By: David Conde
Thanksgiving includes historical moments and other events that bring people together to give thanks. It begins with the survival story of the pilgrims helped by Indian people in the early 17th Century.
Over the years, there has been so much myth about the holiday that people generally tend to forget that Thanksgiving joins the ranks of celebrations that thank God for a successful harvest. The harvest has a history in which Latinos play a major role.
I am President of the Board of Directors of an organization called East Coast Migrant Head Start Project (ECMHSP), the largest agency of its kind in the United States. We have expanded into the Mid-West with schools in Indiana and Oklahoma and have added staff to serve farmworking fami- lies coming from Texas.
Part of our work before COVID included visiting farm workers in the fields. The last visit was to a strawberry harvesting operation in a Florida field where Latino migrants gathered the fruit, disinfect it and boxed it to be sent directly to the grocery store shelves. I also have had the opportunity to visit migrant worker housing and found time and time again that the living conditions have generally changed little since our family were migrants decades and decades ago. About the only difference that I have seen are the dilapidated trailers homes that serves the same purpose as barns when I was a child.
It is not surprising that every time I pass by the pro- duce department at my local store, I take a second look as thoughts surge within about the farm workers in the fields picking those items for my dinner table. It also makes me feel indebted to the stoop labor of the poorest of the working poor in America.
On the other side of this story are commercials by new age stores that specialize in generic produce and want the public to know the greatness of their product using images of farmers harvesting and bringing the fruits and vegetables to market. I do not see a real farm worker in the pictures, especially a Latino, and wonder why.
Another set of sensational commercials in this vein is about the herbicide Paraquat put out by trial lawyers making claims against the manufacturer because research is indicating that the compound is causing Parkinson’s disease. The image of the most affected, the Latino farm worker, also does not have a place these scenes.
Among the memories of this type of issue includes chopping cotton in central Texas when a Stearman biplane came overhead and sprayed the field and all of us. My thoughts at the time was how cooling and good the spray felt in the middle of a hot day.
At ECMHSP we raise funds to help migrant and seasonal farm worker families navigate emergencies from an inability to work because of illness in the family to law enforce- ment issues faced in traveling from state to state and every thing in between. You can imagine the devastating affect of COVID on a population that must work to survive each day.
In this time of material shortages, migrant and seasonal farm workers continue to work in the fields so that we can have a nice turkey with all the trimmings this holiday. There are no supply chain problems where they are concerned.
Latino farm workers are the people we should have upper most in our minds as we say grace and give thanks for the bounty provided by a wonderful country. They deserve thanks, too.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of la Voz bilingüe. Comments and responses may be directed to news@lavozcolorado.com.
