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1 results

  • 13 - Farmworker Activism

  • Edited by J. Michelle Coghlan, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
    Published online:
    17 March 2020
    Print publication:
    19 March 2020, pp 197-214

  • Summary

    This chapter examines twentieth and twenty-first century US farmworker literature. It argues that US farmworker literature distinguishes itself from the Jeffersonian agrarianism dominant in literary and cultural representations of US farmers by not only exposing the systems of power and privilege through which farmworkers are exploited, but also positioning farmworkers as key conveyors of environmental knowledge. And it shows how farmworker epistemologies in US literature and culture offer a critical vantage point on both the industrial food system and the larger systems of colonialism, capitalism, and racism upon which the industrial food system relies. The chapter considers Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown (1939), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as examples of farmworker literature that both address the conditions of exploitation facing farm laborers in the industrial food system, including economic and environmental violence, and foreground farmworkers’ environmental knowledge.