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Coming Up on the Season:
Migrant Farmworkers in the Northeast
August 16, 2003-February 1, 2004
"Well, do you see anybody else out there picking the broccoli? No. Someone's gotta do it, and we're the ones."
Behind supermarket shelves is a vast, invisible world of farmworkers who pick, bunch, wash, and pack the fresh foods we consume. A new exhibition, "Coming Up on the Season: Migrant Farmworkers in the Northeast," at the National Heritage Museum on August 23, 2003, traced the path of the fruits and vegetables we eat, and the lives of the people who grow and harvest them in six parts of the Northeast. Oral histories, contemporary photographs, and artifacts explored a facet of our society that is rarely seen and even less understood.
"Coming Up on the Season" examined farm work done in Downeast Maine, the largest producer of wild blueberries in the nation. Further north, Aroostook County, long known for its potato fields, is becoming a leading broccoli area. Apple orchards range along Lake Ontario in western New York; onions are a major crop in the "black dirt" of the western Hudson Valley. New Jersey, once the breadbasket of the East, is still a major producer of "truck" crops such as lettuces, peppers, and cucumbers. Southeastern Massachusetts has been the center of cranberry production for 150 years.
Based on five years of fieldwork and documentation, "Coming Up on the Season," developed by the Cornell University Migrant Program, revealed that even in our mechanized world, having fresh, unblemished produce still means farmworkers have to handle the food by hand. The Northeast grows much of the nation's fare, and in no other region do migrants make up such a large part of the workforce that produces it. Excerpts from oral histories with workers and growers, combined with contemporary photography by Drew Harty, provided compelling views of the world of farmworkers today. Historic photographs, including several taken by photographers for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and 1940s, helped visitors understand the historical forces that have shaped farm work. The project team collected artifacts rarely seen in museum exhibitions including tools such as broccoli knives and blueberry rakes. Also on view were paintings by students in a Migrant Education Program including Row Harvest, a large-scale painting by former migrant worker Juan Cavasos.
"Coming Up on the Season" was fully bilingual in English and Spanish. There was a section where photographs and objects from Mexico helped explore the world that workers leave behind and their aspirations for their families and communities. Interactive sections explored weight, pay, and the trip north to America. A family gallery guide engaged audiences of all ages to explored ideas about food, family and community, while a special section explored growing up as a child in a migrant family. The exhibition ended with a video wall entitled "Voices of the Harvest" where growers and workers shared their viewpoints.
The Cornell Migrant Program is a unit of the Department of Human Development, College of Human Ecology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Support for this exhibition was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Newman's Own and Pioneer Media Technology.
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