TRJ “East of Eden” refers to a Steinbeck novel, which was itself a reference to the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. But this work seems most closely tied to Steinbeck’s migration epic “The Grapes of Wrath.” What connection do you see between what Steinbeck was writing about and the migrant community in the Central Valley? BF When you go to the same migrant camp that’s mentioned in “The Grapes of Wrath” now, you realize this is the housing. It’s still here. The people that occupy the spaces, that is the same. The struggles are still the same. In some ways, the struggles are worse now for this community because they also have to worry about getting taken from their families and deported. But there are still folks living in the housing that people in the ’30s were living in at some of these camps. They’re still migrant labor camps, and now maybe they insulated the walls, but it’s the same buildings even going back 100 years. It doesn’t feel like there’s been a lot of change. I’ve even seen numbers that show that, adjusted for inflation, people are actually making the same or less now than farmers during the Dust Bowl era. Which is crazy.
This is a diverse group of people with diverse priorities, just like any other group. The media only shows these folks as a unit of labor and in their relationship to migration, and that’s it. Regardless of political ideology, we all rely on these folks in exactly the same way every single day. If you act like you don’t need these folks, you’re just wrong. It doesn’t matter — right, left, whatever. It’s their labor that is feeding us. I just don’t understand how there’s a disconnect there. It’s just sort of an out-of-mind thing that people are so disconnected from their food supplies at this point in this country.
TRJ What’s something most people don’t understand about the migrant population in the U.S.?
A worker harvests stone fruit in the fields outside Fresno, CA.
There’s
this
big
BF
misconception the migrant community is this single voting bloc. The left side of the political spectrum in this country takes it for granted. They basically that view the migrant-worker community as all one voice, and they are all of one opinion that all that matters to them is legal status and migrant issues.
Central Coast workers harvest strawberries.
124
125
ISSUE 01
THE EDEN PROJECT
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online