Thank The Farmworkers
Elliott "Aspen" W. Smith
Thanksgiving normally disgusts me as a holiday, besides the family aspect. I never really liked most of the food, and despise the historical baggage regarding the natives. Though I am a proud American, I believe we are old enough as a country to fall on different and more rooted traditions other than this holiday. However, I do think there is something I think our entire civilization needs to be thankful for. The Farmworker.
During the future 2024 presidential elect’s Donald J. Trump’s town hall on Univision, a man approached him early in the interview. His name was Jorge Velasquez. Jorge was a farmworker, who had spent his life in the Californian fields picking strawberries and cutting broccoli. Many of these jobs, as he would say, utilized undocumented labor. He asked Trump, what would happen if they got mass deported and what price we would pay for food. Trump would go on a tangent about helping farmers who he would state were skewered by the last four years. This was a terminal mistake, but I will not blame Trump for this. Most Americans (and people in the industrial world) cannot distinguish between farmer and farmworker or just how important farmworkers like our friend Jorge are to the foundation of our civilization.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a dystopian book called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. It tells the city of a vibrant bustling utopian city by the name of Omelas with all the prosperities known to man. However, in this story, a horrible realization that many were forced to come to was that all of this utopian prosperity came at the expense of a single child subject to eternal damnation and pain through no willingness of their own. Many resumed their daily lives, but some were so reviled that they walked away from the city. Many dystopian novels like this are often crude parodies of physical conditions that many saw in their own daily lives often to an exaggerated degree. However, Ursula presented a moral and philosophical dilemma. Whether she knew it or not, she described modern industrial civilization, mainly in “First World” Countries. Due to the pervasiveness of high Modernity, many cannot afford to walk away from the city. But what do these have to do with farmworkers?
One of the early cultural aspects born of the burgeoning Aridoamerican people was that of the Chicano Movement. After WWII, many GIs who had fought never returned to the fields which their ancestors cultivated. They went to managerial/industrial jobs, moved to the suburbs, and flocked to new and upcoming places such as the false city of Los Angeles. This open agrarian gap was filled by Braceros; farm workers who worked the fields that were imported from Mexico as temporary workers to replace farming activity during WWII and to a lesser extent the earlier eras stretching back to the late 19th century. They were temporary migrant laborers who ebbed and flowed between the US and Northern Mexico like the tides. They were men of the Aridoamerican Plane. They were current people working the land and returning to cheaper Mexico during the winter to harvest the fruits of their labor. However, due to a mixture of condescension and horrid wages, many of these farmworkers with the help of the culturally adjacent Nuevomexicanos who were dealing with their own land dispute at the hands of the Anglo Empire would go on to form the Chicano Movement, guided by Caesar Chavez.
Farm work is brutal work, which is why many abandoned it upon the lure of the megalopolis. You are bent down, working in the intense sun for hours incomprehensible to most Americans. It’s very physically taxing work. Not only are the wages terrible compared to the rest of America but there remain horrid abuses which are harder to counter due to people’s undocumented status. Not only are they the only ones doing it, but even if normal Americans wanted to return to the fields, they would be far too old as a population due to collapses of fertility. Technics will not save us due to its raw costs and resource inputs required at a mass scale. All of our intensification of agriculture has come from increased usage of fertilizers and Migrant Labor. Even the blistering abscess of the La Frontera Wall was deliberately made very shoddily so that those who were willing could circumnavigate it.
While it is true immigration lowers wages, it’s ”High Skilled” immigration that does, or more specifically downwardly mobile degree holders. We have seen Canada’s standard of living collapse under mass importing these degree holders, and they at least partially contribute to the decline of the degree’s value in the United States. Great replacement certainly is happening, great replacement of white collar and industrial jobs in favor of overseas people due to cheaper costs. This does not apply to the humble and rooted farmworker nor the agrarian jobs of the denizens of the “First World” abandoned for the lure of the cushy megalopolis’ of the late Faustian culture. Many of the agricultural companies would centralize, cannibalizing the remaining land for monocultural cash crop practices, and utilizing an army of undocumented laborers teetering on slave-tier wages who within the Anglo Empire have no real representation for them allowing for constant abuses both from their employers as well as wider society which views them as an invader and calls for their deportation.
In reality, the Farmworker is our Atlas, holding the entirety of our civilization by their shoulders. As very few people know how to farm anymore, we have offset much of our farming to these migrants and the corporations that brutally abuse them. Many of them come to these industrial countries for opportunity or refuge but are still brutally subject within the broader Anglo System. Industrial Civilization in its haunting overcast, demands a lower slave-like class in order to economically fulfill itself and its entire mission. It has thus opted for the cannibalization of rural people within poorer countries to run this machine, mainly and originally Mexicans and Central Americans which Caesar Chavez stood for. Demography is damned in the reality that the Farmworkers are the only ones preventing you from starving to death in the hollow shell that the megalopolis’ are. Unfortunately, the people who claim to be on the side of the farmworker are Angeline and Liberal elites who view diversity purely through idyllic culturally suicidal lenses or by their perception of Jose who mows their lawn, and Maria who cleans their house. When push comes to shove, many of these people advocate for slavery and a newer much more disgusting form of La Casta which many Aridoamericans revile.
Farmworkers are the abused child in the City of Omelas. While we enjoy material prosperities unseen in human history and incomprehensible to our ancestors (and indeed we may not see again for thousands of years if ever again), our entire world is built on a foundation worked for and tended by their hands. America is one of the largest agrarian exporters in the world. Remittances, or the reason these migrants come to these abusive occupations be damned when they’re the reason we all aren’t currently starving to death. Many countries around the world including all developed countries have similar examples, however these won’t be mentioned as much since the Farmworker is embedded in the DNA of the Aridoamerican Plane. Rather than demean them, we must remember we wouldn’t have a society without them. Should they ever shrug, we will all pay the price for abusing them. History will vindicate them.
Si Se Puede.
Hey, great article u discussed this on the eurabiamania podcast. As a urban person living in a big city one is so much drowned in the sea of abstractions that one misses the physical reality of life.