Migratory Workers Depicted in Literature

History

Around the world, migrant workers have often had a powerful economic and social influence on society. In the Americas, such workers have included a wide variety of demographics, including people from the Caribbean, Mexico, and other countries of Latin America; blacks and whites from the Southern states; and Asians. Each wave of migrant workers has often been represented in the nation's literature, whether by established writers documenting social trends or by up-and-coming voices from these typically marginalized communities themselves.

One of the most notable figures of twentieth-century American literature, John Steinbeck, is known for focusing heavily on disadvantaged economic classes, especially migratory farmworkers. Many of his works are considered examples of proletarian literature, as sympathetic, perhaps even militant treatments of the working class. Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) relates the trials of a farm family, the Joads, who are driven from their home in Oklahoma to California. There they seek work as migrant fruit pickers. Their journey and subsequent labor are marked by death and harassment. Despite the family's apparent defeat, Steinbeck portrays them as determined and dignified, a predominant theme in his work. Of Mice and Men (1937) was written first as a novel then produced as a play. It focuses on the friendship of two migrant workers and their ultimate defeat.

While the proletarian literature of Steinbeck and other writers of his time was grounded in the dignity and rights of the individual and his family, the explosion of Chicano literature was born in the rise of César Chávez's United Farm Workers of America in the 1960s. Chávez's movement gave voice to a long-silent minority, the migratory farmworkers living in squalid, inhumane conditions, working under life-threatening conditions, and earning a pittance for their labor.

Leading in development of Chicano literature was Luis Miguel Valdez with the Teatro Campesino. Chávez allowed Valdez to present his original drama to farmworkers as a means to strengthen his union. In contrast with Steinbeck, Valdez had been part of an itinerant farm family. Uncomfortable in middle-class city life, Valdez returned to his roots in the Salinas Valley. He sought to develop drama both reflective of and appealing to the farmworkers themselves.

The base of the teatro performance was the acto, Valdez's own creative approach to the one-act. Performed outdoors, actos included song and dance, use of masks, and few props. Initially, Valdez's concerns were solely with the farmworkers and the strike.

During the same era, Chicano fiction writers produced novels and short stories of the Chicano experience. These writers included José Antonio Villarreal, Tomás Rivera, and Miguel Méndez. Many Chicano poets dealt bitterly with the Mexican experience in the Southwest United States, which was once part of Mexico.

In the 1990s and early twenty-first century, increasing debate over undocumented immigrants—including many migrant workers—brought further attention to literary representations of the migrant experience. Many works by Latino and Latina authors drew considerable critical acclaim for showcasing the essential humanity of marginalized immigrant laborers and their families. Scholars also advanced the study of migrant narratives, applying postcolonial theory, sociolinguistics, and other lenses to better understand the perspectives of populations often caught in complex social, economic, and political currents.

Literature by and about migrant workers reached new heights when Juan Felipe Herrera was named US Poet Laureate in 2015. Born to migrant farm workers, Herrera went to on to build an acclaimed career as a poet, with many of his works dealing directly with the migrant experience, including Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999) and187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007, Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (2008). He also published influential works for young readers, approaching the often fraught subject of migrant workers with compassion in works such as Imagine (2018).

Survey

In Chicano literature, Valdez credited such influences as Old Comedy, commedia dell'arte, Bertolt Brecht, Japanese theater, and the religious drama of the pre-Hispanic peoples of Latin America. His plays detail the farmworkers and their hardships in the fields. The characters, farmworker and owner, are more symbolic than realistic. The purpose of many of the actos is didactic—they teach while entertaining.

Rivera's . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971; And the Earth Did Not Part, 1971) is a composite of stories and anecdotes. Some are socially or communally focused and some are individually focused. Chicano poets such as Tino Villanueva and others trace a cycle of the Anglos' being welcomed but rejecting the Mexicans' friendship, the prospering of the Anglos, the ruin of the land by the Anglos, the exile of the Mexicans into barrios, the seeking of work in the mines and the fields of the North, often with cultural alienation, and finally "an honest friend/ that by clear waters I await"—the friend being the United Farm Workers. As is the theater, Chicano poetry is strongly linked to the social struggles of the migrants. It affirms the Mexican American culture and maintains a flux between Spanish and English.

Bibliography

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.

"Juan Felipe Herrera." Poetry Foundation, 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/juan-felipe-herrera. Accessed 23 Sept. 2019.

Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Daniela Merolla. Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe. Lexington Books, 2005.

Sommers, Joseph, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto. Modern Chicano Writers. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979.