American Harvest: Hold the Shame

This is a critical letter about the film American Harvest that was sent to the City Newspaper.

Dear City,

I am writing to express my deep, deep disappointment with the film “American Harvest,” which opened in Rochester last Saturday at the Little Theater. I am a paralegal and outreach worker at Farmworker Legal Services of New York, a nonprofit law office based in Rochester. From my two years of providing legal services to farm workers in the Rochester area and beyond, I can say—from personal experience—that “American Harvest” presents a naïve, incomplete, and shamefully ignorant portrait of agriculture in the United States.

The film’s director, Angelo Mancuso, appears to have begun this project with honorable intentions, and I’m sure he feels his film is supportive of the mostly immigrant workers who plant and harvest America’s crops. But, as revealed in scene after scene of his movie, Mr. Mancuso fundamentally fails to understand the nature of our agricultural system and the brutal conditions suffered by its labor force. Essential facts are omitted, crucial context is lacking, and rosy clichés about farm workers’ satisfaction with their lot in life go unquestioned.

To be absolutely clear, I don’t disagree with the central premises of “American Harvest”: that immigrant farm workers are essential to the contemporary agricultural system, that the current immigration policy is unjust and makes no sense economically, and that America’s politicians need to take far more decisive and pragmatic actions to fix this broken situation.

The problem lies in the fact that Mr. Mancuso has made a 95-minute movie—purportedly dedicated to explaining how the “American Harvest” gets harvested—that contains not one word regarding the abuses of workers’ rights and human rights that are the norm, not the exception, in this line of work. How is this possible? How does a self-proclaimed journalist miss such a crucial part of the story? For instance, about 20 minutes of Mr. Mancuso’s film take place in Immokalee, Florida. With a simple Google search, the director would have learned that the Immokalee area has had half a dozen agricultural slavery cases—not just slavery-like conditions, but actual slavery, according to the federal government—exposed in the last ten years. Many workers in Immokalee continue to live twelve to a single trailer, while paying rent prices that rival Manhattan’s. Mainstream regional newspapers like the St. Petersburg Times and the Naples Daily News have reported these conditions thoroughly, as have magazines such as National Geographic and the New Yorker. Abuse is hardly an obscure aspect of farm work in Florida.

Likewise, and closer to home, part of the film takes place west of Rochester, in the town of Kent. With the slightest amount of research, Mr. Mancuso would have been aware of another slavery case involving farm workers, just eight miles away in the town of Albion. This case, exposed by my office in 2001, was the first human trafficking case prosecuted in New York State under the then-brand new Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and received some attention in the local press. Like the Florida cases, it reinforced what most human rights advocates already understood: that farm workers are so disenfranchised of even the most basic civil and labor rights that they make perfect targets for modern-day slave drivers to exploit. Yet there is not one word in “American Harvest” about the epidemic abuse of farm workers in the United States.

Mr. Mancuso’s ignorance regarding these abuses is simply inexcusable. Entire generations of Americans learned about the base injustices at the heart of American agriculture thanks to “Harvest of Shame,” a 1960 CBS documentary featuring the legendary investigative reporter Edward R. Murrow. The shockingly inhumane working conditions documented in that film persist today, yet “American Harvest” considers them unworthy of mention.

When I presented these concerns directly to Mr. Mancuso at the film’s opening on Saturday, his defense was this: he chose to make a film about immigration policy, not about the abuse of workers’ rights. As I told him at the time, I find this argument profoundly irresponsible, not to mention absurd. Mr. Mancuso has used farm fields as the backdrop to nearly every scene in “American Harvest”, yet he never mentions the horrific crimes taking place every day, in fields just like these, all over the country. As a rough equivalent, imagine a filmmaker climbing aboard the Rochester Fast Ferry and shooting a documentary about the lovely furnishings and attractions on the boat—without ever pulling back the camera to reveal that the ferry was stuck in a harbor, sunk into disuse by a well-documented disaster of fraud and mishandling.

Film is a powerful medium; people tend to believe what they see, especially when watching a documentary. My fear is that too many people will see “American Harvest” and assume its images of uniformly happy, smiling farm workers represent the daily reality of work in one of the most dangerous industries in the United States. When every farm owner and produce broker interviewed in “American Harvest” says that workers are happy in the fields—“This is a like a kid out of the ghetto going to Yale,” declares one—viewers unfamiliar with agriculture will be tempted to believe them. Only a few viewers will later consider what role these speakers have in profiting from the rampant abuses they neglect to mention. When every farm worker interviewed in the film says that he loves his job and loves his boss, it will again be tempting to believe that this is the whole story. Only a few viewers will note that these workers appear to have been interviewed in the presence of their bosses—who, in any case, are bound to see the interviews on film later and will know if any worker bad-mouthed them. And a few viewers might note how odd it is that all but one of the workers spoke English, a rare occurrence in the agricultural world—and how strongly this suggests that Mr. Mancuso only interviewed only those subjects who eagerly volunteered to speak to him, a white stranger with a camera being escorted by their boss.

This kind of journalism is lazy at best, unethical at worst. Filmmakers, and documentarians in particular, have a serious responsibility to tell the whole, messy truth—not just the details they find convenient. On Saturday, Mr. Mancuso defended himself by angrily declaring, “I’m not Michael Moore.” Well, he’s no Edward R. Murrow, either.

Sincerely,

Owen Thompson

Readers interested in learning more about the situation of farm workers in New York State should feel free to contact me at othompson@wnylc.com. They can also learn more about Immokalee, Florida, at www.ciw-online.org.