By Kris Nelson
Photo from www.marekbennett.com.
“What are the costs of leaving one’s homeland?” “What are the true human costs of our food?” “What is a ‘New England’ story?” These questions are at the heart of stories told by migrant dairy farm workers in Vermont, collected in the nonfiction comics anthology, The Most Costly Journey / El viaje más caro: Stories of Migrant Workers in Vermont, Drawn by New England Cartoonists edited by Marek Bennett, Julia Grand Doucet, Andy Kolovos, and Teresa Mares. Mares, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont, discussed the book, and how it came to be, in her keynote presentation at a recent Farm to School professional development event for Vermont educators, Multiple Perspectives and Counter Narratives in VT Food Systems. I recently attended the event, hosted by Shelburne Farms, Vermont Folklife, and the Vermont Historical Society, with Farm to School Coach Sheila Humphreys. The opening keynote, followed by several breakout sessions, offered an essential and often overlooked lens through which to understand Vermont’s agricultural life.
The Most Costly Journey emerged as a collaborative project of the Open Door Clinic, Vermont Folklife Center, UVM Extension Bridges to Health, UVM Anthropology, and Marek Bennett’s Comics Workshop. It began when Julia Grand Doucet, registered nurse at the Open Door Clinic in Middlebury, VT, searched for ways to address the mental health issues faced by immigrant farmworkers whose lives are marked by isolation and separation, often leading to depression and substance abuse. She landed on the simple but powerful act of “bearing witness to someone’s truth and experience” as a potential source of healing and support. Using comics, a medium historically used in literacy work in Mexico, the stories were made more accessible through a collaboration with Marek Bennett’s Comics Workshop. The project began with a series of illustrated pamphlets in Spanish distributed to farm workers, which were subsequently compiled into the book published in English. The book was selected for 2022 Vermont Reads.
In her opening presentation, Mares provided a range of statistics that accentuate the reliance of Vermont’s dairy industry on migrant labor. Sixty-eight percent of Vermont’s milk comes from dairies employing migrant laborers. However, beyond statistics and surveys that do not capture the particular ways that poverty is experienced, the overriding theme that Mares identified in her initial research of migrant workers on Vermont farms was “encerrado,” which she translated as “enclosed.” Mares showed slides of the 100-mile border over which the U.S. Border Patrol has jurisdiction to illustrate what she called “the Mexicanization of the U.S. Canada border.” While there is relative safety for migrant workers on the farms, when they engage with life beyond the farm, they take the risk of encountering border patrol, jeopardizing losing the home and livelihood they have found in Vermont. Mares quoted one migrant worker: “The problem is, we cannot leave.” After learning about one storyteller in particular, The Story of Juana, workshop participants reflected on how they were affected by the story, shared ideas for how to use the book in their teaching, and explored their questions and concerns.
In the second half of the event, Sheila and I participated in a workshop conducted by Vermont Folklife, exploring how dominant narratives shape our ideas about place. In one exercise, the group discussed an image from Vermont Life Magazine, surfacing how pastoral images are “a big story about Vermont, but not the whole story.” This idea resonates with cartoonist Marek Bennett’s reflection, in the Open Door Clinic newsletter, on the evolution of his own perspectives through participation in The Most Costly Journey book project: “Before working on this project, I had a certain set of stories and storytellers that I classified as ‘New England.’ And I would have classified the El Viaje storytellers as ‘immigrants’ or ‘Mexicans,” etc. Now I see that their stories of immigration and survival ARE truly New England stories as much as anyone who lives in this region.”
As someone relatively new to the field of Farm to School and regional food systems, I greatly appreciated the chance to dig deeper into the challenges and opportunities that multiple perspectives and counter narratives bring to this work. Author Julia Alvarez writes in the Forward to The Most Costly Journey, “Deep within the migrant community exists its own powerful resource: storytelling. A story can cross any boundary, including that most heavily-guarded boundary, between self and other, us and them.” In mid-March, Food Connects staff will have a chance to talk about these themes during a Staff Equity Discussion, where the book will be featured. As I continue to read the stories, I look forward to encountering those boundaries and discussing how they influence our work at Food Connects.