“A powerful, well-researched survey of the lives of agricultural guest workers” — Kirkus Reviews

  • Fully revised with 2024 updates

  • Read now (payment optional)

What’s it like being an H-2A farmworker? How does it feel to leave your family in Mexico for the better part of every year to work on a North Carolina farm growing tobacco or sweet potatoes or some other crop? And what’s it like running a family farming operation here, facing intense foreign competition, desperate for employees to work your fields?

Finding America’s Farmworkers answers these questions like no other book. Filled with stories about farmworkers, growers, and others who comprise this little known world, it’s the ideal primer for anyone curious about the people who fill our grocery stores with inexpensive produce.

This accessible, non-academic text is both compassionate and balanced. Beyond its profiles of numerous interesting people, the book also provides a succinct history of farm labor in the US, a description of the H-2A “guestworker” visa program, and just enough data to support the facts. And while the author doesn’t shy away from highlighting problems, he also makes sensible recommendations for solving them.

This fully revised edition includes H-2A data through 2024, updates including results of the re-do election for presidency of the FLOC farm labor union, and a new chapter structure.

No matter what readers already know about the world of farmworkers today, they will learn something new from Finding America’s Farmworkers.

CONTENTS

  • About this book

  • The H-2A agricultural guestworker program in a nutshell

  • The annual trip north of a typical H-2A farmworker

  • Some expected and unexpected crops of North Carolina

  • One tough job on Easy Street

  • Raising crops is no easy way to make a living

  • A veteran H-2A farmworker and his clever creations

  • A brief history of how things got this way

  • Guestworker housing in North Carolina

  • English lessons, guitar picks, and an unexpected reunion

  • All about the nation’s largest H-2A employer

  • Trying to organize North Carolina farmworkers

  • The unique medical risks facing an H-2A farmworker

  • How some H-2A employers cross a disturbing line

  • Some agricultural workers outside the H-2A program

  • A new era begins on Easy Street, then another and another

  • Discovering, forgetting, then discovering again

  • A very cold camp and a scary guy on the bridge

  • Some ideas

  • To whom I owe thanks

  • Interviewees and source citations

  • Many sources of additional information

More from kirkus reviews

“What makes this book stand out is its deeply personal narrative. Readers learn about the rompecabezas de enredo (handmade entanglement puzzles made from wires and cords) that one older migrant makes for the journey; social dynamics that exist inside worker communities (where the mayordomo is ‘the most-senior member of a grower’s crew…who can speak enough English to receive instructions from the grower, or patrón’); and how workers communicate with family via Facebook and WhatsApp messages. While many note how work in the United States has provided them with ‘a better economic situation,’ the workers’ living conditions and tenuous employment, exacerbated by abusive growers, have also bred a culture of ‘fear of retaliation” among many“

Read the full review here.

About

Michael Durbin has been finding farmworkers since 2013, mostly as a volunteer with a number of non-profit organizations in eastern North Carolina. In his day job he is a software engineering manager for the banking industry. His blog and other writing can be found at michaeldurbin.com  

Finding America’s Farmworkers: Reaching Out in North Carolina is the property of Box Top Books, a limited liability corporation registered in North Carolina. For more information contact boxtopbooks@gmail.com