Since its publication this November, The Common’s Issue 26 portfolio of writing and art from the seasonal, migrant, and immigrant farmworker community has received attention from a variety of news outlets and organizations across the United States. Visit the links below to hear conversations with farmworker portfolio co-editors and contributors, read more about the development of the portfolio, and keep up with ongoing programming involving our fall issue.
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With so many California contributors to our Issue 26 farmworker portfolio, we had to have a West Coast celebration! Join The Common for a celebration of writing and art from the seasonal, migrant, and immigrant farmworkers who power California’s vast food and agriculture systems.
Come celebrate with us at LA’s renowned Skylight Books for a reading and conversation about place, immigration, writing, justice, farmwork, and family with contributors from California. All are part of our portfolio of writing and art from twenty-seven contributors with family roots in farmwork. It was co-edited by Miguel M. Morales.
Essayist Amanda Mei Kim writes about the ways that collective power, racism, and nature weave through the lives of rural Californians of color, through the lens of her experience growing up on her family’s tenant farm just outside LA.
Poets Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Aideed Medina, and Oswaldo Vargas write about the struggle and the beauty of work in the fields and on farms. Their work highlights the nuance and diversity of that experience—queer discovery, activism and protest, shared labor and community.
Artist Narsiso Martinez creates moving portraits and scenes of farmworkers in the fields, painted on flattened cardboard produce boxes discarded from grocery stores. This work is drawn from the nine seasons he worked in the fields of Eastern Washington state, to fund his undergraduate and graduate studies. Narsiso writes, “When I nest images of farmworkers amidst the colorful brand names and illustrations of agricultural corporations, I hope to help the viewer make a connection, or a disconnection rather, and start creating consciousness about the people that farm their food.”
The event will include brief readings by each writer, a short presentation of Narsiso’s artwork, and then a moderated conversation and Q&A. It will be hosted by the magazine’s managing editor Emily Everett. Wine and drinks available!
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke came of age working in fields, factories, and waters. A labor and environmental poet, Hedge Coke was a sharecropper by the time she was mid-teens and continued manual labor until nearing thirty years of age, when disabilities precluded continuation. Following former fieldworker retraining in Santa Paula and Ventura, California, in the mid-1980s, she began teaching and is now Distinguished Professor and Mellon Dean’s Professor at UC Riverside. She is the author/editor of eighteen books, including Look at This Blue (National Book Award finalist), Burn, Streaming, Blood Run, Off-Season City Pipe, Dog Road Woman, The Year of the Rat, Effigies I, II, & III, Ahani, and Sing.
Narsiso Martinez (b. 1977, Oaxaca, Mexico) came to the United States when he was 20 years old. He attended Evans Community Adult School and completed high school in 2006 at the age of 29. He earned an Associate of Arts degree from Los Angeles City College, and a BFA and MFA from California State University Long Beach, where he was awarded the prestigious Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. His portraits of farmworkers are painted, drawn, and expressed in sculpture on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally. His work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, MOLAA, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Martinez was awarded the Frieze Impact Award in 2023. Martinez lives and works in Long Beach, CA.
Aideed Medina is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, spoken word artist, and playwright, and daughter of Miguel and Lupita Medina of Salinas, California, and the United Farm Workers movement. She is the author of 31 Hummingbird and a forthcoming full-length poetry collection, Segmented Bodies, from Prickly Pear Press.
Amanda Mei Kim writes about the ways that collective power, racism, and nature weave through the lives of rural Californians of color. Her writing has appeared in The Common, The New York Times, PANK, LitHub, Brick, Tayo, Eastwind Magazine, DiscoverNikkei, and Nonwhite and Woman. Poems are forthcoming in an anthology from Haymarket Press. She is a member of this year’s Changemaker Authors Cohort and a de Groot Writer of Note. She is a former Steinbeck Fellow and California Arts Council Fellow. Amanda is the founder and lead researcher for Kanshahistory.org, which publishes the property transfer records of Japanese Americans who had their farms taken during World War II. Her professional work focuses on agriculture, equity, and ethnic media. She is also a creative strategist for Hmong American farmers who are being persecuted by their local government. Amanda is writing a memoir-in-essays that uses her family’s 125-year history as agricultural workers to show how people of color created a more just and sustainable food system. More at www.amandameikim.com.
Oswaldo Vargas is a 2021 Undocupoets Fellowship recipient. He has been anthologized in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color and published in Narrative Magazine and Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day,” among other publications. He lives and dreams in Sacramento, California, for now.
Photo from a labor camp for Filipino farmworkers. The author’s parents are in the center, holding her older brothers.
Mama saw her boss, Jack Radovich, standing in her row during a sweltering San Joaquin afternoon. She was picking table grapes alone when he suddenly appeared, several yards away, gazing off in the direction of the blue-gray Sierra mountains. She assumed he was surveying his vineyards, visiting his farmworkers like he aways did. He was a hardworking landowner, who usually let his young sons build and deliver the packing boxes with a beat-up, sunburnt pickup truck. The kind of boss who always seemed to know when the grape packers needed more boxes. He didn’t call out or turn toward her, but she hurried his way, eager to be the first one from her team to claim the boxes. Daddy was her foreman.
By ALONDRA AGUILAR RANGEL
Translated by JENNIFER ACKER
Piece appears below in both English and Spanish.
There are people who express with songs what they can’t express with their own words. My grandfather is one of these people.
Papá José, as we grandchildren call him, is a reserved man, but he has a unique way of talking about his life and expressing his feelings. His hair is now covered in white and his face in lines. He usually wears a pair of gray pants, a flannel shirt, his old sandals and his light brown sombrero. He’s a working man of the countryside.
I visit him only once a year. Like many people from my country, I go to Mexico every December to spend Christmas and New Year’s with my family. It has been twelve years since I left home, the house where I grew up, the dirt streets and brick houses where I spent my childhood on the outskirts of Morelia, the capital of Michoacán. I went to elementary school there, then junior high school, until my family and I moved to the United States. So much time has passed since then. And now I have repeated the family history. Three years ago, I left my parents’ house in California to go study on the other side of the world. I can travel only once a year. The distance and time make me miss my family a lot. I question why we are constantly moving: Why do we keep looking for a better life somewhere else? This is why, for some time now, I have felt the need to talk more with Papá José, to know more about his life. I try to take advantage of every visit to talk to him and listen to his stories.
By JIM GUY, with ARONNE GUY
Oregon
A fruit tramp family of the 1930s stayed in many places for short periods of time. We arrived, picked the crop, and moved on. That’s why we were called tramps, nomads, and many other things not nearly as complimentary. Our shelters while picking could be the loft of a barn, a converted hen house, or a small sleeps-two tent. On occasion if you were in an especially nice place, you might have a cabin or a large canvas-covered dwelling with a wooden floor. If we had a place of permanency, it was the car or truck that took us to the next job: we might spend the winter in California or pick apples in Washington State. It was all dictated by the season. Packing and moving was as much a part of our life as picking the crop.
The wheat wants an apology,
for taking me this long
to show my wrists
to the thresher boy.
White women give my father shaded looks.
Bringing babies to do their dirty work,
mumbled in passing.
I am paid in jelly doughnuts
for my day on the boycott.
My dad leads my baby brother
to the front of the grocery store doors
for a meeting with the manager:
two men
and a five-year-old interpreter.
June 1978
Central Valley, California
We demanded, we begged, we guilt-tripped our parents for money. We had reached the age where we cared about our image. We no longer accepted garage sale clothes or Kmart blue-light sale items. We wanted the hip-hugging, sailor-pant flap Chemin de Fer jeans, we wanted the upside-down-U-stitch-on-the-butt Dittos, we wanted the iconic Ralph Lauren polo, and we wanted the clunky Connie Clogs. We wanted the clothes our American middle school classmates strutted around in.
By LEO RÍOS
Good vibes started at Movida, my favorite paisa club in Bakersfield, because it was real. Other clubs were only restaurants during the day or warehouses on the fairgrounds. Movida was a big-time deal, built especially for visiting artists who came from everywhere—L.A., Mexico, sometimes Central or South America. It was the dance spot you took your girl to, if you wanted to be among the best dressed, the most beautiful.
Artwork and introduction by NARSISO MARTINEZ
Tender Leaves (2021). Ink, charcoal, and gold leaf on cardboard produce box (52.50 x 62.50 in). Photo by Yubo Dong.
Introduction
Through my art, I intend to highlight the difficult reality faced by American farmworkers, a workforce essential to American life consisting of men and women almost wholly of insecure immigration status. This status makes them vulnerable to predatory practices from agribusiness. I am a former farmworker myself; after immigrating to the United States from a small community outside of Oaxaca, Mexico, I worked nine seasons in the fields of Eastern Washington state to pay for my undergraduate and graduate degrees.
I seek to honor farmworkers and reveal the difficult working conditions they face. Their portraits and scenes from the fields are executed on found produce boxes. When I nest images of farmworkers amidst the colorful brand names and illustrations of agricultural corporations, I hope to help the viewer make a connection, or a disconnection rather, and start creating consciousness about the people that farm their food.
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