I recall a few weeks ago while sitting in a Laundromat, the television was tuned to the local Fox affiliate, Q13. There was a story about the lack of product at the local florist for “special occasions,” because of a shortage of workers to pick flowers, and drivers to transport them. There were two close-up shots of one worker each in the field cutting flowers; they were filmed from behind, so you could not see their faces. Of course this problem doesn’t just involve the flower industry, but the farm and food production industry as well. An Associate Press story this past July about the farm labor shortage getting worse didn’t give them a “face” either. It did laud efforts by dairy farmers in Pennsylvania to hire high school kids for summer jobs to learn to milk cows, mainly because the kids liked working with animals, we were told; but of course getting them to do grunge work out in the fields was another matter altogether.
We were told that farmers can’t compete with the restaurant and warehouse industry, which “offer things that farmers can’t afford—like a bump in starting salary, a bonus just for applying, less labor intensive responsibilities, and air conditioning.” I have already noted in a post about heat deaths among farm workers during the intense summer heat waves, including in Washington State, where little was done to update regulations to prevent heat-related deaths or injuries among farm workers.
The AP story noted that farmers still have a difficult time hiring and retaining “native” labor; someone who seems a “good fit” is there for one day, and never shows up again. One farmer said “We’ve got this expectation that you can punch a clock and everything goes to sleep at a farm, but it doesn’t work that way.” Some blame the hard work; others “blame a lack of work ethic, and many point to generational shifts.” A Pennsylvania beef farmer named Marty Yahner put it bluntly: “Let’s be brutally honest. Americans don’t want to do manual labor. Not everyone can be a computer programmer. We still need the mechanics and the carpenters and the farmers and the truck drivers. Who the heck is going to run these farms and keep our world fed?”
The story continues: “Some rely on local labor but say they have trouble finding people interested in farm jobs—and who will keep showing up for work. Others rely on foreign workers but have difficulty navigating federal guidelines to bring the employees to their farms.”
Who are these “invisible” people who couldn’t be identified in either the local television news spot or anywhere in the AP story? The ones who one Pennsylvania farmer described as “the best guys. No matter what I tell them to do, they do it with a smile”? It’s those damn “Mexicans”—and a few of them are even U.S. citizens.
This is nothing new; hell, I wrote about it in a 2010 post, in regard to a story that appeared in the Seattle Weekly about the problems at the Emerald Downs horse race track in Auburn:
“The panic over the Mexican groom shortage ushers to the fore a noisy band of hypocrites within America's capitalist machine: unemployed citizens who decry job shortages yet don't have the temerity to start at ladder's bottom…’There are no white people who want to work, and [the Mexican grooms] love their jobs," said trainer Belvoir, who's Caucasian. "White people don't want to work; they just want to bitch and say there are no jobs.’”
After the work visas of the missing Mexican grooms were mysteriously delayed, there was a three-month “window of opportunity” for the “natives” to respond to advertisements offering work as grooms. Two-count-them-two people made initial inquiries, and were not heard from again. The Mexicans “loved their work,” but the natives looked askance when they found out that part of the job required such “blue collar” tasks as shoveling horse leavings. “Americans” just don’t do that kind of work. It’s only fit for “Mexicans”—except that “real” Americans like to complain when they (Mexicans) are doing it.
Of course the reason why farmers are having so much more trouble finding this kind of help than in years past—even prior to the pandemic—can be laid at the feet of the nativist, racist polices made more "openly" by Donald Trump and his henchmen, particularly the Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller. The Trump administration’s "adjusted" regulations (which apparently have not been changed by the Biden administration) in regard to temporary H-2A work visas made the cost of bringing in Mexican farm labor near prohibitive for many farmers—and thus ignorantly exacerbating the “problem” of undocumented immigrant labor if farmers can get away with it.
Under the H-2A program, farmers are required to hire “American” first, and failing that face unnecessarily exorbitant costs to bring in “foreign” labor, as if Mexican workers can truly be labeled as more “foreign” than, say, Canadians. The Trump-imposed program requires that farm workers, whether “native” or immigrant, must be paid the same wage, regardless of experience level. This means that some farmers are loath to hire “entry-level” workers (like high school kids) with no experience in the fields and are liable to soon quit at the required minimum wage of $14.05 when other industries (like warehouse and fast-food restaurants) can pay entry-level workers much lower wages. Yet even at those “elevated” wages, there is still the problem of hiring and retaining “native” labor for farm work.
Legal, housing and transportation costs (immigrant labor is required to be bused in) mandated by the H-2A program are only in place to make it more onerous for farmers to hire seasonal (let alone all-year) immigrant labor because of racist attitudes toward these workers. Earlier this year the House of Representatives passed a bill to change the H-2A program to make it easier for farmers to bring in immigrant labor and for longer periods—including a path to citizenship for long term workers. But of course that went nowhere in the U.S. Senate.
Immigrants make up 73 percent of the farm worker labor force, according to the USDA. They are here because (besides the shortage of willing “native” labor) there is a limit to mechanization, since Americans demand “blemish free” fruits and vegetables than can only be picked by hand. Depending on the numbers you choose to count (including the undocumented), there is up to 3 million immigrant farm laborers who this country never sees or feels any gratitude toward, save to expectorate their ignorant, bigoted bile toward.
The problem of “invisibility” of
course goes far beyond simply farm fields, but in the media as well. The "invisibility" of Hispanics
on “mainstream” network and cable television—whether on entertainment
programming, news or even commercials—is impossible to ignore if that is what
you are looking to see. Now, Disney is releasing a new animated film this
Thanksgiving weekend called Encanto
(which means “charm” in Spanish) which is probably an effort to allay criticism
for it’s lack of Hispanic presence in its productions. It’s plot is predictably
bizarre for this kind of fare; a candle for some reason has given a house and
each member of the family who lives there some magic powers, and then one day
the house somehow becomes demonized and the only one who can save the day is
the only member of the family—female, of
course—who doesn’t have any “gift."
Naturally, there are some things not quite right; the setting is in Colombia, yet the dress of the characters are plainly modeled on the stereotypical “Mexican.” A large percentage of the members of this family are “Afro,” which of course would not be typical given that racial and "ethnic" prejudices in Latin America are no different than they are in the U.S.
I can only conjecture that the makers of this film decided that they had to set this film somewhere that was recognizably Hispanic, but still had a large enough black population to justify putting black faces in this film; it seems that Colombia, whose Spanish rulers imported African slaves, was chosen as the setting because it thus has a much higher percentage of black residents than Mexico does. I doubt, somehow, that this will attract a black audience to this film. This movie also appears to be female-centric, which isn’t surprising since Hispanic women are seen as “less scary” than Hispanic men.
In any case, whether or not this film makes Hispanics less “invisible” is another matter altogether. Skin color and clothing aside, if this film was entitled “Charm” and all the characters were white, black or Asian you wouldn’t detect anything “Hispanic” about it. They are just “like us,” right? We will see how the box office does to determine how non-Hispanic moviegoers react to a film with characters that don’t look like “real” or “honorary” Americans—even though they talk and act “American.”
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