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New Harvest, Old Shame Press Review
‘New Harvest, Old Shame,’ About Farm Workers
NEW YORK TIMES, April 17, 1990
by Walter Goodman
In the 30 years since Edward R. Murrow’s powerful report “Harvest of Shame,” the safety and welfare of America’s migrant workers have bee improved by federal legislation and union bargaining. Nevertheless, as tonight’s strong documentary, “New Harvest, Old Shame,” shows, for the 800,000 farm workers who follow the crops north each spring, it’s still mighty hard travelling. The latest offering from “Frontline” can be see at 10 p.m. on Channel 13.
Dave Marash, tonight’s correspondent, joins a family in Indiana as it prepares for the September trip back to Florida. Pedro Silva, 40 years old and the family head, was already working in the fields when the Murrow documentary appeared. It has been a tough year for his 15-member family, ages 9 to 62. The tomato crop suffered from too much rain, and at 35 cents a bucket, the Silvas are ending their six-week picking season with only $1,400.
By the time they arrive at what serves as their home in the Everglades Migrant Camp, truck breakdowns and illness along the way have put them in debt. Their plans to stop off for some picking in South Carolina were destroyed by Hurricane Hugo, and the crops in Florida have been killed by a freeze.
In interviews with union organizers, farmers, officials and community workers, Mr. Marash finds that big growers are still enjoying an oversupply of labor. In Florida, he notes, there are three farm workers for every available job, and Americans like the Silvas are losing out to people from poor countries who are willing to work for less. A woman who has been hiring migrants for generations tells how the black Americans who did the picking 30 years ago were replaced first by Mexicans and Salvadorans and more recently by Guatemalans and Haitians, many of them illegal aliens.
In a particularly painful passage, Mr. Silva directs his anger not at the growers or at the authorities who set the minimum picking wage, but at the newcomers. “It’s killing us,” he says. “They’re running us out of there. Those Guatemalans, they say, ‘If you pay him $3.35 an hour, you can pay me $3 an hour.’” Marshall Barry, a professor of Florida International University who has made a study of the state’s agricultural economy, directs responsibility elsewhere: “Employers will lower the wages and then if you refuse to accept those wages, they’ll hire a man who’s hungry or someone who desperately needs work.”
The farmers, lobbyists and officials interviewed seem bland and evasive compared with the workers and union organizers. That may be a tribute to the editing skills of the program’s producers, but the evidence appears to support the case that despite the recent reform of the immigration law, illegal aliens continue to pour into the United States, where, with the cooperation of growers, they depress wages. Mr. Marash draws attention to the power of big farm interests in states like Florida as well as in Washington, D.C., to create loopholes in the law and discourage strict enforcement. As a rural organizer observes, “Farm workers are not anyone’s constituency in Congress.”
The income of Florida’s farm workers, Professor Barry reports, buys less than half the goods it did in 1967. Moreover, the great majority of workers have no health insurance, no sick days, no paid vacations, no pensions. Their children, constantly on the move, are unlikely to complete the schooling that might break the migrant cycle. “This ain’t no life really,” says Pedro Silva.
‘Harvest of Shame’ focuses on plight of migrant workers
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A sequel to Edward R. Murrow’s famous Harvest of Shame documentary showing the deplorable conditions of migrant farm workers in 1960 found little has changed in 30 years.
Three decades ago, CBS cameras panned over a long line of tired, hungry farm workers waiting for bags of food. They had just lost their jobs to a killing freeze.
Public Broadcasting Service shot the same scene, this time outside the National Guard Armory in Homestead, Fla., following a deadly Christmas freeze that dropped temperatures to 22 degrees in the Everglades.
The only notable difference is that one scene was filmed in black and white and the other taped in color.
Murrow’s report shocked the nation by showing that many Americans ate because of people who earned miserable wages and had no sick pay, vacations and unemployment benefits or disability pay. On top of that, the migrant workers for the most part lived in squalid housing.
In Houston, PBS’ Frontline series will air New Harvest, Old Shame at 9 p.m. tonight on Channel 8. It is the story of Pedro Silva’s family on the roads and in the fields of rural America as they move from an Indiana bunkhouse to a trailer at the Everglades Labor Camp.
“Even nature is against them,” said the producer Hector Galán. “This year they faced heavy rains in Indiana that cut crop yields in half, Hurricane Hugo in South Carolina which left them with no work and the freeze in Florida.”
Galán located Pedro Silva and his wife Reina in late November and followed him with an assistant and a photographer as the extended family’s six-vehicle convoy headed south, stopping at highway rest areas to eat, wash and sleep.
“What would have been a two-day trip turned into a six-day trip,” Galán said. “Pedro’s truck broke down twice. Finally he had to leave it behind because he couldn’t afford to get it fixed. Reina’s nephew became ill. It was one hardship after another.”
Reina Silva’s sister, María Martinez, said she wanted to be filmed to give farmers a hard look at the way their workers live.
“If all farm workers in this country stopped working, the farmers would have to let their fruits and vegetables rot in the fields,” she said. “They have to realize that when we make money, they make money. When we eat, they eat.”