Student Action with Farmworkers

Further Listening

For this episode, Maria Hinojosa sits down with legendary labor leader and civil rights activist, Dolores Huerta. They speak about politics, the current state of organizing, sex and passion, and much more.

Editorial note: This interview was recorded in September of 2023 before the current crisis in Gaza began.
In this episode of Latino USA, historian Mireya Loza and her uncle and former bracero Juan Loza meet at his home in Chicago to reflect on the legacy of the long-running and controversial labor Bracero Program and its impact on their family.
Over 300,000 students in the U.S. migrate every year to work in agriculture, from spring to fall. At a high school in South Texas, when these students return, they gather at the Migrant Student Club to discuss their experiences and get support from a migrant student counselor. At a special gathering of the club we met Reyes, who started picking asparagus in Michigan to help support his family when he was 9 years old. And over the course of his last semester of school, we follow him as he works to graduate, financially support his family, and deal with an unexpected twist: the pandemic.

In 2018, Diego and Mario joined the U.S. government-sponsored H-2A visa program, leaving their families in their home country of Mexico to harvest blueberries at a farm in North Carolina for six months. They had no idea they were about to become victims of human trafficking and that their lives would be derailed forever.

In the first episode of two-part special “Head Down,” we go deep into how a visa program that brings more than 300,000 foreign agricultural workers to the U.S. every year is plagued with abuse and wage theft. All of this while the U.S. government plans to expand it.
In the last installment of our two-part investigative series “Head Down,” we shift the focus to look at the systems put in place by the U.S. government and why they’re constantly failing foreign agricultural workers in the H-2A visa program. As a result, we uncover millions of dollars in stolen wages that, instead of being returned to the workers, end up in the coffers of a U.S. government agency.
Visual artist Narsiso Martinez uses materials, like discarded produce boxes and dusty charcoal, to depict intimate scenes about the life and labor of farm workers in the United States. At 19, Narsiso also made that journey, and went on to do farm work in the orchards of Washington state in order to afford his dream of pursuing art school.

This episode features an interview with Yesenia Cuello who shares what is was like for her to grow up in rural Eastern North Carolina while working in tobacco fields with her mother and sisters, and how that inspires the work she does today advocating for farmworkers and their families as the Executive Director of NC Field.