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.
The Trump administration’s immigration policies have invited numerous comparisons to nineteenth-century regulations of enslaved persons. These comparisons will continue so long as the state retains the power to circumscribe a person’s mobility and employment opportunities through the policing of their legal status.
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.”
This is what we often overlook when we write about work: people exist beyond of systems of labor and exploitation.
