The rest of the (farmer) story
Dodge’s Super Bowl ad featuring Paul Harvey’s ode to the farmer has generated a lot of talk right from its airing, and not just for the Americana-drenched production. Some have called out the ad for its portrayal of the farmers whom God on the eighth day made; the majority of them reflected the ad’s presumed demographic target, which also happens to make up the larger part of the football-watching audience.
Who really works the farms? According to a fact sheet [.pdf] from the National Center for Farmworker Health, 72 percent of the farmworkers in this country are foreign-born and 68 percent are Mexican by birth; 22 percent are women.
Should Dodge and its agency have taken pains to cut an ad reflecting the facts? The very aim of advertising is to conjure an alternative reality, where issues like immigration won’t interfere with the prospective consumer’s contemplation of the possibilities: If the exhausted American ploughman can stop to splint the leg of the meadowlark, then why not have a new truck? The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal frames it well:
[A] Dodge ad isn’t on the level of the government’s deportation programs or the long-time cognitive dissonance of American immigration policies. But it’s the kind of cultural substrate in which our laws and prejudices grow.
Harvey himself helped layer that substrate, with radio commentaries celebrating John Wayne, individualism, and the death penalty and warning of “radicals,” moral decay, and welfare cheats—images and language readily harvested by politicians and culture warriors of lesser eloquence and bigger ambitions. So it’s interesting to see the turnabout engineered by immigration rights groups this week, with the release of slightly different versions of the Dodge ad. Paul Harvey’s voiceover is still there, but the farmers God needs “to seed, weed, feed, breed and rake and disc and plow and plant” are Latinos and Latinas. More reflective, in other words, of the current reality. The ad from Latino rights group Cuentame can be viewed on its Facebook page; one from Isaac Cubillos appears below.
Tags: immigration, labor
Face it, many Americans “can’t handle the truth” preferring to dwell on a romanticized version of what and who we are. There are those who weren’t even alive during the 1940′s and 50′s yet yearn for what is portrayed as the ‘simpler’ times of those years; never minding the facts of men dying in two wars; children practicing bomb drills; and lest we forget, segregation and lynchings. This list barely touches the surface of what people want to believe about our country–Christopher Columbus anyone? No, they would much prefer the white-washed, sanitized history taught in our schools; used in advertizing and, of course, used by our politicians.
Great comment and great video, but I think the demography of farms needs to be furher clarifed. In the United States, “farmer” and “farmworker” are often used to refer to two different groups of people. The latter are usually those hired as wage laborers by the former. So when the fact sheet says that 72 % of farmworkers are foreign-born, I think this means 72 % of the agricultural wage laborers, not 72 % of everyone who lives or works on a farm. The USDA says that there are 1,053,000 farm workers (including full-time and part-time), not 3 million (the higher figure found in the fact sheet comes from a 1993 study, and the numbers have gone way down). The USDA says 46% are Hispanic and 44% foreign-born (if we exclude managers and include just laborers and supervisors the figures are 50% Hispanic and 48% foreign-born). In contrast, there are about 3,000,000 people classified as “farm operators,” people who operate farms. They may do all the work themselves or part of the work themselves or hire and supervise farm workers. I have no idea what the percentages are. Farm operators own about 57% of their land and 96 % of them are white. So while none of this is meant to change the point of the video, which is that Hispanic farm workers were made invisible in the Paul Harvey ad, I am a bit confused about the demography of US farms, farm operators, and farm workers. I imagine that there are a fair number of farm operators who work very hard on their farms–but that is no excuse for leaving the Hispanic farm workers out of the picture. I’d love to hear from someone who knows more about this and has clearer data.
Growing up in Chicago, I used to listen to Paul Harvey with some frequency. By dad was enamored of him — especially his conservatism. By then Harvey was just doing “The Rest of the Story.” Even as a kid I knew I was being sold something by an expert salesman. But I admired his art. The man could tell a story, even if it wasn’t always true:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/22/AR2010012202602_pf.html
I grew up in rural Wisconsin, definitely farm country. The few farmers who had someone other than immediate family working on their farms had “hired hands” or “hired help.” These hired men (almost always men) were often related to the farmer in some manner … brother-in-law, cousin, etc.
They were mainly resident on the farms, ate with the family and were pretty much looked after by the farmer.
The distinctions that exist today appear to be the result of larger farms (mainly corporation-owned) and non-resident, seasonal laborers.