“Hello, I just want to introduce myself. My name is Emma and I am conducting a research project, traveling around the country and collecting stories from immigrant women in agriculture. I heard about your market and was wondering if there might be someone here I could talk to.” It was not my normal way of acquiring research subjects. Usually, these conversations materialize after a couple of emails back-and-forth, a forwarding to a co-worker, a referral to someone else, or maybe a few phone calls. Yet, when I decided to take a last-minute, long-weekend trip to Eugene, I decided to settle for a last-minute, long-winded research tactic as well.
Distracted by something, probably the avocado hummus and fresh pita I had just sampled at the Mediterranean booth beside me, I had barely put much thought into my I just want to introduce myself. By the time I considered my words, they had already fallen out of my mouth and sat, lingering in the air between myself and the woman behind the information booth. Why do we ever preface introductions with that phrase? How very manufactured! How very untrue! I didn’t just want to introduce myself.
Luckily, my introduction didn’t seem to bother the friendly woman working behind the information booth. She promptly pointed me in the direction of a stand just to the other side of the hummus vendor. In front of the booth stood the director of Huerto de la Familia, an organization that Silvia, the head of the Adelante Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture program, had briefly mentioned to me. Similar to Adelante Mujeres, Huerto de la Familia conducts a six-week organic agriculture course with the goal of capacitating latino families in Lane County, Oregon with the resources and education necessary to improve their food-security, health, and economic self-sufficiency.
Behind the booth stood a Mexican immigrant named Stella and her teenage daughter. Stella, I learned, had just completed the six-week course, and was selling her produce at the Eugene Saturday Farmers Market for the first time. I asked Stella if I could take a picture of her with the produce stand, and her daughter immediately jumped into the frame, adjusting her mother’s t-shirt and wisping back the strands of stray hair that intruded in front of her mother’s ears.
Watching Stella and her daughter interact, I suddenly grew aware of a fact that I had, absentmindedly, experienced countless times before: for immigrant women farmers, family involvement reigns crucial. We say it all the time: family is everything. We may roll our eyes at our family members, poke fun at them, and at times, they may represent our worst enemies. Yet, at the end of the day, most of us would do anything for our families. I often tell stories of my family, the loud New Yorkers, about the ruthless jokes and untempered bluntness, how stepping into my home may feel like stepping into the eye of a hurricane. But I love my family, they’re everything, I’ll add without a second breath. To immigrant women, this everything takes on a whole new meaning.
Before leaving Portland, I spent a second evening volunteering at the Adelante Mujeres CSA packing. This time, Silvia asked me to drive her just a couple blocks away, to the Forest Grove Farmers Market, where some of the women and men in the Adelantes Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture Program held booths. At one of these booths, a married couple sold boxes of fresh berries, hot peppers, and a variety of other produce items. As I bantered with the couple in Spanish, their teenage daughter worked the cash register beside them.
At another booth, a young boy sat alone behind the scale, a row of boxed ground cherries lining the table in front of him. His mother, I learned, had just left the market to deliver some of her produce to the CSA packing, trading places with Silvia and I. Thus, instead of asking the time-strapped farmer, I consulted the temporary boss, her son, who could not have been more than eleven years old, whether I could snap a picture of the stand. Her stand. His stand? Well, the family’s stand.
I have seen it countless times before, but never put two-and-two together until I watched Stella and her daughter interact at the market in Eugene. I saw it at markets in New York, in Iowa, in Wisconsin, in San Francisco, and in Oregon. I saw it in the teenage girl who proudly listed the ingredients in her family’s traditional Dominican sweets, waving her hands over layers of milk and sugar at the Lents International Farmers Market in Portland. The families of immigrant women farmers, more often than not, play visible rolls in the farm business.
After my realization at the Eugene Market, I grow upset with myself-perplexed that this reality had taken so long to materialize in my distracted mind. Of course, family plays a crucial role in the businesses of immigrant women farmers, as for immigrant women farmers, family plays a crucial role in everything.
Sure, most of us say that our family plays crucial roles in our lives: they support and comfort us, they provide an atmosphere of trust, and they provide an atmosphere of honesty (whether desired or not). Yet, for an immigrant, often juggling limited financial and educational resources, possibly a language barrier, and often a government stacked against them, the ability to trust someone takes on a much larger meaning. For immigrant women, family might represent the only group of people they can trust indefinitely. Parents trust their children, and these children can help with the farm business, as well. Often, children living in the U.S. have gained a stronger English-language education than their parents have received, and thus, they can soften the language barrier between their parents and customers. Children also help their parents by drawing in these customers, as children represent something we can all connect to. How many times have you been drawn to a vendor simply because their young children sit beside them behind the stand, sorting boxes of produce and matter-of-factly educating customers about organic pest management and companion planting, topics that linger half-way in the haze above their pigtailed heads?
Of course, this parent-child arrangement plays a reciprocal role for farming families. Through helping out at the market, the children of immigrants gain many important perspectives from their parents, as well. They observe their parents’ tenacity, gain business, monetary, and communication skills, and learn to value hard-work. They grow inspired to follow their parents’ lead, inspired to push onward, even when the odds, the neighbors, the education system, the health system, even the entire country, seems stacked against them. Maybe, in an ideal world, these children would not need to learn at such a young age that prosperity comes from treading water, endlessly, against the currant. Yet, immigrant farmers seem to believe that their children must learn the reality, no matter how harsh. Perhaps, it is crucial that they learn.
Once I internalized the importance of family for these immigrant farmers, I began to further consider the U.S. government’s practice of separating immigrant children from their parents, and the continued, ineffective reunification of these families. In that moment, just when I thought the unfathomable nature of this practice had reached its precipice, it grew even more incredible to me. In my life, my family acts as a necessity. At times, there might be anger, heavy-handed jokes, sarcasm, and even pain, but all of that bad is grounded in the deepest good, the deepest love, and the deepest trust. I can hardly imagine the importance of family to someone in an unfamiliar, even hostile, place. I can hardly imagine the importance of love and trust in a place where love and trust seems so difficult to find. Us non-immigrants say that our families are everything, but for immigrants, they truly are.
