Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

The Women in the Pictures

On the wall of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center hangs a picture so small, dark, and faded that you might pass it by without a glance, if you didn’t know to look for it. In the picture, a woman in a full skirt and bonnet sits on the seat of a rusted tractor, orchard trees spread above her head. This woman, Hatsumi Mishimoto, is an Issei (Japanese immigrant to North America) and farmer who settled in the Hood River Valley. This woman worked on the farm all day, took care of the children all day, prepared her family’s food, kept the living quarters clean, faced internment after the U.S. government ordered her removal from her home, and faced continued ostracism upon her return to the Hood River Valley. This woman’s story is not unique.

Sitting down for coffee in Portland with Linda Tamura, author of Hood River Issei and Nissei Soldiers Break their Silence, felt like peering at the past through the bottom of sea-glass jar; her animation bright and reflective. Linda and I had just sat down after viewing the photo at the Nikkei Legacy Center when she began to recount memories from her own childhood spent on her parents’ orchard in Hood River. There she made toys out of boxes and sticks, her growing limbs cushioned by her chair tree whenever they needed respite from their hours of orchard play. I sat and listened to Linda, mesmerized, sipping on a very-Portland almond milk steamer that I had chosen, less than ten minutes earlier, from the coffee shop’s selection of six very-Portland non-dairy milk steamers. Yet, before Linda could finish describing the contrasting memories of this orchard: blisters and sweat for her parents, and a playground for her and her siblings, the barista informed us that the shop would be closing momentarily.
Linda smiled in blithe, unabashed by the surprise closure, and ushered me to the outdoor seating area beside the coffee shop, so that we could resume our conversation. Linda had barely finished describing the story of her grandmother’s immigration when the barista returned, dismissing us from the outside section. Linda smiled again, thanked the barista, and beaming still, beckoned me down the muggy Portland street, where we finished our conversation while leaning against the side of a cinema building. Linda’s sea- glass animation could not be phased by a twist in the plan, bad weather, or a closed coffee shop. After all, she was an orchard kid; and if I could choose one word to describe orchard work, I would choose unexpected.

Linda Tamura, who was so kind to give me not only many stories, but personal words of encouragement, as she was once just like me, at the start of her first research/writing project.

For her past research, Linda collected stories from Hood River Issei women, many who immigrated to Oregon in the 1920s. Many of these women held romantic views of a luxurious life in the United States, visions fueled by the prosperous men in top hats and crisp suits that returned to Japan after spending five years earning money in the U.S. These women did not know that the vast majority of Japanese men who immigrated to the U.S. were paid a fraction of the wages earned by other migrants, and seldom earned enough after five years to return to Japan and marry. Thus, many men sought arranged marriages with Japanese women, who would then travel to meet their new husbands in the U.S. At nineteen years old, Linda’s grandmother became one of these women, another sort of Issei women in the pictures. A common “picture wife”, Linda’s grandmother sent a series of photographs to a potential husband, and once he decided to marry her, she joined him in the states.

Many picture brides were surprised to discover the extent to which their lives in the United States differed from their expectations. They found that, no matter how hard they squinted, they could not make the America they saw match the image that padded their memories, the returning men who strutted through their streets back home, outfitted in stiff top-hats from the U.S. Instead, these women lived in houses more akin to barns, learned to cook and sew in the early mornings and evenings, worked alongside their husbands on the farms all day, and worried for the safety of their children who often strayed through the farms, unattended, or slept in basinets under the fruit trees as their mothers worked. Most of these women lived down dirt roads, in rural areas, with no neighbors in site, sometimes in love-less marriages, and often with no family members on their side of the Pacific Ocean.

Linda recounted testimonials from women whose husbands scolded them for taking a break in their farm labor. One of these women grew so terrified to halt her work that she toiled in the fields until just a few days before giving birth. A particularly famous Issei woman, Shizue Iwatsuki, used poetry to paint a picture of her anguished new life on an orchard in the Hood River Valley. One evening, Shizue missed her family with such a passion that she prayed to the stars for an image of what her loved ones were doing at that moment, an ocean away. Many of these women replaced dreams of romantic and lavish lives in the United States with dreams of returning home to their mothers in Japan, yet they seldom lacked the financial means to do so.

As if these Oregon Issei women had not faced enough anguish, in 1942, they  were swept from their farms and ushered onto trains, with no knowledge of their destinations. When the trains screeched to a halt, the women and their families found themselves interned at camps, hundreds of miles from the Hood River Valley. Linda recounted the story of her father, a second generation Japanese-American who enlisted in the United States military. On leave from the military, he would visit his parents at an interment camp in California. When his leave ended, he continued to fight for the very country whose leaders held his family captive.

I could say that, once released from internment camps, the Issei women returned to their lives on the farms. Yet, I would wonder about the accuracy of this statement. Were the lives of Issei women farmers really their own? These grueling, lonesome lives they never signed up for? Instead, it seems that each Issei woman returned, not to her own life, but to some life, some existence, with her toiling body far removed from her own heart.
What would Hatsumi Mishimoto, the woman whose picture hangs on the wall of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, say with regards to ownership of her life? Over email, Hatsumi’s great-grandson explained to me that his great-grandmother came to the U.S. through an arranged marriage, and did not, in fact, want to work as a farmer. Yet, surprised by the demands that awaited her, she made do. What other life could she lead? These Issei women farmers, separated from familiarity by miles and ocean-crossings, unable to speak the language that now surrounded them, and unable to afford the trip back home, simply made do.

I write this in a coffee shop in the center of Hood River, Oregon, a town set within a backdrop of fruit orchards and wine vineyards, with trees that bristle when wind sweeps across the winding Columbia River. I spent much of my weekend working at farmers markets in Hood River and Mosier, selling peaches alongside the woman who manages the orchard where I have worked for the past two weeks. When customers pass our stand, they see a young farmer with a bohemian hair wrap twisted around her dark locks, standing behind boxes of fruit and a jar of dehydrated fruit-leathers, their cylindrical shapes held together by hand-tied twine bows. These customers are drawn in by words like organic and tree-ripened. At produce booths nearby, crisp beet leaves peak out from burlap bags, young farmers in trucker hats, knit-caps, and flannels cut carrot tops, weigh eggplants, and rearrange mason jars of sauerkraut. Customers immerse themselves in trances of home-cured sausage and newly-risen sourdough.

I am guilty of it myself. Well, maybe not the sausage part, but only because I’m a vegetarian. We farmers market customers often hold romanticized visions of sustainable farming, visions painted in the threads of flannels and work boots, in February pantries stocked with jars of local, July berries. We seldom look beyond the market-ready attire and sustainability buzzwords to see the full farmer that stands behind them. We seldom see her 4am morning, her sleepless nights, her cut-up, dirt-studded fingernails, her muscular arms that gained their tone not from hours spent lifting barbells in the gym, but from hours spent lifting boxes of produce, her stress fizzing as she wonders if she’ll grow enough, her stress fizzing as she worries that she’ll grow too much, the last-minute phone calls to the food pantry to ensure that all produce finds a home, her weather destruction, her weather delays, her everything falling into or out of place, always unplanned.

Learning about the lives of pre-WWII Japanese women farmers in the Hood River Valley allows me to consider the romanticized lens with which we often view agricultural work. Sure, many sustainable farmers today would argue that the outcome is worth the grind, and not solely for the monetary returns (those may or may not amount to the work put in). Rather, these farmers remain passionate about creating a better world, about promoting the health of our communities, our people, and our soil. At the end of the day, when all the potatoes are crated up and the spades hung back in the shed, many of these farmers would not choose another profession. Yet the seeds of our sustainable future are planted in soil that is sometimes lonely, sometimes painful, and almost always under-appreciated and under-paid.

Of course, I do not wish to relate the work of todays Hood River Valley farmers with the toil of Issei farmers who faced unfathomable oppression. Rather, by learning about the painful lives of Issei women farmers, I am forced to consider how a trade so romanticized, not only requires some of the longest, hardest work, but also remains grounded in a history of oppression. Now, as I walk through the Hood River Farmers Market, the wind blowing off of the Columbia river and sweeping through my hair, I will remind myself that the same wind bristled through the leaves of the pear trees planted by Issei women. I will stop and wonder how often we glamorize the painful. How often do we romanticize an experience that, at one time, sprouted from roots of oppression?

Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

Her Everything

“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.