The Future is Another Country
Lange’s photographs can be considered “care work,” the devalued labor, integral to maintaining human life. By identifying the distress of migrant laborers’ lives, Lange indicated where care had lapsed.
These scientific servants of elite interests created a vision of the migrant body that perfectly matched the ideal working body of slavery that must be kept at labor to avoid illness.
In our current moment, as the Trump administration daily wields federal power to attack immigrant communities and workers’ rights, these kinds of community-driven struggles and organizations serve as a bulwark protecting families and empowering workers to make change where they live and work.
To the present and past Mexican farmworker families of Tulare County: I write for you and walk alongside you. Mis vecinos, you are right. You belong here, just as your history of endurance and resilience belongs in our archives.
The Activist History Review invites proposals for our April 2019 issue, “Migrant: Unwaged Work in the U.S.”
While the questions set before religious judges are often rather inward-facing, the nature of such questions, which can determine the fate of someone’s immortal soul, can have major impacts on the political and economic life of believers outside the walls of the Church.
As progressives who believe in the power of unions and the necessity of unity against an exploitative capitalist class who treats workers as commodities, this situation forces us to ask an important question: what will the future of work look like?
Officer John Brullman’s conviction for violating Francis Galatis’s civil rights was the high water mark of years of activism against police brutality. But it wasn’t really a victory, it was a right hand turn.
We are too used to worshiping rich people in our country.
While the impact of the United Farm Workers is perhaps not as strongly felt in the twenty-first century as it might be, its pedagogical relevance makes it perhaps more significant now than ever.
