A Short Q&A with the Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power Contributors
Today’s interview is with Erin L. Conlin, Assistant Professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Tell us about your essay, “African American and Latino Workers in the Age of Industrial Agriculture.”
It is a case study using oral histories and archival sources to examine the intersection of labor and environmental history in southern farm work. It reveals the difficult decisions economically and/or racially marginalized people made to survive and thrive in a given situation. It contextualizes the challenges facing the South’s new working class (in this case mainly Latino farmworkers) by examining Florida agricultural workers’ (predominantly African Americans’) long history with pesticide and chemical exposure and coercive labor practices.
What sparked your interest in labor history?
In 2002 I moved to South Florida and shortly thereafter read a horrifying article about modern-day slavery in Immokalee, Florida (National Geographic, 2003), a community located just 40 minutes from my own. The Immokalee story stuck with me. When I decided to pursue my PhD, I chose to focus on agricultural labor since we all eat yet rarely do we think or talk about the thousands of people who harvest our food.
Why do you think that the study of labor history is important today?
Labor history is important because the clear majority of us will spend our lives working, whether in the home or outside of it. Work affects so many facets of our lives, from our daily quality of life, to access to social and economic mobility, to national issues like immigration policy, health care, and the role of the government. When we understand our nation’s labor history, we begin to see why individuals, companies, and governments made certain decisions at certain points in time, and the consequences of those choices. We can then use that information to draw evidence-based conclusions about the world we live in today and decide how best to move forward.
What are you working on at the moment?
My current project examines how Florida agricultural producers cultivated a profitable labor system that would eventually grow into the East Coast migrant labor stream. I look at the period during and after World War II when growers successfully imported thousands of workers from the Bahamas (and other Caribbean nations). I’m also actively developing an oral history program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.