Psalm 126

 

One Sunday afternoon each fall at the crossroads of Highway 55 and Easy Street in Sampson County, North Carolina, thousands of campesinos, church members, families, student volunteers, and community members gather to celebrate the harvest and give thanks to farm workers for bringing food to our tables. People enjoy traditional Mexican foods such as tamales, taquitos and horchata, as well as the American favorites, hot dogs and hamburgers. Children play games, couples dance to la musica, and families walk around gathering informational pamphlets from service agency representatives. The celebration ends with the soccer trophy being awarded to the champion team.

Around dusk, old school buses and vans caravan workers from the festival back to their reality—overcrowded trailers and substandard farm houses with broken windows and sagging roofs; poverty wages where they are paid by the piece; 12-hour work days; and no overtime, holidays, sick days, workers’ compensation, health insurance, vacation or retirement. The reality of farm workers is inhuman. Most universally acknowledged standards of human rights, such as access to just and favorable conditions of work, fair wages, a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of one’s family, and decent housing and medical care, are denied to farm workers. Unfortunately, the American Dream that many exiled Latin American farm workers seek in the U.S. becomes a nightmare of discrimination and exploitation. Below is an excerpt from an interview with a farm worker in North Carolina who speaks to the disappointment often faced by immigrants who come to the U.S. searching for the American Dream.

One comes looking to make money. And this is a lie because one comes to suffer worse than in his own land…One leaves the family to suffer to come make money here in the United States and it is not true, how one imagines it will be… us immigrants, we are blamed for everything…Truthfully poverty exists [in Mexico], why should we tell you otherwise? Because if there were no poverty, we would not have to come.¹                        

During the annual Farm Worker Festival, there seems to be a communion of peoples without the usual borders erected by language, class, race, ethnicity or citizenship. For one day each year, there is mutual respect, appreciation, and thanksgiving for the primarily undocumented and working class Spanish-speakers who harvest our fruits and vegetables. The festival provides physical nourishment to the body accompanied by a rejoicing of the spirit. It is through these common experiences of sharing a meal, celebration, learning, and talking that we begin to encounter community. Unfortunately, this day doesn’t come too often and rarely translates to our everyday being. The daily separation that farm workers face from the larger “native” community leads to many health-related illnesses such as depression and alcoholism, and it further isolates this already exiled community. The effect on the “native” North Carolina community can be one of spiritual death, as lack of communion with those who are oppressed can leave one with no hope. This segregation of peoples is a symptom that the community as a whole is not well.

As many liberation theologians point out, those who are oppressed are the most aware of the causes of their oppression and poised to seek justice. Because of their marginalization, farm workers advocate and organize for freedom from slavery, oppression and death. The liberation that farm workers seek is not only for corporal life, but is spiritual freedom as well. Certainly physical death is one form of oppression that farm workers face. Two workers died in the fields of North Carolina in 2005 from heat stroke, hundreds of Latin Americans die annually crossing the U.S./Mexico border, and hundreds of thousands of farm laborers are poisoned with potentially deadly pesticides each year. Farm workers are also seeking a spiritual community. “This spirituality gives rise to new songs to the Lord, songs filled with an authentic joy because it is spirituality that is nourished by the hope of a people familiar with the suffering caused by poverty and contempt.”²

In 2004, North Carolina farm workers won a contract with the NC Growers’ Association and Mt. Olive Pickle Co. ending the boycott of Mt. Olive pickles and gaining respect in the workplace for over 8,500 farm workers. With this victory, there was much celebration among farm workers and advocates. Now there is the acknowledgement that there are over one hundred thousand additional farm workers who need protections, wage increases, and benefits. This need for full deliverance from oppression is reminiscent of a speech made by Frederick Douglass at a Fourth of July Celebration in 1852 when he reminded the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of liberty’s unfinished business. Though referring to slavery, his challenge of the need for awareness, action, and hope is relevant today. He implies that since the church did not stand against slavery, then it

…regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing.³

While it is through oppression that marginalized communities are blessed and thus promised liberation, it is through solidarity with farm workers and other marginalized peoples that many of us can participate in the collective journey toward justice. Without communion with farm workers, who nourish us physically and spiritually, we are not able to challenge the individualism, discrimination, and oppression that support injustice based on one’s documentation status, country of origin, color of skin, language spoken, or money earned. As long as farm laborers continue to live in exile away from their families, earn poverty wages, and work and live in life-threatening conditions, liberty has unfinished business. It is only through a communal journey of hardship and conflict that farm workers and advocates can restore the full community to health—to a life free of oppression—and therefore be full of joy.

By Melinda Wiggins, Executive Director, Student Action with Farmworkers

1.  Libby Manny, Alejandra Okie, Melinda Wiggins, eds. “Interview with Miguel by Luis Mendoza.” Fields Without Borders/Campos Sin Fronteras: An Anthology of Documentary Writing and Photography by Student Action with Farmworkers’ Interns (SAF: Durham, 1998).

2.  Gutierrez, 19. 3.  Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” 05 July 1852.