Farm workers on a field near Mount Williamson in Inyo County, California. Photograph by Ansel Adams. Public domain.
Farmworkers are the backbone of America, but this country has a long history of exploiting the very people on whose labor we depend.
Under the Trump administration, so many ICE agents have shown up at farms that farmworkers have stopped showing up to work, crops have gone bad, and — no surprise — food prices have soared. This March, the administration’s answer to consumer concerns was to expand the guest worker program, permitting U.S. farms to hire more temporary workers, while doubling down on its deportation efforts and putting traditional legal pathways to citizenship on hold.
The result: a more vulnerable, lower-paid workforce, with no rights, no representation and no voice. The same logic structured the infamous Bracero Program in the 1940s.
Separating labor from belonging, and work from full citizenship, and even personhood has a long bloody history in this country, going back to slavery. The very people whose ancestors’ wisdom and sweat built the wealth of this nation have faced relentless attacks on their rights to hold and tend land as equal citizens.
Over the 20th century, Black farmers went from owning 20 million acres to two, Jubilee Justice founder and president Konda Mason told me in our report from Alexandria, Louisiana in 2023. Our report delved into the reasons for that, the violence at the heart of so much of it, and the ways that one project, the Jubilee Justice Black Farmers’ Rice Project, is trying to right the wrongs and build a different future for farmers whose access to land, and ownership of the means of production has relentlessly been denied.
Central to the project was Jubilee Justice’s rice mill. Laura Flanders & Friends was there for the opening — the first mill owned and operated cooperatively by Black farmers in the U.S. South. Since then, the project’s expanded, adding a corn mill alongside the rice. Soon they’ll be selling their specialty rices and grits to high-end chefs and consumers via their website. They also have plans to open a cafe — a tortilleria — nearby. Mason envisions a place to bring people together through cuisine — “masa and rice.” And that’s important, because just 20 minutes away, ICE operations are tearing people apart, family by family, day after day.
More than 4,400 immigration enforcement flights came in and out of Alexandria airport last year, making it the biggest deportation hub in the nation. Now the federal government is seeking to build a 528-bed detention camp for migrant families and unaccompanied children nearby.
Another local husband was snatched this week, Mason told me this morning. “I’ve come to believe that extraction is a mental illness.” she said. Extraction of people from the land, from their families, from their spirits. Extraction and exploitation of the land — “It’s all about taking life away and giving nothing back.”
We can nourish ourselves, feed the land and help one another thrive, or we can extract, exploit and destroy. This land, especially the U.S. South, has seen its fill of both. Mason and the farm are digging into the resistance history: Black, Brown and abolitionist white.
“Life wants to live. The land wants to grow.”
