Twenty miles and a world apart

September 5, 2014 9:22 AM

A Duke University summer intern attempts to provide empowerment to migrant farmworkers and their children through the federal Migrant Education Program, and discovers firsthand the many obstacles to that mission.

At the beginning of summer Eric promised his girlfriend Sara he’d come back to Charleston on weekends. He enjoys the first few trips back, hanging out with Sara and enjoying burritos and tequila shots at Juanita Greenberg’s Nacho Royale, a popular hangout near campus. But it doesn’t take long for Eric to notice a surreal disconnect between affluent Charleston and the much larger part of Lowcountry where farmworkers live. “It’s only twenty miles from the center of Charleston to a tomato pickers' camp on Jones Island,” says Eric. “And it’s like nobody in Charleston knows. Or cares.”

posted by drlith (18 comments total)

Considering that we all eat food picked by migrant workers in one form or another, this was an especially hard (but good) read. Thank you!
posted by ldthomps at 9:58 AM on September 5, 2014

“And it’s like nobody in Charleston knows. Or cares.”

Hate to tell you, kid, but it isn't just "like" or "as though" nobody in Charleston cares.
posted by clockzero at 10:01 AM on September 5, 2014 [10 favorites]

I grew up in a farm community that brought in a lot of migrant workers every summer. Even though they were all men on their own, with no children or families coming with them, we really could have benefited from a program like this.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:26 AM on September 5, 2014

I once worked at AMSA and the placed med school students in clinics or doing remote work like this (think immunizations, community health education type stuff). Difficult and emotionally hard work.
posted by k5.user at 10:45 AM on September 5, 2014

I empathize with the people that are the secondary subjects of the family, but I really can't empathize with the focus of the story. It's just too "I was privileged, but had a magical summer helping the poor and now am a better human being!"
posted by corb at 11:01 AM on September 5, 2014

I totally thought that as well at first but it does say, in a sort of throwaway/easily missed sentence, that the guy plans to make this his career, working for the Migrant Education Program in the state capital.

I definitely tend to be pretty cynical about the whole voluntourism situation in the US and other affluent nations, but SAF does do valuable work, and iirc, a decent number of SAF participants go on to doing this kind of work fulltime.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:16 AM on September 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

oh, that is really cool! And yeah, I totally missed that part, sorry. I take back my irritation!
posted by corb at 11:24 AM on September 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

"He turns to audio books (free of charge, courtesy of Pirate Bay)".

Well, nobody's perfect, I suppose.
posted by IndigoJones at 11:33 AM on September 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Oh no, I think I misread/conflated his desire to do future government work plus the SAF assignment to work with the MEP now into a career path. Sigh.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:34 AM on September 5, 2014

For people of relative privilege with curiosity about how the world works, open eyes and open minds, the plight of people low down the status scale who do hard work and are mistreated in the process is not unknown or a surprise when discovered. Left hanging in articles and books addressing this and related subjects is a question:

How to get the wider world -- and the influential people in it -- to (a) be aware of it, (b) acknowledge it, (c) give a damn, and (d) do something productive about it?

This is what I want to know.

The biggest challenge, I suspect, is (c), the giving a damn bit, because, alas, too many people with more than adequate amounts of money in their pockets -- and the political influence that goes with it -- benefit from the system. Slavery is, and always has been, profitable.
posted by cool breeze at 11:48 AM on September 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's a very important topic but I feel a little disappointed in the reportage. There were no outside facts or figures, no commentary from any other advocates for migrants, no contextualization of the story within current events. Granted, those things are typical of a certain style of reporting that might be on the wane, but without them (or something like them) this reads like it's nothing more than a story.
posted by clockzero at 11:57 AM on September 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I see the problem with this sort of "life-changing experience". Someday, kids his age will be in charge. Don't we want as many of them as possible to understand and sympathize with migrant workers? Isn't that exactly how you get influential people doing the (a), (b), (c) and (d) in cool breeze's post?
posted by clawsoon at 11:58 AM on September 5, 2014 [5 favorites]

I'm sitting about ten miles from the nearest official farm worker camp; just like the article suggests, it's a great place (with frequent visits from all the various agencies and non profits, decent housing, etc) compared to the informal housing on some of the farms and in some of the backroad encampments. I was surprised though that the article didn't mention churches -- here, the Catholic church and a few evangelical churches are centers of information, outreach, and services (all in Spanish, though quite a few of the newest arrivals speak only indigenous languages which is complicating that outreach).

After high school she’ll work in los campos. The fields.

Locally, people use "fields" as a loan word, pronounced more or less like "los feels" but with a soft s, not a z sound. Because of the border crackdown and other factors there is a shortage of farm labor here so wages are up a bit in the last three or four years, not to the point that native born Americans are competing for the jobs, but enough that growers have had to pay better and provide almost reasonable conditions or watch their crops rot.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:54 PM on September 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Slavery is, and always has been, profitable.

Well, that's open to debate, but more to the point: slaves are property and as such an investment. Employees are disposable.

These people are employees.
posted by IndigoJones at 1:38 PM on September 5, 2014

Don't we want as many of them as possible to understand and sympathize with migrant workers?

Apparently not, except so far as it allows people to engage in sanctimonious sniping at the author.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:47 PM on September 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

"I was surprised though that the article didn't mention churches -- here, the Catholic church and a few evangelical churches are centers of information, outreach, and services"

A bunch of my friends were involved with this program when I was at Duke (and my church was as well), and it might be that North Carolina has the smallest percentage of Catholics in the US (3%) and not a very strong Catholic infrastructure; Durham (where Duke is) had 3 Catholic parishes for the whole city, compared to 13 for my current similarly-sized post-industrial city. There are a bunch of cultural and historic background things going on impacting all of this, but generally -- Hispanic immigration to the Carolinas has been sudden and incredibly rapid, and the local Catholic Church infrastructure was not even a little bit prepared to take on such a massive expansion of population ... in a totally different language. They are slowly catching up, but in the Carolinas churches haven't generally been as vibrant a site of migrant worker outreach as in, say, the midwest or California.

But yeah, my 80-year-old parish priest was enrolled in beginning Spanish and trying to memorize most of the Mass at least phonetically, and learning such important phrases as, "I can get you a lawyer even if you are not legal" and "Your employer is not allowed to lock you up with key overnight" and "If you are sprayed with pesticides you must call this number." There just wasn't anybody else available. They were trying to get a young priest with at least high-school Spanish (or natively Spanish-speaking with at least high-school English!) assigned to the parish, but there's just such a shortage of priests.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:01 PM on September 5, 2014 [9 favorites]

Summer of 2009 I did legal work for the Migrant Legal Action Program, a quasi-governmental agency with the mission of helping children of migrant laborers receive education. The entire office was four of us and an intern. This issue is just a little bit overlooked. Thanks for the post.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:06 PM on September 5, 2014

And it’s like nobody in Charleston knows. Or cares.”

So much of privilege falls into this category. And sadly I'm guilty of this myself. Thanks for sharing this story.
posted by Fizz at 4:28 PM on September 5, 2014