Who picked your blueberries?
Nowadays when I reach for a bunch of blueberries, I pause and wonder.
Who picked these berries?
Was it the work of some of the people I met recently in Western Michigan?
The people who told me about long days in the sun without a break or without water or a toilet and how they are sometimes cheated out of their earnings.
The people who talked about desperate families sneaking underage children onto the fields so they can earn as much possible because the fields are so crowded nowadays with new workers – people fleeing the immigration raids, or new recruits on the migrant stream from places as far away as Oaxaca or simply jobless folks scouring for work, any work.
I went to Western Michigan because that’s the Midwest’s garden, drawing about 90,000 farmworkers yearly. But here in the Chicago area we have about 50,000 workers, many of them farmworkers and many others who tend the nurseries and gardens.
Nearly all of them are Latino and because so many are without papers, they suffer in silence from abuses that you would imagine went out of practice decades ago.
I know about these workers in the Chicago area and their problems because of a thoughtful and wisely timed article some weeks ago by Fabiola Pomerada in La Raza that talked about the agencies that help these workers with the challenges they face.
So, now while they have finished picking blue-berries and are moving on to other crops, it seems a good time to go out and witness the lives of these people who harvest our foods.
Or with the explosion of small farmers’ markets in the Chicago area, a good story might be about these farmers and where our crops come from. If your audience cares about where it gets its food, this can be a good story to tell. This can become a moving narrative story about farmers and the people who work for them. Or a story about simply knowing who harvested your food and focusing on them.
Driving home from Michigan, I thought about the stories I heard and stories I heard years ago in central Florida where slavery still lingered in the fields and I thought about how little life has changed for some in the nation’s farm fields and I hoped the blueberries I bought at a road stand stand didn’t come from the wrong place.
Once again, if you do any reporting on this or want some suggestions, drop me a note.
saludos
Steve@newstips.org
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6225/how_would_you_like_his_job/
and here’s a column by Teresa Puente
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/chicanisima/2010/07/this-summer-ive-spent-time.html
Comments
No Comments