Trumpism and Farmworkers
By 
As the excellent historian Douglas Sackman points out, Trumpism has trouble wrapping its head around farmworkers. Trumpists are defining rural America as a White Homeland through all sorts of messaging, including social media from government agencies. They hate immigrants. But even Trump isn’t stupid enough to think that poor Americans are going to pick crops. What’s he done instead is naturalize Latin Americans as suited to pick crops because that’s who these lesser people and effectively want to restart the Bracero Program. It’s real bad. Here’s some choice bits from Sackman’s essay:
On X, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been presenting itself as if it’s on a mission to secure a white homeland. It has posted videos of white people enjoying America’s natural wonders to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and paintings that propagandize manifest destiny, the idea that the U.S. is destined to extend its dominion across North America.
Homeland Security recently posted John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress” as a “Heritage to be proud of.” It depicts a luminous white goddess flying west over the American landscape, with white farmers plowing the soil beneath, while petrified Native Americans, shrouded in darkness, are being chased from their homelands.
As I and others have pointed out, Homeland Security is using coded messages to affirm white supremacists’ vision of turning America into a white homeland.
On the ground in America today, nonwhite immigrants are fleeing from immigration agents, as if the Gast painting is coming to life. The United Farm Workers union, referring to “videos of agents chasing farm workers thru the field,” says that “workers are terrorized.” One worker said they are “being hunted like animals.”
Trump told CNBC that he does not believe that “inner city” people can come to the rescue of farmers, whose source of labor has been decimated.
As Politico reports, Trump is now floating the idea of expanding an existing visa program for temporary agricultural workers and creating a new program that requires them to leave the U.S. before reentering legally. If so, he would essentially be reinventing the Bracero Program – the U.S. guest worker program with Mexico created at the behest of California growers during World War II that lasted until the 1960s.
Ian Chandler is an Oregon farmer whose cherries are rotting on the trees because he’s lost the farmworkers who normally pick them. He recently told CNN that these people “are part of our community, just like my arm is connected to my body, they are part of us. So it’s not just a matter of like cutting them off … if we lose them we lose part of who we are as well.”
The Spanish word bracero roughly translates to someone who works with their arms, but the earlier guest worker program didn’t have the same inclusive meaning Chandler intends. Instead, it racialized Mexicans as natural farmworkers, as mere brawn extracted from human beings who were otherwise excluded from the community.
As historian S. Deborah Kang notes, “Sumner Welles, former under secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excoriated the ‘poisoning discriminations’ faced by bracero workers and equated their experiences with the ‘Juan Crow’ racism.”
Over the course of its history, many Americans have held out hope that the U.S. would create a farming nation that lives up to the original promise of an organic democracy – the democracy Jefferson mythologized and one where all Americans are included – built from the ground up.
As historians Camille Guerin-Gonzales and Lori Flores have shown, farmworkers, whatever their official status, have worked hard to find “grounds for dreaming” in America.
Making that American dream a reality involves seeing farmworkers for who they are, I believe: vital members of the body politic who reconnect all Americans to nature through the foods they eat.