The Harvest/La Cosecha Documentary

To conclude my mini-study of migrant farm workers, I watched a documentary that I had been wanting to see for a while now, The Harvest/La Cosecha.  Here is the trailer:

The powerful film tells the story of three child migrant workers, all of which had been working in the fields for basically as long as they could remember.  Here in the U.S. each year there are over 400,000 children picking the produce we eat.  Both the opening sequence of the film and the trailer present the hard facts: "In some countries children 12 and younger pick crops."  "In some countries, children work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week."  "The United States is one of those countries."  As upstanding, moral citizens of this country, we decry child labor in the Asian factories, but how many of us know about this kind of transgressions in our own country?  I definitely had my moment of liberal guilt as I was eating strawberries while I was watching the film.  There was a whole scene where one of the girls was complaining about how strawberries were one of the worst crops to pick as you are bent over all day searching for the berries among the leaves.  Yes, my berries were organic, so my conscience was clear there, but who had picked them?  The physicality of agricultural labor is challenging at any age, let alone for a child.  One of the migrant children, Victor, recounted how he carries around 1,500 pounds of tomatoes each day in Florida in the fields.  And then at end of the day he carries each pound again unpacking the crates.

And now for some more statistics:  Poverty rates for migrant families are two times greater than those of other occupations.  The dropout rate for migrant children is four times the national average, as these children are often moving around the country following the harvests with their families from May-November.  All of the children in the film talked about how difficult it was come and go from school.  Victor said he envied the fact that his younger siblings were able to go to school regularly: "They give us everything there. They have air-conditioning there.  There is no air conditioning in the fields."  Of the other two other girls in the film,  Zulema outright said she didn't think she'd make it to high school, and Perla had already been held back one year.  And health-wise?  Children are often exposed to dangerous levels of pesticides in the fields; E.P.A. safety regulations are developed based on the average 154 lb. male.  But of all the statistics presented in the documentary and on the film's website, the one that struck me the most was this: according to the calculations of a UC Davis researcher, raising the incomes of migrant families by 40% would only add $15 to the yearly produce budget of the average family.  Now that's a stark statistic!

Throughout the film, both the children and their parents (and even grandparents!) showed a profound sense of awareness of the cycle they were trapped in, all expressing that they didn't want the same life for their children.  Yet, each generation was still deeply embedded in the migrant world; parents bring even their youngest children to the fields because they cannot afford day-care.  The most heartbreaking narrative of the film for me was Zulema's fatalism about the whole situation.  At the beginning of the film she is asked about her dreams.  "Dreams?" she says, "I'm still working on those."  At the end of the film, when she is interview again after a year or so has passed, she says "Maybe I'll have goals, but dreams?"

To tie things back to libraries and my studies, I was reminded of the inspirational story of the woman whose life was changed by the bookmobile coming to the migrant camp.  The books and ideas it brought to her taught her that there were things to dream about beyond the camps and fields.  Watching this film also really hit home for me the idea of migrant workers as a truly "isolated population."  Just to logistically figure out how to reach out to these families and make sustainable connections is a huge amount of work as they travel from state to state.  It is clear that bringing our services to these families is the best plan of action.  I know if may sound a bit idealistic, but I think that libraries are in a key position to make up for some of the ways our other institutions are clearly failing these children (and their families)!