge of), the situation for migrant farmers has seen little (if any) improvement since Rivera’s childhood. Even now, in 2014, they still live in chicken coops, for which they must sometimes pay rent (Evans). The children are expected to start working at ages as young as six. They have to live wherever the work is, so education becomes fragmented and inconsistent. It’s one of the most dangerous jobs out there, and it’s still perfectly legal for children to do it.

            I feel so helpless about all of this, not only because I have no idea how I could personally help the situation, but because I can’t see how positive change could even be implemented on a larger scale. We like our food cheap and readily available, most of us don’t like growing or raising it ourselves, and we rarely think about how it made it to the grocery store. Until I read Rivera and this article, I had no idea there was such a thing as a migrant worker, let alone what it means to be one.

Work Cited

Evans, Robert. “5 Awful Things I Learned as a Child Laborer (in the USA).” Cracked.             Cracked.com, 29 Sept. 2014. Web. 16 October 2014.