Losing the Migrant Voice
MILLS, NICOLAUS
Losing the Migrant Voice Migrant: Agricultural Workers in America's Northeast By William H. Friedland and Dorothy Nelkin Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 281 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Nicolaus...
...The best pickers use both hands, alternating them in a sort of swimming motion...
...Reviewed by Nicolaus Mills It has been more than a decade since Edward R. Murrow's "Harvest of Shame" first appeared on national television, over 30 years since James Agee and Walker Evans completed the writing and photography of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...
...All had been working in lettuce...
...But why students of migrant labor at a time when the California grape strike is recent history...
...And it does succeed in at least portraying how the conditions under which migrants live frequently serve to deprive them of even the meager benefits they have earned...
...The nurse commented that this had been a big day for rashes and four migrants had come in complaining about them...
...It also comes at a time when California??with its bracero history, its grape strike and Cesar Chavez...
...Both agreed that I had the same rash as four other people...
...On the first day I held the ears with my left hand and pulled them with my right...
...The doctor took a look at my arm, without stopping, and continued walking down the hallway...
...Based on the field reports of 16 Cornell and Tuskegee students who lived and worked with the migrants during the summers of 1966-68, the book consists largely of passages from their diaries joined together by explanatory sections...
...Later, back at the camp, I told the crew leader that it was hives...
...These passages are dull, and, what is worse, frequently reveal a condescending attitude, portraying migrants as not merely victimized but disillusioned to the point where they possess few inner resources: "Migrants refer to themselves as inessential or easily replaceable...
...The flypaper was up for 20 minutes and I counted 20 flies on it...
...This is a very slow technique...
...Migrants' perceptions of the larger society are based on an extraordinary lack of knowledge about events outside the camp...
...Or we are told of the problems one participant had learning how to pick corn: "There are several techniques of pulling corn...
...Instead of restricting itself to such insights into migrant life, however, too often the book focuses on the difficulties the students had with the trappings of their new habitat: "Joe instructed me on the proper use of flypaper...
...Indeed, the dominant narrative voice is that of the students themselves rather than the migrants they describe, who are of most interest and whom we want to hear firsthand, not secondhand...
...Nonetheless, as East Coast agricultural workers become more organized (only this year the United Farm Workers signed their first Florida contract), Migrant is sure to be turned to with increasing frequency for the picture it gives of the lives of the 50,000 men and women who harvest crops from the Gulf of Mexico to Maine...
...Whatever conditions may be, they are usually accepted fatalistically...
...Yet the belief still persists that America's migrant labor difficulties are largely confined to the West...
...it was 'contact dermatitis.' The doctor came by but disagreed with their diagnosis, saying I had hives...
...Occasionally the students' observations are illuminating, as in the following account of collusion between growers and local officials: "I developed a very bad rash, so I went to the migrant labor clinic...
...I can understand growers still being incapable of grasping this...
...Obviously the participants in this project came away from it with little sense of where the inner and buried strengths of migrants lie...
...For theirs is a flawed book, one that cannot compare with Robert Coles' recent Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers...
...provides the same narrow (but in many ways comforting) perspective for viewing migrant problems that the South cast on black problems in the early '60s...
...Unfortunately, it is doubtful that William Friedland and Dorothy Nel-kin's Migrant: Agricultural Workers in America's Northeast will change this misconception...
...He laughed and claimed that hives were only for little children...
...We unwound the roll and hung the paper in the middle of the room, directly in front of the door...
...Then, two young interns looked at me more closely...
...Doctors these days don't know what's going on.' He said I had this rash from working in the lettuce fields because of the strong insecticides...
...The reader's feeling of distance is exacerbated by the instructions professors Friedland and Nelkin place at the beginning of each chapter...
Vol. 55 • May 1972 • No. 11
