What's it like being an H-2A farmworker? How does it feel to leave your family in Mexico for the better part of every year to work on a North Carolina farm growing tobacco or sweet potatoes or some other crop? And what's it like running a family farming operation here, facing intense foreign competition, desperate for employees to work your fields?
Finding America's Farmworkers answers these questions like no other book. Filled with stories about farmworkers, growers, and others who comprise this little known world, it's the ideal primer for anyone curious about the people who fill our grocery stores with inexpensive produce.
This accessible, non-academic text is both compassionate and balanced. Beyond weaving together accounts of numerous interesting people, author Michael Durbin also provides a succinct history of farm labor in the US, a description of the H-2A "guestworker" visa program, and just enough data to support his facts. And while this long-time volunteer aid worker doesn't shy away from highlighting problems, he also makes sensible recommendations for solving them.
No matter what readers already know about the world of farmworkers today, they will glean something new from Finding America's Farmworkers.
