Latinos and the U.S. Farmworker Rights Movement: The Traumas of Then and Now

A talk by Lori Flores

Assistant Professor of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook
 

For almost a century, U.S.-born and immigrant Latinos have comprised the vast majority of our nation’s agricultural workforce. Yet the historical struggles of these farmworkers—and others of varying backgrounds—to earn a living wage, safe working conditions, and social acceptance are ongoing in today’s disturbing climate of xenophobia, unregulated labor programs, and rampant health hazards in the fields. Lori Flores shares vignettes from her book Grounds for Dreaming about the relationships formed between U.S. citizen and immigrant farmworkers in the time of “Operation Wetback,” a deadly transportation accident during the Bracero Program, and the violence of the United Farm Workers’ lettuce strike of 1970, and compares them to similar trends in the present day. This talk illuminates how the persisting traumas of migrants’ border crossing and surveillance, employers’ disregard of farmworkers’ physical safety and unions’ struggles to win agricultural labor contracts are profoundly affecting California and other centers of national food production.

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Lori Flores was a CCSRE dissertation fellow in 2009-2010 and received her Ph.D. in History from Stanford in 2011. She is an Assistant Professor of History at SUNY Stony Brook, where she teaches courses on the histories of Latinos in the United States, labor and immigration, the American working class, the U.S. West, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her book Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2016) offers an in-depth study of the relationships between U.S.-born and immigrant Mexicans in their struggle for labor and civil rights in the world of California agriculture. Her scholarly publications have won prizes from the Western History Association, the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, and the Western Association of Women Historians. She has also written career advice columns for Inside Higher Ed and articles on Latinos in TV and film for the websites ColorLines/RaceForward and PopMatters.