With These Hands: The Hidden World of Migrant Farmworkers Today

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From Florida to Washington, from California to Maine, farmworkers handpick nearly every vegetable and piece of fruit that lands on our dinner tables. Few of them are protected by the labor laws common to every other American worker. Their pay is often stolen by the people who employ them. In the most extreme cases, their employers have been convicted of actually enslaving them. By letting them tell their stories in their own words and based on over 300 interviews conducted throughout the U.S., With These Hands gives us the voices of the men and women who take our food from the ground. In addition, farmers, farm labor contractors, union organizers, government investigators, coyotes, and many others talk about their roles in the world of the migrant farmworker. No one story, no single truth, can adequately express the farmworker's world; With These Hands presents its complexity in vivid and human language.

SYNOPSIS

The plight of farmworkers has only worsened since Cesar Chavez organized them 30 years ago. Wages have fallen; working conditions have worsened. With These Hands, recounts the first-person histories of these workers' lives -- what results is a harrowing documentary of some of the most marginalized Americans, from recent immigrants who arrive in this country with no money and no idea of their future to "fruit tramps" who wander nomadically from field to field. With These Hands , serves as a fascinating window on an intricately structured world that few of us see, yet one that we are touched by whenever we make a quick trip to the supermarket.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

Farm workers earn an average of $6,500 per year and commonly suffer abuses that would be inconceivable in other industries. Documents the farm labor system through the voices of farm workers, as well as growers, labor contractors, union organizers, government investigators, and teachers. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

David Kusnet

If there is an implicit message to this worthwhile survey. ..it is that somehow [migrant farm workers'] isolation must end. . . .[T]his effort will not be easy. -- New York Times Book Review

Christopher D. Cook - The Progressive

Rothenberg does an admirable job of gathering important human stories. It's just unclear what links he seeks to make between consumers and a food system that delivers bountiful, cheap produce through exploitation.

Kirkus Reviews

You'll never again take the produce on your supermarket shelf for granted after reading this illuminating account. At this point, the incredible shrinking paycheck has become a fact of the American worker's life. Just how little progress some of America's most disenfranchised have made since Civil War days, however, comes poignantly clear in this ably written chronicle of the 700,000 migrant workers who sometimes literally kill themselves to bring food to our tables. The book is comprised of real people talking, interspersed with Rothenberg's statistics and analysis. Although the author might have attacked his topic with an agenda, he was an outreach worker and paralegal for a federally funded legal-services program that represented farmworkers, he instead lets both sides speak. All concerned are remarkably candid, even those who regularly break the law. (Pseudonyms are used.) Contractors, for instance, speak of luring employees to work with drugs, loaning money at inflated rates of interest, and witholding tax and Social Security payments. 'Breaking the law is the only way you can make decent money," says Manuel Gomez, a contractor who finds workers for California growers. He records only some of his workers' hours and pay on the computer, then pockets the money he might otherwise have paid in Social Security or taxes. 'The truth is the worker hardly notices,' he concludes, noting most of them are illegal aliens. 'They don't even use real Social Security numbers, so we're not stealing from the workers. We're just stealing from the government. I don't see it as all that bad.' Altogether, Rothenberg interviews more than 250 people, including workers and their families, border patrolmen,political lobbyists, union organizers, coyotes who smuggle workers across the border, doctors who care for farmworkers, and growers. A fascinating portrait of an invisible class and an evocative mandate for social change.