WHEN A STRANGER RESIDES WITH YOU
Migrant Farmworkers and the Gift of Food
Matthew Philipp Whelan
for Andrew
amigo, luchador, traductor
When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger
who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as
yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I the Lord am your God.
—Leviticus 19:34-35
You serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers ... Such
fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high … Is not this the fast that
I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the
oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? … Then your light shall break forth like the
dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the
glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
—Isaiah 58:1-10
Introduction
On Saturday January 14th 2001, two days before Martin Luther King Jr. Day,
hundreds of migrant Latino farmworkers1 and their families set out on a 22 mile march
from Quincy, Florida towards Tallahassee, the state capital.2 For them and for many
other farmworkers and their supporters nationwide, the civil rights movement is not over.
The long struggle against segregation continues.
After covering half the distance the first day, the Florida marchers slept in a
nearby town. That Sunday morning, they awoke and held a prayer service. Much like
for the participants in the civil rights movement, the living energies of this particular
march were theological. These farmworkers were not only seeking a more just US but
also the coming of God’s Kingdom, a story as ancient as the Hebrew Scriptures.
After the prayer service, the farmworkers marched the remaining miles to
Tallahassee. Their destination was Governor Jeb Bush’s mansion. In the street outside
his gate, six of the farmworkers got down on their hands and knees. Others placed a
tabletop and a white tablecloth on their backs and then spread peppers, oranges, and
tomatoes across it. Over the makeshift table fashioned on the backs of the workers a sign
read: “WE PUT THE FOOD ON FLORIDA’S TABLE.” They sought to remind their
fellow Floridians and the rest of us that we eat thanks to the gift of other’s labor, and that
those who provide this labor are silent and invisible among us.
In considering such events, we see that our eating is more complex than a
nutritional exchange between an eater and food or a commercial transaction between a
1
The terms farmworkers, laborers, workers and migrant farmworkers will be used interchangeably. In The
Human Condition, Hannah Arendt makes an important distinction between labor and work. She defines
labor as “the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body ... bound to the vital
necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor ... the human condition of labor is life itself.”
She defines work as “the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not
embedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle ... work
provides an artificial life of things.” Agricultural is an instance where there is somewhat of a conflation
between labor and work. In its alimentary role, agriculture is clearly linked with labor. Yet its increasing
industrialization leads many to draw parallels between agricultural laborers and other industrial workers.
Because farm laborers are so often referred to as workers, I will do the same.
These events are recounted in Ryan Davis, “22 Miles on the Road to Justice,” St. Petersburg Times,
January 15, 2001.
2
2
buyer and seller.3 It is also participation in a system of relationships in which we occupy
a privileged place and assign little value to how we attain the food we eat. Our challenge
is powerful: How do we learn to see eating as an ethical act? As part of a larger story in
which those who labor to provide our food are also participants? In which the health of
the interwoven relationships among people and the land that bring about our nourishment
are central?4 These are important questions to consider in a time when our personal
nutrition is the only form of health considered relevant to our eating. The Florida protest
reveals that there is something profoundly wrong with the relationships that comprise our
food economy; for these relationships allow us to enjoy the gift of our daily bread
because they rest upon the backs of others who find it difficult to secure their own.
What follows is an attempt to draw out the idea that eating is ethical and that it is
part of a story in which we are all participants. It is an attempt to “slice, dissect, and hold
up to the light the diseased tissues of the social body gone awry … [and] with an eye
toward healing … search for paths of resistance … and liberation.”5 To do so, we must
begin by paying particular attention where the disease is most evident: in the suffering of
farmworkers. We will first look beyond our nation’s borders in order to understand some
of the forces that brought them here (Section I). After discussing their journey north, we
will focus on farmworker poverty in the US (Sections II and III). We will discuss their
struggles for justice on a local level with the support of organizations like the Virginia
Justice Center for Farm and Immigrant Workers and the Virginia Farmworker Legal
Assistance Project (Section IV) and then at a national level with the renewal of the
Freedom Rides (Section V). Finally, in the last two sections (VI and VII), we will, in the
spirit of the civil rights movement, observe some of the theological implications of these
3
Highlighting both these meanings, a store has recently opened in Charlottesville, Virginia that is both a
restaurant and a gas station. Its name is Fuel and its slogan is: “Fuel for your body, fuel for your car.”
4
Miguel Altieri, Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to adequately delve into agroecological concerns, they are also
crucial to this story. For example, what practices are used by the predominant modes of agricultural
production in order to produce our food? What are their effects upon the land, in terms of soil erosion,
declining soil fertility, and pesticide contamination? Still other questions might include: What materials are
used to package or advertise the foods that add nothing to its nutritional value? What do those materials
cost and what kind of waste do they produce? What was added to the food that is not food in order to
preserve it? What distance, and with what effects, did it travel so that we might eat it?
3
events, arguing that we must radically expand our understanding of health to embrace all
the relationships within our food economy. Only then can we understand what health and
healing entail.
I. Hunger Comes and the Men Leave: The Journey North
To understand the migrant farmworker story we must first look beyond our
nation’s borders. For most farmworkers, the trailhead of their journey is Latin America.
Latinos in general—and Mexicans in particular—make up the vast majority of the
migrant farmworker population in the US.6 Every year, hundreds of thousands set out
from countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua on the
dangerous journey northward in search of work.7 While they face great difficulties in the
US, their difficulties begin in their homeland and are the reason for their journey. As
farmworker Algimiro Morales says, “It is necessity which brings my people here to live
through these dangers, face social rejection, and watch as their families are torn apart as
fathers leave their families at home and children grow up alone. This is not the way
things should be.”8 Farmworker Jorge Urroz expresses a similar sentiment in the form of
a prayer: “Lord, give me the chance to make it north so that my family won’t have to
suffer anymore, so that they’ll no longer spend days without eating.”9 There are powerful
forces that drive people northward.
In central Honduras, in the municipality of San Juan de Flores, for example, the
migrant journey northward is perhaps the story that dominates the imaginations of most
Honduran men today.10 Countless men have left for El Norte (the North), and many
5
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1992), p. 26.
Alejandra Okie Holt and Sister Evelyn Mattern, “Making Home: Culture, Ethnicity, and Religion among
Farmworkers in the Southeastern United States,” in The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers’ Lives, Labor,
and Advocacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 22.
6
“A Profile of US Farmworkers: Demographics, Household Composition, Income and Use of Services,”
U.S. Department of Labor: Office of the Secretary, November 1, 2003.
7
8
Daniel Rothenberg, With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), p. 29.
9
IBID, p. 122.
4
others actively plan to do so. Almost all express a similar reason for leaving: they cannot
make a living where they are.11 They set out northward, nourished by the stories they
have heard about the US—a land of plenty, flowing not with milk and honey, but with
dólares (dollars). Before leaving, they often borrow from money lenders at exorbitant
interest rates—as high as twenty-five percent a month. Homes are frequently offered as
collateral. Today, there are villages in Honduras that consist almost entirely of women,
children and elders; all the able-bodied men—young and old—have left. The fates of
those who set out are various: some make it; others die or disappear entirely and are
never heard from again. Some live their whole lives in the US; others return home after
repeated failures to cross the border or because they run out of money.
The poor do not have to wait for disaster.12 For Mexico and many of the nations
of Central America, it has come repeatedly. To mention just a few recent examples: in
1998 Hurricane Mitch killed thousands and devastated infrastructure in both Honduras
and Nicaragua. The media called Mitch the worst natural disaster to hit the Americas this
century.13 Because the marginal people lived on marginal land, such as unstable hillsides
or flood planes, they disproportionately bore the disaster: their houses were the most
likely to collapse or wash away when the heavy rains and flooding began.
In 2001-2002, back-to-back droughts scorched the corn and bean crops as they
stood in the fields. Since many in this region are subsistence farmers and these crops are
the staples, rates of hunger and malnutrition rose substantially. The Nicaraguan
newspaper, La Prensa, reported that “People are surviving on a diet of mango.”14 In the
most isolated villages in the municipality of San Juan de Flores, Honduras, even before
the drought, many families subsisted during los meses de hambre (the hungry months)
10
I lived and worked in this region for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer (2000-2002).
11
One must also mention that there are now extensive networks that link Latinos and others to jobs, people
and resources in the US. Our economies are tightly integrated and are growing increasingly so.
12
This phrase appears in an essay by the Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta.
Mark Armstrong, “A Year After Hurricane Mitch, Central America Still Struggling,” CNN Online,
October 27, 1999.
13
“Central America Alarmed at Crop Failure,” BBC, July 27, 2001; and “Honduras Declares Drought
Emergency,” BBC, July 25, 2001.
14
5
mostly on a diet of green plantains. During the drought, with their reserves of corn and
beans dwindling, it was common practice for families throughout the region to eat a
dinner of sopa de café (coffee soup), which consists of corn tortillas soaking in a cup of
coffee. In conversation, people often used the phrase aguantar hambre (endure hunger),
a reminder that people do not just die from hunger; they also live with it and endure it.
Because so many migrant farmworkers in the US were at one time farmers in
Mexico, we must also mention the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) on the livelihoods of subsistence farmers in Mexico, who are pitted in direct
competition with subsidized US farmers. This situation has increasingly been seen as a
disaster for the poorest sectors of Mexico’s economy.15 Many fear that it is a herald of
what is to come for the rest of the region’s small-scale agriculture.16
Most recently, coffee’s price on the world market has fallen drastically and
currently stands at a record low.17 In some areas, its price has dipped below the costs of
production and farmers no longer harvest it. Coffee cultivation provides many families
throughout this region—like those in the villages of Honduras described above—with
their primary, and often only, source of cash income. As the cornerstone of the familial
economy, when the price of coffee drops, rates of hunger and malnutrition rise, children
are taken out of school and there is no money for medicine in times of sickness.
It is hard to overestimate the scale of each of these disasters—let alone their
recurrences—in societies without insurance or social safety nets. We must remember
that a number of these countries, like Honduras and Nicaragua, are already among the
poorest in the Americas. Many have responded to local poverty by joining the rural
Tim Weiner, “NAFTA: Ten Years Later,” The New York Times, December 27, 2003. For a very
articulate Mexican voice on this matter, see also Alejandro Nadal, “El caso del maíz mexicano en el
NAFTA: Variabilidad genética y liberalización comercial,” Programa de Ciencia y Tecnología, El Colegio
de México; translated into English as “On the Environmental and Social Impacts of Economic
Liberalization on Corn Production” (available online at: www.oxfam.org).
15
16
See Harvesting Poverty, an archive of The New York Times editorials on the damaging impact US
agriculture subsidies and trade barriers have on farmers in countries like Mexico.
The BBC has done a good job in covering the coffee crisis. See “Coffee Crisis Tops Summit Agenda,”
BBC, May 19, 2003; “Child Victims of Coffee Trade Wars,” BBC, February 10, 2003; “Spilling the Beans
on Cheap Coffee,” BBC, September 24, 2002; and “Why Cheap Beans Don’t Make Cheap Coffee,” BBC,
February 10, 2003.
17
6
exodus. In his album Clandestino, the singer Manu Chao captures the origins of this
migration in a haunting refrain: El hambre viene, el hombre se va / por la carretera
(Hunger comes, and the men leave / by the highway). But it is inaccurate to say that
people leave their homes when powerful forces are at work to drive them away; the
invisible hand for some is an invisible fist for others. The notion that a market exists for
all in which goods and services are freely exchanged is an illusion. These migrants
neither dwell in a world nor work in a market that is free.
Everyone who travels north by land has a story of hardship. Migrants and those
they leave behind tell stories of the countless thieves who assault them and the crooked
businessmen who prey on their vulnerability. They also tell stories of the goodness of
complete strangers who give them a meal and a bed to sleep in. Because migrants
typically know no one along the way, many camp at night in the woods along the road.
They often travel by train, jumping on and off as they try to avoid la migra (immigration
agents) and tying themselves to it in order to sleep. Their ingenuity is continuously tested
in discovering routes to avoid immigration officials or ways to sneak across the border.
A taxi driver in Honduras, who had gone to the US and returned, told me of his crossing
in a small container in the back of a truck. The container was sealed tightly to avoid
suspicion. When it was opened on the US side of the border, he had nearly suffocated.18
Many have traditionally crossed into the US by way of the Rio Grande. For this
reason, those who successfully journey to the US by land are referred to as going mojado
(wet). Every year people drown in the crossing. Pushed to increasingly remote areas by
border policies that concentrate policing efforts on populated areas, many migrants now
cross Arizona’s Sonora Desert.19 The desert’s temperature fluctuates widely, from frigid
nights where the cold makes it hard to sleep, to scorching days where the heat is intense
and incessant, reaching 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Wandering in the desert in these
18
Earlier this year in May, reports of 19 smuggled Latino immigrants who died after being sealed in the
back of an airless tractor-trailer made national news. Many deaths, however, go unreported.
19
The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) recently ended a trial program in which, instead of
sending migrants back across the Arizona border, the detainees were flown to Texas so that they would not
reconnect with the same networks of smugglers. See Karen Brulliard, “Texans Assail Repatriation
Flights,” The Washington Post, September 30, 2003 and Reed Karaim, “A Paradox on Mexico’s Border,”
The Washington Post, February 3, 2001.
7
conditions is perilous. In an interview with National Public Radio, border patrol agent,
Marious Masunga, whose job is to find those lost in the desert, said, “We find the bodies
... blistered all up.”20 Thousands have died in recent years, and in the desert’s vast
expanse, there are certainly others waiting to be found.
That our border to the north is virtually unguarded is difficult to explain in light of
its southern counterpart, heavily fortified and militarized as if some danger or plague
lurked on the other side. For many in the US, a threat does exist; it is the poverty of
others. However, the movement of people northward in search of a living wage is the
shadow-side of the mobility of US companies and capital that move anonymously
southward in search of higher profits. As one migrant worker put it, “It is globalization.
The Americans came to my country, so now I am here.”21 While our borders are
permeable to the search for higher profits extracted in cheap labor, tax shelters and weak
environmental standards, they are largely impermeable to poor people who move out of
necessity. Strict immigration laws prohibit their legal passage. When they do pass, they
are labeled as illegal—stigmatized and dismissed. The impermeability of the border to
the poor is not only evident in legal designations but also in the bodies that drown in its
rivers and die in its deserts.
II. The Broken Body: Farmworker Poverty
The backbone of the US agricultural sector is its short-term, seasonal labor.
These are the crops that depend upon migrants to be planted, tended and harvested:
oranges, grapefruits, cherries, peaches, apples, watermelons, tomatoes, onions, eggplants,
peppers, squash, cucumbers, mushrooms, cotton, tobacco and Christmas trees. Estimates
are that 1.8 million farmworkers live in the US; about half are undocumented. Their 3
million dependents bring the total population of farmworkers and their families to 4.8
million. Called by many the poorest and most disadvantaged group of laborers in the US,
Quoted in National Public Radio’s October 1st story, “The Train of Latino Migration: A Desert
Crossing.” See also the other two parts in the series: “Leaving Home,” and “Heading North.”
20
21
Gary Younge, “On the Bus with the Freedom Riders: Singing Out for America’s Downtrodden,” The
Guardian, October 3, 2003.
8
they work for low wages,22 with minimal benefits23 and under hazardous conditions.
They live in isolated areas, endure poor housing and have little or no access to
community services.
Farmworker poverty is a complex, self-reinforcing dynamic. Many advocates tell
its story by weaving together a number of central threads. First, because most
farmworkers arrive in the US with next to nothing and many are heavily indebted, they
are under a great deal of pressure to accept any employment they can find. When they
find jobs, they are dependent upon them and are willing to tolerate poor living and
working conditions in order to keep them.
Second, as unorganized, nonresident, minorities, they have no voice in US society
and are almost completely vulnerable to abuse, a fact about which they are deeply aware.
Their silence is most obviously evident in that they typically do not speak English but
Spanish. They face the realistic fear that if they complain about an employer or do not
work hard enough, they will face retaliation. In general, the agricultural labor market is
characterized by migrant farmworkers facing off against the organized and powerful
agriculture lobby, which, at the state and federal levels of government, has created and
sustained political and economic relationships favoring growers. The federal
government, for instance, has intervened consistently in this market on behalf of growers,
with policies that have lead to a chronic oversupply of labor. This oversupply—
combined with the fact that farmworkers typically leave the agricultural sector at the first
opportunity—undermines the potential for communal action and relieves pressure from
growers to improve wages and conditions.24
22
Farmworkers have low individual earnings from farm work. The median income is between $2,500 and
$5,000. When they are able to find non-farm work (and only about one-fourth of them are) their median
personal income was between $5,000 and $7,500, placing them far below the federal poverty line; from “A
Profile of US Farmworkers: Demographics, Household Composition, Income and Use of Services,” U.S.
Department of Labor (March 2000).
In many states, they are excluded from workers’ compensation and unemployment benefits. They
receive no medical insurance or sick leave and are denied the right to organize. They cannot access social
insurance or social service programs. See Rothenberg, p. xvii. See also “A Profile of US Farmworkers:
Demographics, Household Composition, Income and Use of Services.”
23
US Department of Labor Report to Congress, “The Agriculture Labor Market—Status and
Recommendations,” December 2000.
24
9
Third, farmworkers are hired for mostly short-term jobs. They work for low
wages and are excluded from many of the legal protections and benefits that other
workers receive. Principal among their strategies to remain employed is migration and
the stringing together of a number of jobs to make ends meet. To find such jobs, they are
often forced to rely on a subcontracting market for labor management, referred to as the
crewleader system.25 The crewleaders who help them find work exert nearly total control
over their lives, leading to abuses like stolen wages, underreported hours and production,
provision of substandard housing and violence when laborers step out of line. This
arrangement, in which the relationship between farmworkers and the growers who
employ them is not direct, but buffered by a crewleader, tends to free growers from being
held liable in courts for the wages and conditions of their workers.
All these threads comprise the knot of farmworker poverty. It is a system whose
practices shift production costs away from the collective society of growers, taxpayers
and consumers, on to migrant workers and their dependents.26 While the cost of the food
we buy at the supermarket might be relatively low as a percentage of average US
disposable income, its cost on the bodies of the farmworker community is high. The
collective society exerts pressure on farmworkers for the sake of its gain; it squeezes
profit out of their need. For this reason, many advocates speak of trying to stabilize the
farm labor market by shifting these costs to the employers, taxpayers and consumers who
benefit from their labor.27
This situation leaves various marks on the bodies—both physical and
communal—of farmworkers. On the job, farmworkers are obviously dependent on the
physical body in a way many others are not. They engage in intense physical labor for
25
Rothenberg, pp. 91-120.
26
Not only is our food economy dependent upon these workers, their families back home likewise depend
on them. As nation-states increasingly forsake a role as redistributors of wealth, that redistribution happens
informally. Undocumented immigration is one sign of this. Another sign is remittances, which in some
nations, like El Salvador and Mexico, are central to the national economy. See, for example, Victoria
Harrison, “Latino Workers Send Home $30 Billion,” BBC, 25 November 2003. For more on the notion of
informality, see Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New
York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1998).
See the Department of Labor Report, “Migrant Farmworkers: Pursuing Security in an Unstable Labor
Market,” May 1994.
27
10
many hours each day. Poverty intensifies this embodiedness, forcing them to live within
a circle of needs in which daily bread, water for drinking and bathing, clean clothes and
adequate shelter are constantly in question. Furthermore, injury on the job is a persistent
threat. Agricultural work consistently ranks as one of the most dangerous occupations in
the US, with deaths on the job every year. While the most extreme mark on their bodies
is death, more common are broken bones or severed hands, fingers and feet. More
common still are scratches, abrasions and strains. There is also the susceptibility to
sickness, which is, in many cases, a symptom and sign of the fatigue, poor nutrition and
poverty of farmworkers.
Sometimes the mark is not clearly visible on their bodies. Such is the case with
agrochemicals. Pesticides, for example, are one kind of agrochemical, ostensibly used to
kill insects or worms, and US agriculture is the world’s largest consumer of them. About
1.2 million pounds of pesticides are applied to our crops each year.28 In 1939, about
thirty-two pesticide products were registered in the US; today, there are more than
20,000.29 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that as many as
300,000 people suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year, and of those, as many as 1,000
die.30 Because farmworkers do much of the manual labor necessary to harvest produce
blemish-free, they absorb pesticides through their skin, ingest them after having passed
them from dirty hands to their food or breathe them in through their lungs. In addition,
many farmworker housing facilities are located near fields where pesticides are applied.
Because they have neither laundry facilities at their residence nor the time to do laundry
during the week, they wear the same clothes day in and day out, prolonging and
worsening their chronic exposure.
These marks on the physical bodies of farmworkers correlate with other marks on
their communal bodies. We have already spoken of the way their familial and communal
Rebecca Clarren, “Fields of Poison: While Farmworkers are Sickened by Pesticides, Industry Writes the
Rules,” The Nation, Monday, December 29, 2003; see also Christine Stapleton, “Pickers Wade in
Pesticides,” Palm Beach Post, December 7, 2003.
28
29
Clarren, “Fields of Poison.”
30
According to the most recent estimate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
11
bodies are broken with they leave to come to the US. Political and economic forces
pressure these bodies to move in certain ways and do certain things. As one farmworker
describes it: “We are caught up in the economy … we are getting squeezed.”31 This
pressure is most evident in the movement that permeates their lives.32 Migrants are,
above all, people who move. They are constantly on the move from the moment they
leave their homes to even after they arrive in the US. Their continual movement makes
the formation of relationships among themselves or others that seek to help them
difficult. It likewise complicates the emergence of leaders from among them. To the
frustration of many organizers, they move around so much that they are hard to
organize.33 To the frustration of many lawyers, they move so much that they are
sometimes reluctant to press charges when they are wronged. Farmworkers often speak
of life as a fight, a struggle to exist (la lucha). Immersed in this struggle to exist, there is
little left over to resist and join with those who would fight with them. It is therefore
extraordinary when they come together for a common purpose and are able to make
themselves seen and heard among us, as they did in Florida. Their very gathering
together resists many powerful forces that pressure and even break their bodies.
III. Stories of Suffering
Silence, invisibility and powerlessness are central aspects of migrant
farmworkers’ lives. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain illuminates how these mutually
reinforce one other and tighten the knot of their poverty. Scarry begins her book with a
meditation on the extreme difficulty of expressing physical pain. Resistance to language
31
“Forgotten in the Fields,” Richmond Times Dispatch, November 10, 1996.
32
Rothenburg, p 10. The literature on farmworkers often speaks of their movement in terms of three main
“streams”—eastern, central, and western. The metaphor is apt precisely because it emphasizes the
constancy of farmworker movement. Each stream moves northward with the seasons and then recedes
southward again, a vast tide of people. Some, however, have altered this formulation a bit, suggesting that
it is more accurate to speak of this movement in terms of small rivulets that diverge from several tributaries
flowing in different directions. Many workers are follow-the-crop migrants, combining several short-term
jobs to work longer. Others are back-and-forth migrants; they live during the off-season elsewhere, usually
Mexico, and then travel to a set location in the US once agricultural work begins. Charles D. Thompson Jr.
“Introduction,” The Human Cost of Food, p. 10.
33
I have heard this from lawyers who represent undocumented workers. The flip side—which we will
discuss later in regards to the H-2A contract—is when the farmworker is tied to that single employer.
12
is essential to what pain is. But pain does not simply resist language; it actively destroys
it. In acute, physical suffering, language breaks down. The sufferer generally reverts to
pre-linguistic cries, groans, screams and silence.
The inherent difficulty in expressing physical pain makes it difficult for the
sufferer to describe that pain to others and therefore for others to perceive it. Suffering is
a radically private and individualizing experience, confining the sufferer to the prison of
his or her body and fostering an “absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality
and the reality of other persons.”34 For those who are not in pain, the suffering of others
easily slides into invisibility, for “almost any other phenomenon occupying the same
environment will distract attention from it. Indeed, even where it is virtually the only
content in a given environment, it will be possible to describe that environment as though
the pain were not there.”35 All these characteristics of suffering—silence, individuation
and invisibility—form a powerful vortex in which it is very difficult for those of us who
are not in pain to perceive those who are.
The more physical pain is a part of someone’s experience of the world, the more
fraught with hazards will be the path between their experience of suffering and others’
general awareness of it. The most troubling implication of this is that the most insidious
forms of suffering among us will be precisely those about which we are least aware. For
this reason, Dorothy Day writes, “We always need to be thinking and writing about
poverty, for if we are not among its victims, its reality fades from us. We must talk about
poverty because people insulated by their own comfort loose sight of it.”36
These characteristics of physical pain can influence all aspects of life and take a
communal form. In his book, The Honorary Counsel, Graham Green writes: “Most of
[the doctor’s] middle-class patients were accustomed to spend at least ten minutes
explaining a simple attack of flu. It was only [with] the poor that he ever encountered
suffering in silence, suffering which had no vocabulary to explain a degree of pain, its
position or its nature.”37 Paulo Friere speaks of the “muteness” of the rural poor of
34
Scarry, p. 4.
35
IBID, p. 12.
36
Dorothy Day, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Ellsberg (New York: Orbis Books, 1997), p. 106.
13
northeast Brazil and their “culture of silence.”38 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, also writing
about northeast Brazil, describes the many, complex layers of silence in a world
characterized by everyday violence:
[T]he culture of silence ... is the obvious correlate of the culture of violence and
terror in the shanty-town but also the silences of less than courageous complicity
and the failures of nerve that can present themselves as the love of harmony and
non-violence. But in addition to the seething silence of coerced compliance is the
maddening, bureaucratic stone wall of silence toward the suffering of the
anonymous marginals ... There is also the unexpected silence of the church bells
of Our Lady of Sorrows...39
The surrounding society’s political and ecclesial silence has a great deal to do with the
inherent difficulties in expressing suffering and others’ perception of it.
How we perceive others’ suffering ultimately depends upon the story we tell
about it and how we see ourselves in relation to that story. Our stories can illuminate
suffering or cast it deeper into darkness. Michael Katz alerts us to one particular story
that has shaped poverty discourse throughout US history and has served to cast the poor
deeper into darkness.40 It gathers around the notion of what he calls, “the undeserving
poor,” and attributes the causes of poverty to the poor themselves and deficiencies
familial structure, race and cultural forms while ignoring forces of inequality, power and
exploitation. Stories currently told about Latino migrants that likewise construe them as
undeserving speak of them as: illegal, a plague, troublemakers, parasitic on our economy,
the cause of our societal ills, unable to do any other kind of work and well suited for
manual labor due to their ethnic characteristics.
The suffering of others is not destined to be silent and hidden. Our stories have
the power to transfigure time and space, to help give sufferers a voice and visibility and
37
Graham Green, The Honorary Counsel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), p. 66.
38
Paulo Friere, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury, 1970). Because he and others
regarded the illiteracy of rural Brazilians as the source and sign of their “muteness,” Friere proposed basic
literacy campaign as the vehicle for resistance.
39
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, pp. 530-531.
40
Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1989), pp. 3-8, 236-239. See also Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimmed: On (Not)
Getting by in America (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2001), pp. 196-199.
14
link them to others. Do we see poverty, for example, as the result of some deficiency in
an otherwise normal world or an emergency crying out to heaven for redress? What
stories might be told about migrant farmworkers that move them from the margins of our
society and instigate the healing of a broken body?
IV. You Were Once Strangers: Farmworkers in Virginia
From June to December 2003, I worked as an Outreach Paralegal for the Virginia
Farmworker Legal Assistance Project (VFLAP), based in Charlottesville, which
represents farmworkers who are in the US legally on a temporary work visa called the H2A visa. The VFLAP collaborates with the Virginia Justice Center for Farm and
Immigrant Workers (VJC), which represents undocumented workers. Both organizations
travel throughout Virginia and visit labor camps, pass out leaflets and speak with workers
about their legal rights.
The Virginia Justice Center is one of the only programs in the state of Virginia
that represents undocumented workers. Since its inception in 1997, the VJC under the
leadership of Mary Bauer has represented farmworkers so successfully—winning more
than $700,000 in settlements and judgements for over 1000 clients—that politically
powerful industries lobbied to terminate their state funding, placing the entire program in
jeopardy.41 Florence Roisman, a professor of law at the University of Indiana, called this
de-funding “an embarrassment to the Commonwealth of Virginia ... [it is] unique within
the nation to deny all state funding for civil legal services for migrant workers.” Mary
Bauer is incredulous that what she does is seen as so controversial. As she is fond of
saying, “Our clients want such pathetically basic things.”
At the beginning of the summer, both organizations travel mostly in southern
Virginia along the North Carolina border where the predominant crop is tobacco. As the
summer ends and fall begins, they increasingly travel northward into the apple-growing
areas of central and northern Virginia. During this time, weekly visits are made to South
Boston, Virginia where the Virginia Agricultural Growers Association (VAGA) brings its
Henry Weinstein, “Powerful Foes of Legal Aid: State Money for Virginia Justice Center for Migrants is
Slashed after Business Protests,” Los Angeles Times, May 30, 2001. In this article, David Udell of the
41
15
workers every Monday and Thursday mornings to catch Greyhound buses for the nonstop bus ride to Laredo, Texas and then to their final destination in Mexico. As fall ends
and winter begins, both organizations focus on southwestern Virginia, where Christmas
trees are grown. The areas that grow these trees for homes throughout the nation are no
less free of abuses and mistreatment of their workers. In fact, in her nearly fifteen years
in farmworker law, Mary Bauer has had more cases in this area than anywhere else in
Virginia. The Christmas tree production is a $74 million dollar industry, yet minimum
wage and overtime violations are endemic.42
The Virginia Farmworker Legal Assistance Project represents farmworkers on an
H-2A visa.43 H-2A is a “guestworker program,” which came into widespread use in
1964. Growers import seasonal workers through the Department of Labor, which sets
their wages and work terms.44 The legal status of these guestworkers is non-immigrant,
meaning they work for a single employer for a set amount of time, and then they must
return to their country of origin. H-2A work, though legal, does not count toward
residency or citizenship. They are imported for their labor and then sent back home once
they become unnecessary. The H-2A program violates both NAFTA’s Labor Side
Agreement as well as most international conventions on the rights of migrant workers.45
Many commentators have noted how guestworker programs continue the story of
state intervention in the labor market to the benefit of growers. The greatest attraction of
such programs is the grower’s access to an unlimited supply of inexpensive, compliant
labor. One grower expressed this well: “If we had a bunch of American workers, we’d
Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School calls the de-funding “direct retaliation” by
business interests sued by pro-poor lawyers.
Steven Greenhouse, “Underside of Christmas Greenery: Poor Wages,” The New York Times, November
19, 2002. See also Marc Linder, ‘Moments are the Elements of Profit’: Overtime and the Deregulation of
Working Hours Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (Iowa City: Fanpihua Press, 2000).
42
Adrienne M. Dervartanian, “What Will Become of the H-2A Program? A Critique of the Farmworker
Protection Provisions,” Georgia Law Review.
43
See also Rothenburg, pp. 40, 209, 219, 230, 232-33; “H-2A Guestworker Program: A Legacy of
Importing Agricultural Labor,” The Human Cost of Food, pp. 113-135. For powerful insight into the role
of the state and its intervention in the agricultural labor market, see Hahamovitch, The Fruits of their Labor
and Kitty Calauita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration and the INS (Routeledge, 1992).
44
45
See Organization of American States statements on rights of migrant workers and “Trading Away
Rights: The Unfulfilled Promise of NAFTA’s Labor Side Agreement,” Human Rights Watch.
16
have to hire [someone] like a personnel director to deal with all the problems. The
people we have, they come and they work … they don’t say anything.”46 The most
important piece of protective legislation for farmworkers in the US, the Migrant and
Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act, specifically excludes H-2A workers from
coverage, allowing growers even more control over them. The agricultural lobby has
continuously urged Congress to ease the restrictions on bringing in more foreign workers
and to limit their rights while here.47
The agriculture sector has not had to increase wages and expand benefits to hire
and keep workers because it can import them from a ready pool desperate for jobs. In
order to do so, growers must prove that US workers are unavailable and that wages and
working conditions offered will not adversely affect US workers. The wages and work
terms of the H-2A contract are the minimum required by the Department of Labor. Very
few US citizens are willing to do the work for so little. But it is not as if US citizens will
not do the work; for in the past, they have done the work. Rather, as Cindy Hahamovitch
writes, “It would be more correct to say that Americans will not work under the
conditions offered on the nation’s farms as long as they have any alternatives.”48 Even if
there are US workers in the vicinity who would do the work for higher wages and
benefits, the grower can still import foreign workers if there are no US workers who will
do the work for the wages and work terms offered.49
Ginger Thompson, “Immigration Clash Leaves Vidalia Onion Farmers Bitter,” Chicago Tribune, May
28, 1998.
46
47
Charles D. Thompson, “Introduction,” The Human Cost of Food, p. 4.
48
Hahamovitch, p. 13.
49
George Bush has recently urged Congress to pass a plan to give undocumented workers temporary legal
status in the US, basically an expanded guest worker program. It would allow employers not only in
agriculture but in the service industry as well, to import foreign workers on a temporary basis and then
export them when they are no longer needed. The details have yet to be worked out, but many fear that it
will do nothing to place these workers on a path to citizenship. Rather, the huge downward pressure on
wages and working conditions that presently characterizes agriculture will soon characterize the rest of the
economy as well. Richard W. Stevenson and Steven Greenhouse, “Plan for Illegal Immigrant Workers
Draws Fire from Two Sides,” The New York Times, January 8, 2004; Elisabeth Bumiller, “Border Politics
as Bush Woos 2 Key Groups with a Proposal,” The New York Times, January 8, 2004; and Nina Bernstein,
“Immigrants are Divided on Bush Proposal,” The New York Times, January 8, 2004.
17
At the beginning of every harvest season, the VFLAP receives directions to the H2A camps throughout Virginia from the Department of Labor. We are continuously
frustrated by how terrible the directions are and how difficult it is to find the camps.
Directions say to turn left where we really need to turn right. Often, they do not mention
road names or numbers, or they have the distances between landmarks completely wrong.
To say that the camps are hard to find is an understatement. After just a few outreach
trips, I got the unmistakable impression that we were being deliberately misled. Many
trips are spent just trying to find the camps in isolated rural areas. When we do find
them, they are usually places set apart, like behind a farmer’s house, a store or a cluster of
trees. In fact, to find farmworkers at all, I learned from my co-worker Charo Mina-Rojas,
one must develop a way of seeing, a way of recognizing the particular appearance of a
sunken trailer home, for example, in which they are likely to be living.
What was most memorable about my own visits with farmworkers was the
pervasive fear and mistrust among them, which, along with their movement, impedes the
formation of relationships. Fear is an understandable emotion for strangers in a foreign
land. But their fear also relates to a general vulnerability and lack of protection. Because
it corrodes trust between people, fear works against the potential for communal action,
further atomizing a body already broken. Moreover, there are good reasons why they are
afraid. On an outreach trip to southwest Virginia, in front of many others, an
undocumented Christmas tree cutter signed papers in pursuit of an overtime wage claim
to be represented by Andrew Turner, a Virginia Justice Center lawyer. As we drove out
of the camp that night, Andrew turned to me and said, “If we were in certain parts of
Florida, he would be beaten tonight for doing what he just did.” He was not beaten that
night, but a couple days later. He called from South Carolina and told Andrew he was
driven out of the camp by force by the crewleader.
Currently, farmworkers and those who seek to help them typically face one
another as strangers. Complicating the formation of lasting relationships is the fact that
paralegals, lawyers and activists can be as transient as the farmworkers themselves.
Many work a couple of months or years and then move on to different work in different
places. This is not nearly enough time for the bonds of trust to form that dissipate fear.
Problems as entrenched as these necessitate more than the dedication of months and
18
years; they necessitate the dedication of a lifetime. Even a lifetime is not enough; entire
communities of lives are necessary.
What six months of outreach trips made apparent was that rich and poor in
Virginia exist in and move through separate space. We live in different neighborhoods,
go to different schools, take different forms of transportation and often shop in different
places.50 On this note, Gustavo Gutierrez’s comments on the parable of the Good
Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) are particularly appropriate. He speaks of the danger of
limiting our neighbors to only those we see when it is increasingly the case that those
most in need are precisely those we do not see. In Luke’s account, Jesus is approached
and asked, “Who is my neighbor?” In responding, Jesus inverts the question. What is at
stake is not a definition but a response: “Which of these three do you think was the
neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” Gutiérrez comments that
“the neighbor was the Samaritan who approached the wounded man and made him his
neighbor. The neighbor … is not [the one] I find in my path, bur rather [the one] in
whose path I place myself, [the one] whom I approach and actively seek.”51 Our
neighbors are not simply those who live in our neighborhoods, go to the same schools or
shop in the same stores. We must turn from our paths in order to see them.
We cannot accurately speak about farmworkers in southeastern states like
Virginia without locating them within a much larger story of the mostly landless and
underpaid people who, for centuries, have given their labor and have not shared in its
fruits. As Cindy Hahamovitch writes in The Fruits of their Labor: Atlantic Coast
Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty,
Just as colonial planters turned to African slaves when English servants proved
unruly, farm employers in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have relied
increasingly on people of color to keep their labor costs low and conditions of
their farms out of the public limelight. They have averted criticism and conflict
by importing workers who can be exploited without apology or protest. 52
50
James Fallows, “The Invisible Poor,” New York Times Magazine, March 19, 2000.
51
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, translated and edited by
Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (New York: Orbis Books, 1988), p. 113.
52
Hahamovitch, p. 11.
19
This is a story of the establishment of a profitable system of agriculture through control
over the labor force. In this story, the state has not been a neutral actor. As Hahamovitch
writes, “faced with the alternatives of recruiting farm labor by force or improving
conditions and raising wages, Washington chose coercion over conciliation.”53 The
southeast region of the US—where slaveholding once flourished, and later, Black Codes
and Jim Crow segregation laws—has long been known for its labor inequities. Even after
de jure slavery ended, debt peonage, sharecropping and convict labor perpetuated the
segregation that kept millions of blacks and poor whites in a form of bondage.54 While
the ethnicities of those who have done such work have changed, their condition relative
to the rest of the society has changed far less.
There are, no doubt, obvious differences between slave-holding arrangements and
the condition of farmworkers in the US today. Yet farmworkers throughout the US are
literally enslaved.55 There are places in the rural south where people are tricked,
threatened or forced to work in the fields and then not paid for their labor. Camps like
these exist, for example, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.56 At such camps, the cost of
food, rent, loan payments and credit purchases of wine, beer, liquor and drugs are
deducted from each worker’s wages to keep them perpetually in debt to their employers.
These camps are often in isolated, rural areas and are ringed by fences and monitored by
guards.57 The use of debt to control workers is the logical extension of an agricultural
system built upon slavery. In recent decades, courts have established that these
conditions of debt peonage violate federal antislavery statutes. Between 1977 and 1990,
the Justice Department filed twenty such slavery cases charging seventy-one defendants.
53
IBID, p. 81.
Paul Ortiz, “From Slavery to Cesar Chavez and Beyond: Farmworker Organizing in the US,” The Human
Cost of Food, pp. 249-275.
54
John Bowe, “Nobodies: Does Slavery Exist in America?” The New Yorker, April 21-28, 2003; Andrew
Cockburn, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The World’s 27 Million Slaves,” National Geographic, September
2003; “Modern-Day Slavery: Used and Abused,” Palm Beach Post, Dec 7, 2003; and Pete Daniel, The
Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (University of Illinois Press, 1972).
55
56
A number of different lawyers have spoken to me of the existence of these camps. Though I have not
visited them myself, I have driven past them, and they have been pointed out to me. A 1983 report to the
US Commission on Civil Rights described the living and working conditions of migrants on the Eastern
Shore as “deplorable” and “possibly the worst in the nation,” quoted in “Forgotten in the Fields.”
20
In the past three years, the number of prosecutions of human trafficking cases has tripled,
according to the Department of Justice.58 The State Department estimates that every year
smugglers illegally bring into this country fifty thousand women and children, either
involuntarily or with false pretenses. These conditions, fortunately, are not the norm for
all farmworkers in the US. Still, instead of them as isolated or peripheral to the normal
and healthy functioning of the system, we must see them as the extreme form of the way
migrant farmworkers live and work in a thick web of abusive relationships.
A countervailing tendency of the attempt to draw comparisons between AfricanAmerican slavery and farmworkers is to assert and defend the incomparability of
African-Americans’ particular experience of suffering.59 But while the uniqueness of the
suffering of African-Americans is, no doubt, an important point to make, it is also
crucially important to see that such experience must be comparable as well. Linking the
story about African American slavery in the US with other stories generates solidarity.
The experience of slavery is not particular to African-Americans any more than it is to
Latinos, but something they hold in common. Their struggles are not like two separate
rivers but are tributaries of one, ancient river whose primary source is Israel’s experience
of slavery in the land of Egypt. The Lord suggests precisely this in Leviticus (19:34-35)
where the Israelites are told “not to wrong” the stranger among them; the stranger “shall
be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself.” The Israelites are in a
unique position to understand why such treatment is necessary: they were once strangers
in the land of Egypt (v. 35). Their own experience of slavery—its signature on their
bodies and collective memory—makes them especially sensitive to others’ suffering. It
does not lead to silence and invisibility. Their collective remembrance transforms it into
a wellspring of solidarity among disparate groups.
57
Rothenberg, pp. 154-180.
58
John Bowe, “Nobodies: Does Slavery Exist in America?"
59
Pitting minority groups against one another has long been the strategy of the powers-that-be throughout
history. This is especially the case with agricultural labor in the US. See Carey McWilliams, Factories in
the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939),
pp. 305-325.
21
V. We Shall Overcome: The Freedom Rides
John Lewis, one of the original Freedom Riders and chairman of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), rode again in October 2003. He joined the
900 riders of the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides who left from 10 different cities and
stopped in 103 others along the way to Washington D.C. and New York. They rode not
to integrate bus terminals and other public spaces in the south, but to integrate public
space throughout the nation. They rode not to challenge Jim Crow laws, but immigration
laws, to bring attention to the conditions of this nation’s 28 million immigrant workers60
who work mostly in the shadowy, low-wage sector of the economy.61 Agricultural work
as well as much of the service industry—restaurants, hotels, landscaping and cleaning—
fall into this category. Like the farmworkers’ protest in Tallahassee, the Immigrant
Freedom Rides gathered the broken body that comprises the underside of our economy in
order to make it visible on the streets of the major cities across the US.
The Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride was first conceived in July of 2001 as a
means of bringing attention to the plight of immigrant workers and also of breaking down
divisions between African-Americans, immigrants and organized labor—to unite
struggles that are currently divided.62 A huge setback came with the events of September
11. The poorest and most vulnerable bore the brunt of the economic downturn resulting
from that tragic day. Maria Elena Durazo, one of the directors of the Freedom Rides,
described its effect on them: “A third of our industry lost their jobs overnight.”63 Not
60
According to one media report, the riders included Central Americans, Filipinos, African-Americans,
Columbians, Bolivians, Ethiopians, Taiwanese and Sudanese. They were farmworkers, housekeepers,
longshoreman, home-health-care aids and union organizers. Reported in Ben Ehrenreich’s, “Sí, Se Puede:
L.A.’s New Freedom Riders Take their Quest for Immigration Equality on the Road,” L.A. Weekly, October
24-30, 2003.
61
Marc Linder, Migrant Workers and Minimum Wages: Regulating the Exploitation of Agricultural Labor
in the US (Bolder: Westview Press, 1992).
62
These Rides were supported by The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and the Coalition of
Black Trade Unionists. The Rides, however, did not receive the attention many had hoped. In some parts
of the country, very few turned out for the events. In his article, Ehrenreich writes: “Despite a lot of
rhetoric about bridging the gaps between [these] communities, throughout the South, the African-American
and labor presence [were] minimal.” He likewise mentions the comment of a reporter from The New York
Times who boarded the bus from L.A. in Palm Springs and only rode to El Paso, Texas: “I don’t think my
editors really want stories all the way across unless it really catches fire. It would take a firebombing.”
63
Ehrenreich, “Sí, Se Puede.”
22
only were they not able to collect unemployment insurance because of their immigration
status, the families of many of the undocumented workers who also lost their lives in the
World Trade Center did not share in the assistance given to the families of bankers and
brokers. All talk of immigration policy reform immediately ended and attention shifted
to the security of our borders. A wave of fear and anti-immigrant sentiment moved
through the nation.64
Many of the riders had a story like that of Edgar Bonilla, a 32-year-old cook from
El Salvador, who left his country in the late 80's because, “The poverty was too much.
There was nothing to eat.”65 When he arrived in the US, he found work at a restaurant
where he was paid “what they wanted to and when they wanted to.” Often, he would not
be paid for all the hours he worked. But he had no other options: “I had no papers. And
how can you complain?” Others had stories like that of a group of roofers in Arizona,
mainly undocumented Central Americans and Mexicans, who were frequently not paid
for their work and denied water breaks. If they were hurt, they would be dropped off at
the hospital and warned not to tell the hospital of their employer. Even legal residents,
like Federico Gonzalez, also a roofer in Arizona, worked 10-hour days in 100-degree heat
for $9.50 an hour. When he pushed with others to form a labor union, his employer fired
him. He learned, like so many others, that in the US, it is better not to speak if you want
to keep your job.66
In a piece he wrote for The Washington Post, John Lewis links the October
Freedom Rides with their historical heirs, writing that participants in both “put their
bodies on the line to expose injustice.”67 Both resisted the segregation of public space by
acting as if it were not segregated, as if they could move freely within it. In the 1960's
riders were beaten with crowbars and buses were firebombed. Though the immigrant
riders did not face this kind of violence, they experienced much hostility. As reported in
64
IBID
65
IBID
Steven Greenhouse, “Immigrants Travel to Washington to Rally for Broadened Rights,” The New York
Times, September 26, 2003.
66
67
John Lewis, “Freedom Riders of 2003,” The Washington Post, October 1, 2003.
23
various media accounts, protesters against the rides held signs that read, “Stop the
Invasion”68; “They’re illegal; they’re outlaws”69; “No Amnesty for Illegals”70; and “No
more free rides. No more welfare. No more stolen jobs.”71 One man’s reaction to seeing
undocumented workers riding buses and stopping at rallies was to tip off the authorities,
who might then “bag a handful of illegals in the daylight and save themselves a few
nights sleep.”72 In an interview, a Nashville resident was quoted as saying, “An Arab can
make himself look Hispanic easily enough and sneak across the border.”73 A bus passed
through Morristown, Tennessee, where Mexican immigrants earn $6 an hour in chicken
slaughterhouses and even less than that working tobacco. Hecklers greeted the buses by
chanting, “White Revolution is the Only Solution.” They also accused Mexicans of
“stealing all the good jobs.”74
In his report for the LA Weekly on a bus’ detention at a Border Patrol Checkpoint
outside El Paso, Texas, Ben Ehrenreich provides us with a striking portrait how these
riders put their bodies on the line to expose injustice. As the bus approached the
checkpoint, he reports, the fear was palpable. There were many on the bus for which a
stop meant potential detention, deportation, separation from their families and the loss of
everything they had been working for years to build in the US. At the checkpoint, six
agents boarded the bus and announced to all, “If you’re not a citizen of the US please
show what documents you have.” But instead of following the agent’s orders, all the
riders held up badges that read, “I am a participant in the Immigrant Workers Freedom
Ride, a peaceful campaign by citizens and immigrants in support of equal rights for all
workers. I wish to exercise my right to remain silent.” They then began to sing. At first,
68
Younge, “On the Bus with the Freedom Riders: Singing Out for America’s Downtrodden.”
69
Richard Gonzales, “Let Justice Roll Through America,” The Star-Telegram, Sept 28, 2003.
Kerri L. McFalls, “Workers Resurrect 60's Freedom Rides,” Morgantown News Herald, September 30,
2003.
70
Robert E. Pierre, “Advocates for Migrants Take to the Road: Riders Goal is Better Treatment of Illegal
Workers,” The Washington Post, October 1, 2003.
71
72
Richard Gonzales, “Let Justice Roll Through America.”
73
Ehrenreich, “Sí, Se Puede.”
74
IBID
24
there were just a few scattered voices, but soon, all were singing together, “We Shall
Overcome.” The agents continued to move through the bus and question the riders,
whose only response was to hold up their badges and keep singing “...we are not afraid
today...” Eventually, the agents instructed all the riders off the bus. Lined up in the sun,
the riders kept singing, “...deep in my heart, I do believe...” The agents then put them in
detention cells and began to question them individually. They told the riders they would
be arrested if they did not state their citizenship. Still, no one spoke. Even separated in
different cells, they continued, “...we shall overcome...” Little by little, the agents began
to lead the riders back onto the bus. The riders continued singing, but by that time, many
were beginning to tire. Some were weeping. Then, with no explanation, they were told
they were free to go. The bus pulled away with cheers of relief and applause. Many had
broken down into tears. They not only put their bodies on the line to expose injustice, but
used silence and song as a powerful instrument of resistance.
VI. No Human Being is Illegal in the Eyes of God: Churches and Farmworkers
Much like the Florida protest and the Freedom Rides, media accounts of the
farmworker struggle often mention the presence of church buildings and the involvement
of congregations and religious leaders. Because they are media accounts, the religious
aspects of these events appear accidental, more as an insignificant detail than something
meriting reflection.75 For example, while one report of the Freedom Rides names all the
other participants, it is an anonymous priest in the bus who plays a guitar and sings, “No
human being is illegal in the eyes of God.”76 When mentioned, religious involvement is
regarded, at worst, as misguided, and at best, the private inspiration of reformers working
for a better US. One must suppose that journalists de-emphasize the role of religious
In Ben Ehrenreich’s “Sí, Se Puede,” for example, there are: protests “on the steps of cathedrals” (St.
Augustine in Tucson is mentioned), the involvement of an “activist priest” and a “singing priest” (it is not
clear if they are the same), and the Reverend James Lawson. Kerri McFalls’ “Workers Resurrect 1960's
Freedom Rides” speaks of St. Charles Catholic Church. Richard Brand’s “Immigrants Tour Ends in
Massive Rally,” The Miami Herald, Sunday October 5, 2003 recounts an event with “speeches by religious
leaders.” In Gary Younge’s “One the Bus with the Freedom Riders,” there is a rally at St. Thomas Aquinas
Catholic Church in downtown Philadelphia. Steven Greenhouse’s piece in The New York Times, Sept 24,
2003, mentions the church Our Lady of Solitude in Palm Springs, California. In Robert Pierre’s
“Advocates for Migrants Take to the Road” The Washington Post, October 1, 2003, there is a gathering at
Jesús El Señor Methodist Church in Illinois.
75
25
belief in these protests out of a concern for objectivity and detachment. Yet the patriotic
slant of much of this reporting suggests otherwise.
In privileging an outsider’s view over a participant’s, such accounts do not even
consider the possibility that many farmworkers and their supporters view this story to be
more about the coming of God’s Kingdom than a more just US. This fact deserves
greater consideration. We must, first of all, be careful not to conflate these stories and
assume that being a Christian is always the same thing as being a US citizen. One
important reason for this is because from the perspective of the nation-state and its laws,
those who enter without documents are illegal. From the perspective of the Kingdom of
God, on the other hand, no human being is illegal. Strangers who reside among us are to
be loved (Leviticus 19:34-35) and provided with food and clothing (Deuteronomy 10:1819). The Christian ecclesial body is much more than the physical structures of churches
located within the territorial US; its membership does not end at the borders of the
nation-state in which these structures are geographically located.77 The church is an
international body whose borders and responsibilities are in tension with and transcend
those of the nation-state.
Both the church and the nation-state appeal to different allegiances. This is
nowhere better expressed than in St. Augustine’s The City of God, where he writes of two
different cities that tell different stories about the world. Each city derives its respective
identity and cohesion, not from its ethnicity or language, but from what it loves. He
writes, “If we are to discover the character of any people, we have only to examine what
it loves” (XIX, 24).78 While two different bodies with two different allegiances do exist,
it is often very difficult to neatly distinguish between them in the world. Their
boundaries are often porous and even ambiguous. Defining the city of God on earth in
terms of its love complicates human judgments about who is in and out, who is us and
76
Ehrenreich, “Sí, Se Puede."
77
While the Christian church is currently divided, I believe there is enough unity among Christians to
speak of a church in a catholic (i.e., ecumenical) sense. That I am a Roman Catholic will no doubt be
evident in what I emphasize, for example, Catholic Social Teaching. Regardless, I am trying to speak here
in an ecumenical tone of that which unites the Christian church rather than that which divides it.
78
Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, edited and translated by R.W. Dyson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
26
who is them. All are potential members, for as St. Augustine writes, “In this world, the
two cities are indeed entangled and mingled with one another; and they will remain so
until the last judgments shall separate them” (I, 35).
To take seriously the different allegiances of the ecclesial body entails bringing it
into a public space carefully guarded against its presence. It entails breaking out of the
captivity of inwardness, individualism and otherworldliness to which much of the
institutional church is presently confined. What would it mean to privilege the
theological significance of the farmworker struggle and other movements like it?
Considering the fact that the large majority of Mexican farmworkers are Catholic, how
can we tell a story that shelters their voices? What about the religious convictions of
Cesar Chavez, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers in California in the early
1960’s,79 who spoke often and openly of God and frequently invoked the teachings of the
Catholic Church and Pope John XXIII on economic justice and the oppression of the
world’s agricultural workers? He owned neither a house nor a car because he did not
believe that you could work with the poor without humbling yourself and sharing with
them in their plight.80 After the first grape boycott ended successfully in 1970, in which
almost all the strikers lost their homes and many of their possessions, echoing Jesus, he
said these words: “In losing those worldly possessions they found themselves, and they
found that only through dedication ... [through] serving the poor and those who were
struggling for justice, only in that way could they really find themselves.”81 And he said
these words: “If you give yourself totally to the non-violent struggle for peace and justice
you also find that people will give you their hearts and that you will never be hungry and
never be alone.”82
What do we make of the fact that Dorothy Day thought the theological drama in
California’s vineyards so palpable that her last arrest at the age of seventy-five came on a
79
Susan Ferris and Ricardo Sandoval, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworker
Movement (Harcourt Brace, 1997).
Arturo S. Rodriguez, “The Resurrection of the United Farm Workers,” San Francisco Examiner,
December 7 1993.
80
81
Jaques Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), p. 325
82
IBID
27
United Farm Worker picket line, shoulder to shoulder with Chavez? And do we
remember that before leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott against segregated bus lines
or speaking of his dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Jr.
graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and then went to Boston
University where he earned a doctoral degree in Systematic Theology?
Several questions Charles Marsh raises in his essay, The Civil Rights Movement
as Theological Drama, are particularly appropriate here: how does it happen that social
movements like the civil rights struggle or the farmworker struggle, replete with
theological conviction, are so often “deracinated by its its interpreters from the living
energies of its confessing communities”? Is it respectful not to engage the substance of
such beliefs? Does what they think or say about God really matter?83
VII. The Gift of Food
I this final section I will shift the theological significance of the story related in
these pages from the margins of this discussion to its center, treating it from the
perspective of a participant in the Christian story. In doing so, I do not mean to suggest
that I speak for farmworkers or have special insight into their convictions. Admittedly, I
am a member of a church in which the eating practices of some rest of the backs of
others, indicating its profound failure to discern the ecclesial body. I speak in the hope of
God’s Kingdom and of a church whose identity consists in its compassion.
Wendell Berry’s writings help us to understand that our eating is part of a
complex story in which we are all participants.84 Berry argues that present economic
relationships and the place many of us occupy in them fragment our eating and
increasingly restrict us to the role of a consumer. Our understanding of our food typically
begins where we buy it and ends when we consume it. We accept, passively and
uncritically, that role, which radically reduces the notion of eating to merely a
Charles Marsh, “The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama: Interpretation and Application,”
Modern Theology, 18:2, April 2002.
83
84
This final section is deeply indebted to the writings of Wendell Berry.
28
commercial or appetitive transaction. According to Berry, this amounts to “a kind of
solitude unprecedented in human experience.”85
Because few of us are directly involved in food production or live near the places
where this production takes place, we have at best a vague sense that the origin of most of
what we eat comes from the soil and was produced by human labor. It takes a great deal
of effort to discover the story prior to the food’s purchase and consumption: the particular
farms where it is grown, the agricultural practices employed, the treatment of the workers
or how our food arrived at the place where we bought it. Present arrangements foster
these divisions and make it increasingly difficult to fathom the relationships that we
depend on, whether we know it or not. More disconcerting still, this disconnection is
intimately linked to powerful interests that profit from this situation and in whose interest
it is to preserve it.
We are in desperate need of a more comprehensive story of our eating, in which
we live responsibly within the relationships upon which we depend for our nourishment.
There is, in practice, after all, no such thing as eating in solitude. There is only a
distinction between responsible and irresponsible eating.86 We must understand that
“eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act.”87
Because our eating is an agricultural act, it is also an ecological act, for “how we eat
determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”88 The farmworker struggles
reveal that our eating is likewise social act, bound up with all those who labor to produce
our food. In all these ways, the ordinary act of eating is “the profoundest enactment of
our connection with the world.”89 When we eat thoughtlessly, we affirm its present state.
When we eat mindfully and responsibly, we transform and renew it.
85
“The Pleasures of Eating,” What Are People For? (New York: Northpoint Press, 1989).
86
“The Body and the Earth,” The Unsettling of America (Sierra Club Books, 1977).
87
IBID
88
IBID
89
IBID
29
All these meanings commingle in the Christian belief that eating is sacramental.
We believe our food is a gift, 90 which we acknowledge when we pray before a meal.
The origin of our food is the miracle upon which our lives depend—as extraordinary as
turning water into wine, curing the blind, walking on water or even multiplying loaves of
and fish. In this miracle—so ordinary we forget it is miraculous—sunlight, soil, air and
water transfigure seeds into a harvest. And that gift, by human hands, becomes our daily
bread. Our lives depend upon the generosity of the earth and on others who take earth’s
gifts and transform them.
To speak of food as a gift means we are not its creator. Despite a pervasive
cultural presumption that we are the authors of ourselves and our destiny, we are not in
ultimate control of our nourishment. Our food was not something acquired through the
power and might of our own hands (Deuteronomy 8:17). Our food is not our reward or
right and thus should not be treated as our property or possession. To treat it as such
would be to refuse to acknowledge, in humility, that others nourish us—that we live
because of gifts. We can plant seeds and tend crops, but we cannot make the sunlight,
soil, air and water for those seeds to bear fruit. We are collaborators in incredibly
complex and fragile relationships. As sacramental, the most appropriate metaphor for our
eating is community: with those sharing the meal, with those who grew and transported
it, with Creation and the Creator, whose love infuses and sustains these relationships and
moves them toward communion.
We are participants in a story in which it is not just my daily bread that matters
but our daily bread. We are involved with the needs of others, for whom food is also a
gift, but for whom that gift has not arrived because it is unrecognized and its movement
has been cut off. Those of who eat and give thanks for food during an age characterized
by others’ lack of it feel deep unease. Their prayers are haunted by the improper
reception of the gift in a fallen world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer captures this sense in his
90
For a general discussion of the gift, see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in
Archaic Societies, translated by W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990) and Lewis Hyde, The Gift:
Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). From a Christian
perspective, see Wendell Berry, The Gift of the Good Land (New York: Northpoint Press, 1983); John
Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given?” Modern Theology, 17:3 (July 2001); and also Jean-Luc Marion,
“Christian Philosophy and Charity,” Communio 19 (Fall 1992).
30
reflection, “God’s Loving Care and Human Suffering.”91 Speaking of the hunger both in
Germany and elsewhere, he writes,
When we sit down this evening to a full table and say grace and thank God for
God’s goodness, we shall not be able to avoid a strange feeling of uneasiness. It
will seem incomprehensible to us that we should be the ones to receive such gifts
and we will be overwhelmed by such thoughts and will think that we have not in
any way deserved these gifts more than our hungry brothers and sisters.
Christians must avoid thinking that God favors them, he continues, for
[d]on’t we see that the gifts of God’s goodness become a curse for us … if we
look upon ourselves as models of virtue instead of growing humble as we look at
the incomprehensibility of God and the worry and anxiety our wealth creates in us
and if we thank God only for God’s goodness to us instead of becoming conscious
of the immeasurable responsibility which is laid upon us by God’s goodness.
The worry and anxiety Bonhoeffer mentions is the awareness that our food is a gift we
cannot properly receive while storing it up. The gift must keep moving.92 Every gift is
an invitation for its receiver to participate in this movement. The gratitude within us
must be so deep that it flows through us in gift-exchange. This struggle is radical but the
heart of Christianity: we become gifts for others insofar as we receive the gift ourselves.
It is a struggle that must “take hold of the roots of our being,” and “[seize] hold of our life
and [reach] out beyond even that.”93
Our food is not our only gift; the origin of the entire world is divine charity. The
sunlight that makes life possible, the soil from which we eat, the water we drink and the
air we breathe are all gifts. Their very being bears this mark. We must “give thanks for
all things” (I Thes. 5:18). Our preservation and care for these gifts—so that they may
remain gifts for others—evidences our gratitude. We typically speak of sunlight, soil,
water and air as part of our “environment,” as that which surrounds or encircles us.
Doing so implies our environment is essentially outside or separate from ourselves. The
word Creation better captures the complexity and wonder that characterizes our intimate
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “God’s Loving Care and Human Suffering,” in A Testament to Freedom, edited by
Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).
91
92
This is Lewis Hyde’s phrase.
31
and participative relationship with the “environment.” As Berry writes, “the world that
environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are made of it; we eat, drink, and
breathe it; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is also a Creation, a holy
mystery ... which belongs in a limited sense to us ... [W]e also belong to it, and it makes
certain rightful claims on us.”94 Once the movement of the gift has begun, it cannot
logically find its fulfillment until it embraces all Creation, for between any two humans,
Creation exists inside, outside and between them as a bond. Neighbor love is impossible
if we squander the soil, water and air upon which our neighbors now and in the future
depend. Creation makes the claim upon us to receive its gifts, in gratitude, and then offer
them back in our care and proper use of them. We participate in the gift’s movement in
our effort—imperfect though it is—to love all Creation in response to the Creator’s
giving of it. For Augustine, the city of God on pilgrimage in this world is oriented by this
love. It derives its cohesion and identity as receivers and givers of gifts.
Widespread economic practices, which rest on the denial that this intimate and
participative relationship exists, have permitted humans to change adversely the very
chemistry of earth’s soil, water and air in a little less than a century.95 The logic of these
practices tragically reduces the world by encouraging us to act as if it were the work of
our own hands, as if we could create more soil, water and air once we waste them. Not
only is our present economy not comprehensive enough, it is dependent upon and tends
to destroy what it does not comprehend, extracting profit through ruin. Instead of
practices of stewardship and care, which foster health, dominant economic relationships
are permeated by the sole considerations of profit and efficiency, which lead to the use
and exhaustion of both land and people. According to Augustine, the earthly city is
tangled in this destructive, malformed love, which he calls the libido dominandi and
defines as the lust for mastery, the desire to dominate (I, Preface).96
93
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, p. 197-98.
94
“Conservation is Good Work,” Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon Books,
1992).
95
See Partha Dasgupta, “Environmental and Resource Economics in the World of the Poor,” 45 th
Anniversary Lecture, Resources for the Future, Washington DC, October 9, 1997; Partha Dasgupta et. al.
“Economic Pathways to Ecological Sustainability,” Bioscience, 2000, 50(4), pp. 339-345; and Bill
McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989).
32
The practices of our present food economy are unhealthy, not just because of the
divisions they enact and foster between ourselves and Creation, but also the
dismemberment of a communal body into winners and losers. Our present economy
fragments the story of our food so that the labor of others is irrelevant to our eating. As
we have seen throughout this essay, those performing farm labor not only do not share in
the fruits of their labor, but their centrality in these processes is rarely recognizable to
themselves or others. If the relationship between farmworkers and our food were more
apparent, so too would be the link between their poverty and our high standard of living.
It would be hard not to draw the conclusion that it is through unhealthy, exploitative
relationships that so few prosper at the expense of so many. What is problematic is not
just evidenced in the poverty of farmworkers but also in the pervasive and normalized
expressions of greed among the economy’s winners. We are enabled and encouraged to
live under the misguided faith that our daily bread is secured by ourselves alone. We no
longer have eyes to see or ears to hear the manifold ways we are nourished.
In her recent book, Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich calls the working poor
“the great philanthropists of our society.”97 To be poor, she writes, is to be “an
anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.” She concludes her book
with a meditation on what our economy does to the gift of others’ labor: “When someone
works for less than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so you can eat
more cheaply and conveniently, then she has made a great sacrifice to you, she as made a
gift of some part of her abilities, her health, her life.” While speaking with Christmas
tree cutters in Galax, Virginia, who were working 60 hours a week and not being paid
overtime, Virginia Justice Center lawyer Andrew Turner, expressed this very same idea:
“For every hour you work over 40 a week, you are giving a few more dollars to your
employer. After many weeks of work, that’s a huge gift.”
In preparing the soil, planting the crops and tending them, farmworkers are often
stooped over, working for hours on end, their sweat—and sometimes blood—mixing
96
Augustine, The City of God.
Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed. See also Cindy Hahamovitch, “‘In America Life is Given Away’:
Jamaican Farmworkers and the Making of Agricultural Immigration Policy” in The Countryside in the Age
of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America edited by Robert D. Johnson et. al. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001).
97
33
with the soil. This intimacy is even more pronounced during harvest-time when
farmworkers’ fingerprints cover the crops that move swiftly through their hands. As
these crops are bought, sold, processed and packaged, they pass successively through
more and more hands, until they meet our own as we select the produce to purchase. Our
bodies are bent, like the farmworkers’, but over the supermarket bin. By this point, the
space between the food we eat and its origin in the relationship of specific human bodies
with the land is too great to be seen. It is therefore too great to be noticeable to the rest of
us. Still, as our food moves through our hands and into our bodies to nourish us, it
carries a trace of its givers. It is invested with life, even if only a fingerprint remains to
remind us of that fact. Just as those who prepare a meal have given themselves in the
preparation of it, so too have farmworkers.
We who receive the gift of our food must engage in the complex task of returning
it. As John Milbank writes, “correct use of a gift always involves … a ‘giving back’, if
not to the individual then to the wider social forces which that individual represents.”98
In the present situation, the return gift might begin with our responding to the demands of
the farmworkers in Florida and all those of the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides for
better legal protections, increased benefits and wages, and better working conditions.99
The tradition of Catholic Social Teaching—for example, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical
Rerum Novarum: The Condition of Labor; Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno: After Forty
Years; Paul II’s Laborem Exercens: On Human Work; and most recently, documents like
the US Catholic Bishop’s For I Was Hungry and You Gave Me Food: Catholic
Reflections on Food, Farmers and Farmworkers—sees as an essential part of our return-
98
Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given?”
99
Anyone familiar with the writings of William Cavanaugh will see his influence throughout these pages.
While I am very sympathetic to his overall argument, he is critical of the church involvement in the pursuit
of better laws and policies. My question is as follows: is there a way of acknowledging, engaging and even
working within the profoundly anti-theological, even blasphemous, practices of politics and economics,
while remaining distinctively church and holding our hopes in it alone? He argues that this is not possible.
I think that it must be. The abandonment of the effort to change specific laws and policies is frightening for
many reasons, among which is that insofar as church members live in the US or shop at all, they move in a
space in which specific laws and policies confer benefits upon them and deny benefits to others. It is
deeply problematic for church members to enjoy these benefits in their lives and then divest themselves of
their significance theoretically.
34
gift the need for changes in policy: living wages for workers, days of rest, workers’
associations, limits on work hours and child labor.100
Though we must not stop speaking and putting our bodies on the line to witness to
the need for better laws and policies, that alone is clearly not enough. We are the keepers
of our brothers and sisters, not the state. The movement of our return-gift must be still
more radical and tap deeper into the resources of our tradition. This would involve
getting to know farmworkers, learning Spanish, going to the places they are, inviting
them into our homes and communities, and sharing meals together. The scriptures are
replete with appeals to practices of hospitality and generosity to strangers. Such practices
are necessarily local, decentralized and learned through membership in a community.
The scriptures likewise speak of voluntary poverty and the radical sharing of
goods by Jesus’ followers. Along these lines, Pope Leo XIII argues in Rerum Novarum
that all our possessions are gifts, and as such, they are not our own but “are common to
all, so as to share them without difficulty when others are in need.”101 While the
callousness of the story of the undeserving poor is evident in all those it justifies in
leaving without food and a living wage, the story of the gift is radically generous and
calls all to respond: “The bread you retain belongs to the hungry. The dress you lock up
is property of the naked”; and “What is superfluous for one’s need is to be regarded as
plunder if one retains it for the self.”102 Dorothy Day suggests that voluntary poverty
even facilitates our perception of those who suffer, helping us literally to hear and see
them: “Through voluntary poverty we have the means to help our brothers. We cannot
even see our brothers in need without first stripping ourselves.”103 Living excessively
beyond our needs dulls perception and complicates our capacity to perceive others.
Praying before a meal is another central practice in the discernment of the gift.
Instead of launching unreflectively into our food and devouring it, we pause to pray.
This brief pause amidst the movement of our lives reminds us that we move only because
we are nourished by others. In our prayers, we struggle to keep this complex story of our
100
Catholic Social Thought, p. 31.
101
IBID, pp. 22-23.
102
IBID, p. 213; Dorothy Day, “Scandal of the Works of Mercy,” Selected Writings, p. 99.
35
nourishment alive and constantly remind ourselves that we are participants in it. Giving
thanks for the gift of food means allowing its history to linger in the present, to haunt and
challenge our practices of eating together. It reminds us how far we are from what we
believe was accomplished by Christ. Though injustice cannot be finished among us in
our lifetime, it must be remembered. Its remembrance is part of the responsibility of
changing our relationships with our food.
But perhaps the most important Christian practice, one which forms its members
into a distinctive body,104 is the Eucharist, whose governing image is a meal Jesus shares
with his disciples. The bread and wine of the Eucharist are no ordinary bread and wine
that we eat and incorporate into our bodies. As Augustine says in his Confessions, the
Eucharistic bread and wine incorporate us into them and make us a body (see also I Cor
10:16-17). As a meal, the Eucharist resonates with the most basic practices necessary for
nourishment and life. During the Last Supper, Jesus gives thanks for the gifts of bread
and wine and then speaks of the bread as his body, to be broken shared with others (I Cor.
11:23-25; Mark 14:22-25; Matthew 26:26-29; Luke 22:15-20; cf John 61:51). This
concern with food, feeding, sharing meals and the banquet at the end of the age marked
his entire ministry. Before he died, he called upon his followers to “do this” in his
memory, inviting them to form a communal body in which their bodies are likewise to be
poured out for others. After his resurrection, the manner by which the disciples knew he
was the risen Lord was in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:30-32).
St. Paul makes the claim in I Corinthians 12 that because we are members of one
another and therefore only together are we whole, when one member of the body suffers,
all suffer. A radical compassion must accompany a radical perception of others’
suffering. We will know that the body is healthy precisely when its members hunger and
thirst for righteousness because there are so many other members who hunger and thirst
103
IBID, p. 109.
104
To speak of the church as a body is to speak of its liturgical form. According to the theologian
Alexander Schmemann, we misunderstand the meaning of liturgy if we reduce it to cultic categories or see
it merely as a sacred act of worship, different from profane life or the general activity of the church itself.
The original sense of liturgy or leitourgia was “an action by which a group of people become something
corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals.” For the Life of the World:
Sacraments and Orthodoxy (New York: ST VLADIMIR’S SEMINARY PRESS, 1998), p. 23.
36
for bread and water (Matthew 5:6); when members work for peace because others live in
violence (5:9). When the church is the church, the suffering of these other members is
not only heard and seen by it; it is felt by it.
Health is much more than the absence of disease. It is rooted in the idea of
wholeness, etymologically related to words like heal, whole, wholesome, hale, hallow
and holy.105 David Ford alerts us to how health is the root sense of salvation and
therefore carries an immense range of meaning.106 It is not only physical, mental,
spiritual and moral, but also social, political, economic, environmental and so on. Sir
Albert Howard makes a similar point when he writes that “the whole problem of health in
soil, plant, animal and man [is] one great subject.”107 In comments like these, we
perceive the inherent dangers in approaching this subject by maintaining too narrow a
focus. Healing is impossible in isolation, divorced from a vision of communion, the
coming together of various parts in harmonious difference. Healing can only happen
when we turn and face one another.
Because, as Jon Sobrino writes in El Principio Misericordia (The Principle of
Mercy), for still so many, “this world is an immense cross,”108 the body must be
remembered—the broken members must be gathered and re-joined for the body to be
healed. Institutional Christianity today is far from this state of health. We often do not
see or hear others like farmworkers, let alone put our bodies on the line with theirs, in
solidarity and compassion. If we believe that the broken bodies of others share in
Christ’s brokenness, then a great deal of theological drama is taking place outside our
purview. But faith in the Kingdom is the faith that the church can be, in Franz
Rosenzweig’s phrase, “the community of all those who see each other.”109 It is likewise
the faith that others’ suffering is not theirs to bear alone but can and must be shared. By
sharing it in visible and public solidarity, violence is revealed and resisted; the dominant
105
Wendell Berry, “The Body and The Earth,” The Unsettling of America.
106
David Ford, Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
107
Sir Albert Howard, An Agricultural Testament (Emmaus: Rodale Press, 1973).
108
Jon Sobrino, El Principio Misericordia (San Salvador: La UCA, 1992).
109
Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p.383
37
organization of public space is challenged and transfigured.110 This gives these struggles
an unveiling quality, a veracity such that those who have lived in invisibility and silence
emerge, body and voice.
In Florida, the farmworkers did not belong outside Jeb Bush’s mansion gate.
They resisted by gathering together and in the words of Martin Luther King Jr.,
“presenting [their] very bodies as a means of laying [their] case before the local and
national community.”111 So too did the Freedom Riders, who risked their own safety to
make injustice visible to the rest of us. We see this resistance in every state in the US
when farmworkers step forward and legally pursue claims against employers who have
denied them wages, like the Christmas tree cutter who signed up with the Virginia Justice
Center and was beaten soon after. We see it in a story Virginia Justice Center lawyer
Mary Bauer tells about taking the depositions in Mexico of a dozen men who did not
receive minimum wage or overtime for their work in the US. Many of the clients
traveled a dozen hours on a bus to appear at the depositions. When asked by the
opposing counsel in separate interviews what they hoped to achieve through the lawsuit,
each responded almost identically with the words, “Justice for the other workers, so that
no one else gets treated the way I was treated.”
When people join together and refuse to disappear despite harassments, arrests,
deportations and beatings, they gradually diminish fear in themselves and others. They
anticipate a new society in the shell of the old, the initial contours of which have already
begun to take form in our fields and on our streets.
Conclusion
For those of us whose nourishment is caught up in the suffering of farmworkers,
the question is inescapable and urgent: how are we to respond? Certainly, “there is
enough shame for everybody to share some of it and enough responsibility that everyone
See Cavanaugh’s account of “street liturgy” in Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body
of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), pp. 273-277. See also Francis Fox Piven and Richard
Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How they Fail (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
110
111
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait (New American Library, 1991).
38
should accept some of it as well.”112 We can hope that this shame will lead us toward a
deeper engagement—that in calling us into question, it calls us to respond.
Our response must involve a process of repentance, forgiveness and
reconciliation, among the distinctively Judeo-Christian practices that heal severed
relationships. Because sin is a distancing from the other, repentance entails drawing near
physically. It is linked to the idea of turning or returning. As we read in the tractate
Yoma of the Talmud, commenting on Hosea 14: “R. Hama bar Hamina said: Great is
repentance: it brings healing to the world.”113 But the path to reconciliation is risky.
The repentant ones must recognize their complicity in the offense. They must learn, as
Hosea counsels, not to say ‘Our God’ to the work of their hands, believing they are in
control of their nourishment (14:2). Furthermore, the offended ones must forgive those
who have wronged them; they hold the power to alter the story through their forgiveness.
Despite the difficulties of these practices, they maintain a faith that relationships are not
destined to remain damaged but can emerge strengthened. They maintain a faith that, in
the words of this year’s Lenten Reflection of the National Farmworker Ministry, “a
damaged industry can be healed.”
The oracle of Isaiah 58:1-9 arises in the context of the strained relationship
between the Israelite community and Yahweh. The community desires to renew this
relationship and has engaged in ritual fasting in order to do so. Their efforts, however,
have not been met with a divine response (v. 1-2). In verses 3-5, we discover why when
Yahweh declares: “You serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your
workers … Such fasting as you do this day will not make your voice heard on high.” The
community fasts but does not attend to the brokenness of the social body in which it
resides. The fast Yahweh desires is “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of
the yoke, to let the oppressed go free” (v. 6-7). These practices not only heal the
community’s oppressive, though unacknowledged, relationships with its workers, but
they also restore the relationship with their Lord: “Then your light shall break forth like
the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly … Then you shall call, and the Lord
112
Quoted in Rothenberg, p. 238.
39
will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, ‘Here I am’” (v. 8-9; see also
Jeremiah 22:16). The fullest expression of a radical orthodoxy is a radical orthopraxis.
We live in a time in which it is increasingly difficult to tell stories other than those
justifying the present order. Ours is a climate profoundly inhospitable to the imagination
of alternatives. Still, I have tried to suggest how a theological story is the most adequate
in illuminating both the deficiencies of the present and in pointing out a path of resistance
and healing. The story suggested here, however, is necessarily tentative and open-ended.
As we have seen, it quickly becomes vast and embraces much that cannot be discussed.
Its vastness, however, does not mean that its telling is impossible. Rather, it suggests that
there are many others, both now and in the future, who are called to participate in its
telling through the creation of new communal forms. The story will grow and become
more complex as others bring their own voices and lives to bear on it.
We cannot complete the story in our lifetime. We speak and listen to one another
not to end it but to continue it by better embodying it in our lives together. What will
hold the story together is the faith in a gift that has transfigured time and space but not yet
our lives in the world. We envision it as a communion table to which all are invited.
This table does not rest on the backs of others. All are heard and seen because we eat
facing one another.
113
For this quotation and for many insights in these final pages, I am indebted to Robert Gibbs, Why
Ethics: Signs of Responsibilities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
40