Description
Book SynopsisAn examination of the Farm Security Administration''s migrant camp system and the people it served
Today''s concern for the quality of the produce on our plates has done little to guarantee U.S. farmworkers the necessary protections of sanitary housing, medical attention, and fair labor standards. The political discourse on farmworkers'' rights is dominated by the view that migrant workers are not entitled to better protections because they are noncitizens, as either immigrants or transients. Between 1935 and 1946, however, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) intervened dramatically on behalf of migrant families to expand the principles of American democracy, advance migrants'' civil rights, and make farmworkers visible beyond their economic role as temporary laborers. In more than one hundred labor camps across the country, migrant families successfully worked with FSA officials to challenge their exclusion from the basic rights afforded by the New Deal.
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