HIST233 - Huelga: the Farmworker Movement in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to think deliberately about the kinds of work that are truly essential and the lives of people who do that work. This research seminar invites students to explore the history of farmworkers who produce our food, and the twentieth-century origins of today’s mobilizations for health and safety protections; labor, civil, and political rights; and cultural recognition. Students can explore a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: the history of farmworker unions; their relationship to other movements in the US and abroad, from the civil rights movement to the Chicano movement to the Cuban Revolution; the experiences of immigrant workers from the Philippines, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and the role of US immigration policy in their lives; the experience of US citizens from Puerto Rico in mainland agriculture and the role of imperial governance in shaping labor migration; the experience of African Americans and their place in a history that often focuses on Mexican Americans; environmental and health organizing; legislative and legal strategies to obtain rights denied agricultural workers in federal law; artistic, musical, and cultural production; or the relationship between consumers and the workers who produce their food.