Tag: women in agriculture

Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

There is No Experience

I push the bell on the front door of Bessie’s green, Hood River farmhouse and count to sixty, but am met with no answer. The only audible noise is a faint knocking in the distance, a sound I attribute to the farm workers lining the surrounding country roads. I ring again and wait another minute before deciding to try my luck at the back door. As I walk around, I hear the knocking again, louder this time, and look up to see an old woman with gray waves in her hair and an exasperated frown on her face, holding a cane high above her head and knocking it against the dining room window. She waves towards the back door with her cane, and it takes a couple more charade matches for me to decide that I should, indeed, let myself in. Bessie Assai, a 95-year-old, retired farmer, has every right to tell her guest,  a 22-year-old, able-bodied nomad, to let herself in.

Once inside her house, I watch Bessie slowly maneuver towards the kitchen table with her walker. I immediately feel the uncertainty that I often feel with older people, unsure of how much I should offer to help. From a young age, I was taught to help my elders as much as possible, to treat them like kings and queens because they hold more knowledge than I could ever fathom. Yet, I wonder if a woman who spent her entire life relying on the strength of her body might feel disheartened when others question her physical independence. When Bessie doesn’t reply to my offer to help, I watch her maneuver towards the dining room table, and I take the seat across from her.

From the moment of our window-charades, my short visit with Bessie met absolutely none of my expectations. After spending less than an hour in her home, I can find many adjectives to describe Bessie: hardworking, bright-eyed, charming, and collected. Yet, I can also think of one thing that Bessie certainly is not. Bessie is not interested in discussing the political implications of her intersecting identities: the child of two Japanese immigrant farmers, a woman, a farmer on her father’s farm, a wife of a farmer, and a mother. Instead, Bessie wishes to discuss the habitual: the everyday life of her mother and father while managing an orchard in the Hood River Valley, her childhood spent on that orchard, and her adulthood spent on the orchard owned by her and her husband, also located in the Hood River Valley.

Bessie’s focus on the habitual, rather than the political, is especially surprising to me given the historical oppression of Japanese immigrants in the Hood River Valley. Following the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the heavy immigration of Chinese labor subsided, and the Oregon labor market began to rely on Japanese workers. By 1909, over a quarter of the Oregon Issei  (Japanese immigrants) worked as migrant farm workers. The Issei population in Hood River, Oregon grew rapidly when, in exchange for clearing brush for other farmers, Issei farm workers could receive marginal land to begin their own farms.

At that time, many of these Japanese farm workers in the Hood River Valley took on the title of independent Farmer. Rather than awarding them respect, this new title caused many Issei farmers to face continuous oppression in the form of state and county-wide legislative efforts to take away their land, for fear of the new competition. Never mind that these Issei farmers introduced new ground crops, such as strawberries and asparagus to the region, as their new land lacked the trees necessary to grow the more common orchard fruits and compete with more established farmers.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, this bigotry reached its precipice. In 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, designating the removal of any people of Japanese ancestry from a large zone of the west coast, including Portland and Hood River. All Issei in the area were forced to report to assembly centers, and eventually, concentration camps. In 1945, the war ended and the camps closed, freeing the Oregon Issei to resettle or move back to their homes. The 69 percent of Oregon Japanese Americans who returned to their homes faced exclusion from their communities, rallies to deny them of their citizenship, and other forms of opression. At this time, the Nisei (second generation Japanese-Americans) asimilated into the United States culture, likely fueled by the oppression their families faced when tied to their Japanese roots. These Nisei befriended their Caucasian peers, faced less exclusion, and enjoyed diversified options to choose their own life-paths.

Bessie echoes these feelings of Nisei acceptance, as she recollects feeling welcome in her community while growing up on her parents’ orchard. Aside from this reference to acceptance, Bessie focuses on the normalcy of her life on the orchard. When asked about her early days working on her parents’ farm, Bessie responds that no specific memory comes to mind, because everything just came naturally. Her adulthood spend on another orchard evokes similarly non-groundbreaking memories. This later experience was, “just normal,” she explains. Most surprisingly, when asked how her experience as a Nissei affected her experience growing up and farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie responds, “there was no experience, we just farmed.”

Questions regarding Bessie’s gender identity produce a similar response. When asked how her identity as a woman affected her experience farming in the Hood River Valley, Bessie replies that it affected her “in no way.” Yet, I can’t help but realize how the affects of Bessie’s gender on her farm work emerge at other moments in our conversation. When discussing her mothers’ life on the farm, and how it differed from her fathers’ life, Bessie tells me that her mother did not, in fact, work on her parents’ farm. Instead, she got pregnant soon after coming over to the United States, and had to take care of the children, rather than farm.

Bessie experienced a similar phenomenon, and while she grew up working on her parents’ farm, her farm tasks did not carry over to the farm where her and her husband lived. Bessie’s reiterance of the fact that “all things were natural, nothing different” between farming in childhood and adulthood, more applies to her husband, also the child of Japanese immigrants, who completed the farm work on their orchard. Maybe Bessie’s life on her new orchard can be called “natural, nothing different”, but if so, it was only a “natural, nothing different” carry-over from her mothers’ life, rather than her own childhood spent farming with her father. Similar to her mother, Bessie had children soon after marrying and moving to the new farm, and taking care of the children became her primary job.

After speaking with Bessie, I wonder why she does not consider the different, expected tasks of her and her husband as indicative of a connection between her gender identity and her experience as a farmer. Most woman farmers I know are quick to describe the implications  of their gender, and how it affects their work and treatment as farmers. They cite memories of colleagues suggesting that they ask their husbands before making a business decision, or inadequate respect from other farmers in the region. Yet, most of these women are less than 50 years old, and while I would not guess it from her bright eyes and playful smile, Bessie is 95.

I cannot help but wonder if Bessie’s dissimilar response to the gender question holds generational, and possibly cultural, roots. Maybe, Bessie’s answers implies a sort of generational acceptance. Perhaps Bessie, her mother, and other women of their generations and culture, believed that there was no alternate option but to cease farm work and other income-generating activities once the children were born, as they had become accustomed to this practice. With little precedence for questioning this expectation, Bessie simply accepted it. Of course, I will not delegitimize the decision to play the role of full-time parent, one of the most draining jobs in the world. Plus, Bessie could have easily grown accustomed to women with dual farmer-mother roles from neighbors, friends, etc., and decided that she wanted to focus on the later half. * Yet, I wonder how Bessie’s answer would have changed, and whether she would have found a connection between her gender and work, were she born twenty years later.

As for Bessie’s answer to the questions regarding her Japanese identity, I am not sure why she strayed from the political. Was the Nisei assimilation into United States culture so strong that it overshadows any memories of her parents’ oppression? Or, did the memories of this oppression leave Bessie with such a sour taste in her mouth that she no longer wants to talk about them? Or maybe, Bessie simply remembers the habitual more strongly than she remembers the political. Maybe, she remembers the day-to-day planting of strawberries, the harvesting of asparagus that grew from her parents’ trees, and the bundles of juicy pears her husband would collect from their orchard.

Regardless of the reasons for Bessie’s apolitical focus, I hope that she can look back on her life as a farmer, a mother, and the work she has completed with her own two hands, and smile. I hope she can think about the legacy she passed on to her son and grandson, who continue to farm, and gloat. I hope she can reflect on the ability she has awarded all of her children to receive a college education and choose their own paths, and sense nothing but pride. Yet, if I were to ask Bessie whether she feels proud, she would likely tell me that her experience isn’t one of pride or shame. She would tell me that her experience just is.

*During another interview, soon after my conversation with Bessie, I learned that many women in the Hood River Valley, even women from Bessie’s mother’s generation, played the dual mother-farmer role, as well as the role of housekeeper, organizer, etc., etc. Likely, Bessie was accustomed to women who took on the mother-farmer role, but this dual-role was not common in her family, and thus, was not habitual to her. Of course, this introduces an entire other conversation, still relevant today, about “super-women” and the expectation that women do literally all the things, and how only mothers are made to feel guilty when they don’t parent full-time and work full-time and cook healthy meals and run marathons and organize the PTA and do all the things, but that is a whole 5,000 other blog posts!


Categories
Women in Agriculture Project

Adelante Mujeres

Adelante Mujeres means “women rise up,” an apt name for an organization invested in empowering and educating low-income Latina women and their families. Since 2002, Adelante Mujeres has lead programs in early childhood education, Latina girls empowerment, conflict management, sustainable agriculture, small business development, and healthy food access. I had the pleasure of volunteering with the Adelante Mujeres Sustainable Agriculture Program during one of their CSA packing events, and plan to volunteer with them again. On that humid Wednesday evening in early August, I learned that it is possible to stuff too many strawberries into a produce box, that there is, in fact, a most efficient protocol for flipping boxes of berries into paper bags, and that cherry tomatoes look more marketable once multiple varieties are mixed. I learned that effectively empowering a group of farmers, especially those who have been held back by inadequate programming and resources, might require fastidious organization and attention to the smallest of details. However, once those details are attended to, the results can be inspiring.

“There’s nothing like it,” Silvia explained, reflecting on her childhood days spent exploring her family’s farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. “I would climb a tree, grab hold of a peach, and just sit there in a branch eating the sweet fruit, or I’d pick a watermelon and cut it open to eat right there.” We were cleaning out bins in the kitchen of the Forest Grove Methodist Church, her washing and I drying. As soon as the farmers in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture program arrived, we would organize their crops into these bins, and prepare them for pick-up by all share-holders in the Adelante Mujeres’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Silvia, the manager of the Adelante Mujeres Farm Business and Distribution program, held the dual immigrant-farmer title herself. After moving to Los Angeles, and eventually Oregon, she opened her own 26-acre organic farm not far from Portland, where she prided herself on fair conditions and wages for all workers. Unfortunately, the back-breaking gruel of farm management failed to provide an adequate profit after accounting for the many costs, and Silvia was unable to keep her farm.

Silvia Cuesta, Farm Business and Distributer Manager

Upon speaking with Silvia, her passion for farming and fresh produce grew so tangible that I could almost hold it in my palms. After losing her farm, Silvia could have easily succumbed to her disappointment, traded in coveralls for a business suit, brushed her agricultural aspirations away, and proceeded onwards to an unrelated career. Instead, she decided to use her experience in organic farming, as well as her understanding of the inadequate educational and monetary resources available to U.S. Latinas, and shifting gears away from her own farming pursuits, she sought to inspire Latina farmers and their families to move adelante.

Sitting down with Adelante Mujeres’ CSA manager, Azul, I learned about the  specifics of the organization’s agriculture program. Adelante Mujeres began in 2002 under two realizations: 1. Latina women were not actively participating in classes or activities in Portland and the greater-Portland community. 2. Latina women’s little participation stemmed from the fact that existing programs inadequately met their needs and limited resources. Adelante Mujeres has since expanded to provide programming for Latinx youth, children, and men, under the understanding that the setbacks encountered by Latina women often affect their families as well. In 2008, Adelante Mujeres began offering sustainable agriculture training classes to teach aspiring and existing Latinx farmers about land acquisition, farm business, and sustainable growing practices. Five years later, Adelante Mujeres launched their CSA program. For the first time, community members could sign up to receive a weekly bin of produce from these farmers, in turn providing the farmers with a steady and pre-determined income.

Azul Tellez Wright, CSA Membership Coordinator

Today, Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable agriculture training program supports 5 men and 5 women, all who sell their produce through the CSA, and to local restaurants. These farmers are mainly husband and wife pairs, all hail from Mexico, and about half grew up in the United States, while half are immigrants themselves. These farmers grow produce through various land arrangements: in Adelante Mujeres’s sustainable garden, on shared land, and in their own backyards. Some have moved on to launch their own CSA’s , and one has even acquired personal farmland. When I asked Azul to recount a particular instance when she experienced the empowering effect of the program, she smiled and told me that she sees it all the time. “Every single one of these farmers wants to farm, and every single one of these farmers has long-term, farming goals,”  she explained. To Azul, the most inspiring instance occurs when she sees the passion that these farmers express, again and again.

At the Wednesday evening CSA packing, four to five volunteers stretched plastic gloves over their hands alongside Silvia, Azul and the CSA program’s driver. Rows of tables lined the church’s fellowship room, each displaying a label with the address for a specific CSA pick-up location. The bins that lined the tables each designated a CSA member’s name and share-type. To the right of the tables stood a dry-erase board, with bright lines and letters denoting which and how many of each produce item belonged in each share-type. Each time a farmer entered the room, Silvia would go through their produce, fulfill their invoice, and within minutes, the volunteers’ hands would begin to move. Plastic hands dumped bright raspberries and blackberries into paper bags, plastic hands mixed cherry tomatoes, plastic hands weighed bags of arugula, and plastic hands placed sultry, purple eggplants into bins. Spanish answers responded to English questions arose from Spanish requests. The whole event resembled a mixed produce bag–half-filled with organized procedures and half with light-hearted conversations. We laughed, we talked, Silvia made sure I snapped a picture of the strawberries, a volunteer from Milwaukee told us about her teaching job at a Waldorf school, a young, volunteer couple asked me for the name of my blog.

 

 

Silvia herself exhibits a hybrid-personality: a mix of no-nonsense business and loving devotion. Towards the end of my first volunteer shift, a farmer walked into the room carrying a cardboard box filled with basil. I could tell from the way Silvia greeted him that she had known him for a long time. “This was harvested too soon,” she explained, looking him squarely in the eye as she and pinched a leaf of basil between her fingers. As my gloved hands sifted through the multi-colored tomatoes, I listened to them discuss the best methods for growing marketable, organic basil while ensuring it does not go to seed. That evening, as I listened to this conversations and others like it, I began to understand the farmers’ passion that Azul had referenced earlier. Each farmer who entered the room wanted to give everything they could to ensure their improvement and the longterm success of their agricultural pursuits.

I realized then that such success might require a couple tons of underripe basil, some tough-love, 26 acres of loss and disappointment, language barriers, and hours spent out in the field when you could be with your children. Yet, all of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to putting in that work. All of the farmers I met were willing and devoted to persevering in the face of limited land and resources. All of the farmers I met were willing to do all that it takes to ensure that those very children can one day follow in their mothers’ footsteps, and walk with them hacia adelante.

Categories
Poetry and Reflections

2,125 miles

 

The first time I wondered if I knew America was when I moved to Iowa from Connecticut for college. I couldn’t remember the first time I saw the ocean, but looking out over the endless fields of corn and soybeans for the first time seemed as close of a comparison as I could imagine. In Iowa, billboards advertised tater-tot stuffed cheeseburgers and the only vegetables I could discern in my veggie omelet were canned mushrooms. I was half terrified, and half intrigued. Yet, I soon learned to love Iowa for all of its quirks. I also learned that I could never generalize the people in a single state to fit a certain stereotype, like the one evoked by those fast food billboards. There will always be different people with different needs and wants, some trying to introduce change, and some trying to stick to the status quo, but together existing within the same space.

My unlikely love: Iowa

As I drove from my parents’ northern suburb of Chicago to Oregon to begin this journey, I was constantly hit by the same feeling I had noticed upon moving to Iowa. I thought, maybe I don’t know this country I call home. Or, maybe I only known a small piece of it. My mom offered to meet me in Minnesota to drive out to Oregon with me, as I had stopped to visit friends in Wisconsin and Minneapolis after leaving Chicago. She would take a plane back to Chicago once we arrived in Portland, and I was grateful to have her beside me to share the miles. Together, we watched America transform around us to the sounds of the British accent narrating The Woman in Cabin 10, our murder mystery audiobook, strangely, both eerie and peaceful.

At my uncle’s house in Northfield, MN, we talked about the acres of nearby land farmed by Somali immigrants, and the local co-op where these crops take forms tolerable to the resident yogis and worldly college professors. In Minneapolis, I ordered vegetarian enchiladas at a Mexican restaurant in an international market, and wondered if the chef even considered those spinach and cheese filled corn rolls to resemble enchiladas. In the fields between Fargo and Bismark, drip irrigation systems circled the parched land. When my mom asked me what crops they were watering, all I could think to respond was, “definitely not corn.” In Miles City, we counted more Motorcycles than cars, and window shopped at rodeo outfitters and antique stores. In Bozeman, we went on a steep morning hike, looking out over farm and forest land that seemed to blend together seamlessly. In Missoula, the Catalyst Cafe served eggs from vegetarian-fed, free-range, hormone, antibiotic, stimulant, and steroid-free Rhode Island hens, and I think my mom might have been the only one without a facial piercing at brunch. From Spokane to Portland, forest turned to wheat fields, turned to shrubbery and cliffs, turned to forest again.

Pictures from: Minneapolis, MN…Fargo, ND…Miles City, MT…Bozeman, MT…Missoula, MT…Spokane, WA…and in between

You sure learn a lot from driving halfway across the country. Or, maybe you don’t learn anything and you just wonder a lot. Or maybe you ask yourself why you don’t quit your job and all your responsibilities and nomad around the country working on farms for a while. Then you remember that, oh yeah, you’re doing just that.

I really don’t know much about America, and I would argue that a lot of Americans don’t. Sometimes I hate America, and then wonder if it’s alright to hate America when I really don’t know it all that well. One thing I do know is that you can’t define America with one word or even one sentence, as there are so many dissimilar experiences that make up America. I also know that agriculture is an inherent part of every definition you could possibly draw for America. It’s how we fuel, how we survive, our agriculture system powers our capitalism, it stratifies our communities, it isolates us, it hurts our environment, and it harms our health, but sometimes it works with our environment, sometimes it nourishes us, and sometimes it unifies us too.

Agriculture itself contains so many different definitions, and each farmer brings their own background, values, and strengths. This year, I want to learn about those differences and how they drive America. I want to learn specifically about female farmers’ experiences and the values and practices that they’ve brought from other countries, and how all of this disparity adds to the definition of America. After studying the dissimilar backgrounds and experiences of these farmers, there will probably still be a lot I don’t know about America. But, maybe I will hate America a little less and understand it a little more. I think we could all afford to hate a little less and understand a little more.

Dear Mom, Thanks for sharing the drive with me. Also, I’m really sorry that I always leave you with pets whenever I move out. At least this time it was plants, not animals. XOXO, Emma