Q&A: Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire
Workers harvesting peaches, 1991. Photo by Doel Vázquez. Courtesy of Records of the Department of Puerto Rican Community Affairs, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College.
The Latinx Project had the great opportunity to host Ismael García Colón’s first book talk for Colonial Migrants in the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms. He is an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and a historical and political anthropologist with a focus on migration, labor, race and citizenship. Dr. Mireya Loza, Assistant Professor of Food Studies at NYU, had the chance to ask Ismael García Colón a few questions about his new book.
M: How did you come to the topic of Puerto Rican farmworkers in the US?
I: In 1999, when I began to write my dissertation, I worked as an archivist at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro), processing some of the records of the government of Puerto Rico’s offices in the United States. From these records, I learned about the farm labor program and a protest of farmworkers in the town of North Collins, New York. I also knew about the experiences of migrant farmworkers because many of my relatives and neighbors had ventured to the States, like they used to say in Puerto Rico, a recoger tomates (to harvest tomatoes). I grew up listening to their stories about allá fuera (outside there), which is what we call the continental United States. Most of the people in my hometown of Cidra migrated to New Jersey to harvest vegetables and fruits or to Connecticut and Massachusetts working on tobacco farms. Moreover, I had experience interviewing former migrant farmworkers. In the 1990s, I interviewed former landless workers who had migrated as farmworkers for my dissertation and first book Land Reform in Puerto Rico. In 2005, when I began working at Centro as a researcher, I decided that my next project was going to be on Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers.
M: How did Puerto Rican farmworkers’ experiences differ from those of Mexican and West Indian Farmworkers?
I: The fact that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens makes their experience inherently different from Mexican and West Indians. The most important aspect of the Puerto Rican experience in farm labor is that farmers and government officials could not restrict their mobility. In the 1950s, even Puerto Rico Secretary of Labor Fernando Sierra Berdecía argued that the government couldn’t force migrant farmworkers to fulfill their contracts and that their only alternative was to appeal to their sense of honor. However, confusion about the status of Puerto Ricans in the United States was always a challenge for migrants and Puerto Rican officials. For example, an Attorney General of Pennsylvania wrote to the government of Puerto Rico asking to return Puerto Ricans to the islands after the harvest.
Since Puerto Ricans could not be deported, growers and government officials justified not hiring them in racial terms. Many farmers and officials argued that Puerto Ricans were not physically suited for the harvests or that they didn’t have the appropriate skills. Farmers stated that tall Jamaican workers were better suited for the apple harvest or that Puerto Ricans didn’t know how to pick apples. Others pointed out that Mexican were smaller than Puerto Ricans and therefore, better equipped to bend their backs while harvesting vegetables.
In fact, Puerto Rican experiences in farm labor are similar to other colonial migrants throughout the world in the twentieth century. Algerians in France, Jamaicans in Britain, and Koreans in Japan are some examples of migrant workers blurring the differences between being citizens and “foreign others.”
Chartered flight with Puerto Rican migrant farm workers, circa 1948. Courtesy of the Records of the Migration Division, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.
Cover image for Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire (University of California Press).
M: Why did the formal recruitment of Puerto Rican farmworkers stop in the 1990s?
I: From the early 1970s through the early 1980s, legal battles between labor activists, workers, the government of Puerto Rico, and growers shaped new regulations for the use or rejection of Puerto Ricans in U.S. farm labor. The refusal to hire Puerto Rican workers increased when intense labor organizing among tobacco workers was happening. This sentiment came to a head when apple growers refused to employ Puerto Ricans, leading to legal challenges against both growers and the Puerto Rican Farm Labor Program (FLP). For the most part, the courts sided with growers, limiting the applicability of the Wagner-Peyser Act and the preference for Puerto Ricans over guestworkers. In Puerto Rico, the pro-statehood and neoliberal Roselló González administration (1993-2000) ended the FLP in 1993, a year before the United States became part of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The government of Puerto Rico perceived any help to Puerto Ricans in the United States as an obstacle to statehood and neoliberalism. Thereafter, large growers and associations in the Northeast began to replace Puerto Ricans with Mexicans and West Indians. Colonial neoliberalism had finally succeeded in eliminating the FLP.
M: What lesson can we learn about migration and agricultural work from these laborers?
I: First lesson is that the history of Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers reveals that U.S. employers and the federal government favor workers who can be easily disposed after the harvest or silenced for attempts to dispute injustice. But Puerto Ricans are not worse off because of undocumented and guest workers, nor are immigrants in a privileged position. Immigrants are not responsible for the loss of farm jobs by U.S. citizens, as nativists like to think. Rather, it is agribusinesses, farmers, and elected officials who choose to maintain unequal opportunities for all agricultural laborers. All farmworkers deserve equal pay, living wages, decent working conditions, access to health care, and the right to organize labor unions. They deserve to work without fear of retaliation, getting fired, or being deported for denouncing unjust situations.
Second, Puerto Ricans are more than U.S. citizens; they are also colonial subjects. Immigration scholars should not indiscriminately compare the experiences of colonial migrants with those of immigrants without looking also at the distinctiveness of their experiences. Scholars of U.S. migrant labor should not forget the presence of Puerto Ricans, since their condition as colonial citizens reveals the complexity of the definitions and practices of who is a citizen and who is an immigrant in the twenty-first-century United States. That Puerto Rico is a U.S. colony is a matter of concern not only for Puerto Ricans but for anybody in the world who despises the undemocratic nature of colonialism.
Third, Puerto Ricans’ understandings of culture and identity are not an obstacle to social mobility. Rather, inequalities and power have shaped migration, particularly in U.S. farm labor. Immigration policies are part of how states organize these inequalities, shaping not only the lives of immigrants but also the lives of U.S. citizens and colonial subjects.
Perhaps the U.S. government could have developed viable and diverse agricultural production instead of flying Puerto Ricans more than 1,500 miles to work on U.S. farms. Unfortunately, local and global forces facilitated instead the cultivation of inexpensive fruits, vegetables, and tobacco products in the continental United States. In the end, migration remains the only alternative for many Puerto Ricans to survive in a colonial regime devastated by economic crisis, government corruption, austerity, Hurricane María, and the recent earthquakes.
See below for additional resources:
Puerto Rican Farmworkers
Tri-State Area
El comité de apoyo a los trabajadores agrícolas (CATA)
The Workers’ Center of Central New York
Rural & Migrant Ministry (RMM)
National
Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN)
National Farmworker Ministry (NFWM)
Ismael García Colón is a historical and political anthropologist with focus on the Gramscian concept of hegemony, oral history, immigration and colonial migration, race, citizenship, farm labor, U.S. empire, Puerto Rico, and U.S. ethnic and racial histories. His research experiences include documenting Latinxs in the NYC labor movement, and landless workers, migrant farmworkers, processes of colonial state formation and land distribution programs in Puerto Rico. García Colón is the author of Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire: Puerto Rican Workers on U.S. Farms (University of California Press, February 2020), and Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941-1969 (University Press of Florida, 2009). His publications have also appeared in Latin American Perspectives, CENTRO Journal, American Ethnologist, and Latino Studies. García Colón’s current research explores the Puerto Rican experience in U.S. farm labor and its relation to U.S. colonialism and immigration policies, and how government policies formed and transformed modern subjectivities in Puerto Rico.