Southeastern Farmworkers

Florida's Farmworkers in the Twenty-first Century. By Nano Riley and Davida Johns. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003. xvii + 208 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95.

The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Edited by Charles D. Thompson, Jr., and Melinda F. Wiggins. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002. xvii + 337 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, appendices, and index. $50.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Greg Hall
Western Illinois University

The struggle of America's immigrant and native-born farmworkers to break free from the constraints of class and caste began soon after the creation of the first European settlements. Chattel slavery and indentured servitude gave way to sharecropping and tenant farming which gave way to a modern-day seasonal and migrant class of agricultural workers. These workers labor throughout the United States. However, because of the focus of scholarship over recent decades, we are more familiar with the story of twentieth-century farmworkers in the West than we are with those in the Southeast. Two recent books, The Human Cost of Food: Farmworkers' Lives, Labor, and Advocacy and Florida's Farmworkers in the Twenty-first Century, try to address this discrepancy in scholarship.