In the U.S., immigrant and citizen migrant farm laborers work behind the scenes every day to ensure the planting, harvest, and shipment of the food and other agricultural products we rely on. Their work is an essential part of our daily lives—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but their voices don’t usually get a seat at our tables.
We had the great honor of co-editing a portfolio of writing and art from twenty-seven contributors with roots in the farmworker community. It was recently published in print and online in The Common magazine, and a celebration with farmworker readers was held at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. Almost all the contributors are debut and emerging authors, many of whom worked the fields as young children, or to pay their way through college, or to send money to families back home. They shared their lives with us, and, in many cases, shared hard truths, secrets kept for many years.
We learned so much reading their work, and all the incredible work that came in through our call for submissions. But our portfolio was only possible because of the earlier work of other immigrant voices, creating a long tradition of powerful farmworker literature. In this tradition, there is so much more to read, to learn from, and to consider. What sort of lives are the workers who plant and pick and package our food able to live, in a country that does not always welcome them, even after several generations of work?
This list of books, assembled with our personal reading and suggestions from our farmworker contributors, showcases the richness and range of the farmworker experience. The struggle of it—the physical and mental strain, the mistreatment and low pay and food insecurity—but also the beauty of it: the pride of quick, skilled hands, the radiance of an early morning sunrise in the fields, the fierce love and resiliency of a close-knit family.
Like the portfolio, this list is only a glimpse into the wider farmworker community, which is too deep and diverse to capture in a few stories. We hope our portfolio, and these new and classic titles, will start important conversations not just at the dinner table, but at all tables.
The Consequences by Manuel Muñoz
This story collection from Graywolf Press won the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Before its author, Manuel Muñoz, was named a 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, he spent time working in the fields, from second to sixth grade. Consequences is his third story collection, focused on Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in California’s Central Valley in the 1980s. His rich, nuanced characters run the gamut—parents and children, women and men, gay and straight, U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants—and show the full complexity of life in and out of the fields. (To hear Muñoz say this much better himself, read this interview in The Common with his mentor and longtime friend Helena María Viramontes, who also appears on this list.)
Under the Feet of Jesus by Helena María Viramontes
Cornell professor Helena María Viramontes grew up in East LA, working summers in the fields of Fresno with her family—work they had done for generations. Under the Feet of Jesus centers on Estrella, a teenager who picks crops with her family. The novel beautifully evokes the physicality and sensations and settings of farmwork, but also teems with other life: Estrella falls in love with a young farmworker, and must fight back to protect him against the exploitative system they are all part of.
When Living Was a Labor Camp by Diana García
García was born in a migrant farm labor camp owned by the California Packing Corporation, in the San Joaquin Valley. This vibrant and visceral collection of poems is her debut, and won the American Book Award in 2001. With exquisite sensory details, García tells the stories of many different lives and characters—men and women, sometimes struggling, often sassy, and always complex, breathing, alive.
All They Will Call You by Tim Z. Hernandez
In 1948, a plane crashed in California, killing 32 people. 28 of them were Mexican field workers being deported after immigration raids, but only the white crew members were identified by name in the news. Tim Z. Hernandez spent years researching and reconstructing the incident, and the lives of those farmworkers. Finally, in 2018, All They Will Call You names and explores the individual lives and losses that were only a number for seventy years.
Gordo by Jaime Cortez
This story collection for young adults, published by Grove Atlantic in 2021, is set in the 1970s, in the farmworker camps and towns of Watsonville, California—first made famous by author John Steinbeck, and also where author Jaime Cortez grew up. Gordo, a misfit first in camp and then in town, made fun of for his weight and for his deficient masculinity in a hypermasculine community, narrates most of the collection. The stories follow Gordo as he begins, slowly, to understand more about the world and people around him, and about himself.
America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan
Bulosan’s celebrated semi-autobiographical 1946 novel was revived by Penguin Classics in 2022. Set in the 1930s, it follows a young boy from his childhood in the rural Philippines under U.S. imperialism to a life as a migrant worker in the fields and orchards of California and the Pacific Northwest. In close first-person narration, the novel wrestles with the paradox of the migrant farmworker’s experience: alienated and criminalized in the U.S., but still drawn to the promise of the American dream, despite all its shortcomings.
Curious Unions: Mexican American Workers and Resistance in Oxnard, California, 1898–1961 by Frank P. Barajas
This in-depth 2012 history of farmworkers, racism, and resistance in Southern California covers the early development of the agricultural system that exploits immigrant workers, and the eventual strikes and unions that emerged to fight back against that system. Most interesting is the exploration of moments when farmworkers from different racial and ethnic backgrounds banded together to create more powerful unions that could look after the rights of all workers, not just their own.
The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child by Francisco Jiménez
This 1996 autobiographical novel, geared toward younger audiences, is actually twelve intertwining stories that chronicle Santa Clara University professor Francisco Jiménez’s childhood, starting from the moment he illegally crosses the border with his family at four years old, in 1947. They follow their “circuit,” moving to a new labor camp for each crop—picking cotton, topping carrots, harvesting strawberries—and then repeat the cycle, as their family grows from four to ten, and endures each hardship together.
…y no se lo tragó la tierra / …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomás Rivera, translated by Evangelina Vigil-Piñón
Rivera’s 1971 novel is made up of a short stories and vignettes that play with the idea of memory and fragmentation. The English translation by Evangelina Vigil-Piñón came out in 2015, ten years after a film adaptation by the same name. Rivera follows a community of Mexican migrant farmworkers in South Texas in the forties and fifties, dealing with racist, cruel, and inhumane treatment in the fields, in school, and in town. The novel is a classic in the farmworking community, because it dared to speak about things that were never spoken aloud, or shared with outsiders.
The Plum Plum Pickers by Raymond Barrio
Barrio’s 1969 novel is set in the fictional town of Drawbridge, in Santa Clara County, California, where the Western Grande fruit plantation exploits its immigrant workers. It’s a place that highlights the irony of abundance: a farm with so much wealth and food, but nothing but scarcity and struggle for its workers. Barrio chronicles the complicated moment when farmworkers must decide if unionizing to fight back is worth risking the wages that feed their families.
Estamos Aquí: Poems by Migrant Farmworkers edited by Sylvia Kelly, Bob Holman, and Marjorie Tesser, translated by Janine Pommy Vega
From 1994 to 2007, Beat poet Janine Pommy Vega led writing workshops at migrant farmworker camps in upstate New York, sponsored by the Geneseo Migrant Center. With editors Sylvia Kelly, Bob Holman, and Marjorie Tesser, she gathered their poems for publication in this 2007 volume from YBK Publishers. It’s hard to find these days, but worth the search; Mexican and Central American migrant farmworkers reflect on their long hours and hard labor, the comforts of their families, the complications of home and border crossings and being on the move. Poems are presented in both Spanish and English, thanks to Vega’s translations.