Photojournalist David Bacon has had many exhibits and written many books, his latest book is The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration. He has an important new photo essay that we'll note the introduction of.
WHO HARVESTS OUR FOOD?
The Indigenous Roots of a Migrant Farmworker-The Story of Gervacio Pena
Text and Photos by David Bacon
Gastronomica, Spring 2018
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2018/02/who-harvests-our-food.html
https://gastronomica.org/
As consumers we know that what we eat appears in the stores when we need it. We know it must take the labor of people to get it there. Thanks to the media we know that most of the people who put food on our table are immigrants from Mexico. And many of us remember that Cesar Chavez led a movement half a century ago to change their conditions.
But how much do we really know about the lives of the people who feed us-today? Where are the workers who fill the fields coming from? What causes them to leave home? How does it feel to do some of hardest labor we can imagine?
To find answers to these questions, we need to hear the voices of those who do the work. One of those voices belongs to Gervacio Pena. Today a large and rising percentage of agricultural workers, the people whose labor provides the fruit and vegetables we eat, migrate from small towns in southern Mexico. In the rows of wine grapes of Sonoma County, where Pena has worked for many years, you are as likely to hear Mixtec or Triqui-indigenous languages that predate Columbus-as you are to hear Spanish.
Pena was born in the municipio of Santiago Juxtlahuaca, in the Mixteca region of Oaxaca, from which indigenous people have been migrating to the United States for decades. But despite their dispersal, as he describes, they have found a way to unite, not just around language and their towns of origin but through their identity as indigenous Oaxacan migrants.
Mixtecos in their migration overwhelmingly belong to transnational communities-they retain ties to their communities of origin, and establish new communities as they search for work. Their ties to each other are so strong, and the movement of people so great, that people belong to a single community that exists in different locations..
These networks have a profound impact on work, families, social movements, and cultural practices. Traditions become a rich source of experience on which migrants draw as they seek social justice, and to preserve their culture, in the places they go.
As Pena says, migration has complicated social costs and benefits in communities of origin. It threatens cultural practices and indigenous languages. Emigration often seems, especially to the young, a profitable alternative to education. It exacerbates social and economic divisions but has become an economic necessity.
Yet while people decide to migrate to the United States for overwhelmingly economic reasons, the pursuit of work is not the sum total of their existence. As social beings, people create community, and pose challenging questions about the nature of citizenship in a globalized world.
Gervacio Pena has been active in the social movements of farmworkers and Latinos in California for many years. David Bacon interviewed him, as he sat in front of the tent where he lives on the Russian River.
Gervacio Pena speaks.
