By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 11 years ago

God made a Latina farmer, too

Here’s a remake of the lovely but very white-washed Super Bowl ad for Dodge Ram trucks farmers. By Isaac Cubillos, via Rawstory:

This one’s a little bit closer to reality in a country in which 72 percent of farmworkers are foreign-born–including 68 percent from Mexico–and 22 percent are women. There’s also more diversity among farm operators than you’d think based on the Dodge ad–and it’s increasing. Colorlines reports that the growth in the number of non-white operators has outpaced the overall industry growth in the last decade, and in 2007 about 30 percent of operators were women.

Farmers are great, and as we appreciate the people who made the food we eat, remember they’re mostly undocumented immigrants who are paid absurdly low wages to work in extremely dangerous conditions.

Watch a similar video by Latino rights group Cuéntame.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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