The Rain Falls for Every Farmer: Growing Ecological and Social Diversity

Abstract

Fernandez, a Mixteco man in his early thirties from Oaxaca, farms on a rented half acre in Washington State. I spoke with him while sitting at a worn picnic table on a sunny May day, adjacent to the land he had just started cultivating at the Viva Farms incubator project in the Skagit Valley. His positivity and excitement was contagious. He spoke of his two young children as his inspiration to farm. “If I don’t teach my kids [farming], then they won’t teach their kids.” He was filled with joy when he spoke of the opportunity he had been given to grow on his own after many years laboring as a farmworker. Yet a dark cloud seemed to cover his face when I asked him about his experience as a farm laborer in the United States, and the way his boss treated him and other workers. He told me, “They only think about squeezing the worker, and when you are old, they kick you out.” For that reason, because he knows there is no advancement as a worker, only rejection when his body wears out, he decided to work two jobs, farmer and farmworker, day and night, to create more opportunity for his family. Fernandez was painfully aware that the chances of his success as a farmer were not in his favor. He also told me, “White people have advantages up here, and the Latinos do not. A white person can go to the bank and get a loan; they can open up the market. There are always barriers for the Latinos.” Yet he continued day in and day out, because as he says, the sun still comes out, despite these inequities. In my short time speaking