Mexican workers are the backbone of the Midwest dairy industry. For her book “Milked”, reporter Ruth Conniff spent time with dairy farmers and workers on both sides of the border.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KCRW: What percentage of Midwest dairy farm workers are from Mexico?
Ruth Conniff: I don’t know how to separate the Mexican workers from the other Latin American workers, but they are mostly from Mexico. Undocumented workers from Latin America make up 80% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms.
During what time period did this happen? And why?
This has happened over the last two decades. It is associated with the “go big or get out” trend in agriculture. Wisconsin is the number one state for farm bankruptcies in the country, and we’ve been losing family farms at a rate of one to two a day in recent years. Farmers who have managed to survive have had to increase their activities to cope with low milk prices and the consolidation of dairy farming.
Around 2000, many farms were looking to expand for the first time and were hiring employees. They were all family-run operations up until that point – they were growing from 50 cows to 500 cows very quickly and started looking around for employees. The farmers I interviewed for my book talk about how frustrating and difficult it was trying to find workers locally, and how relieved they were when they connected with Mexican workers who had come to do seasonal work on the area’s Christmas tree farms. . [They found that those workers] were interested in doing work all year round. And so they moved [to the U.S.] to milk cows on dairy farms.
Reporter Ruth Conniff spent time with dairy farmers and workers on both sides of the border. Photo by Greg Anderson, courtesy of the Wisconsin Examiner.
It makes sense that many of the people who own these dairies are white and likely conservative, perhaps Trump supporters. But they have strong ties, almost like family in some cases, to these Mexican and other Latin American migrants who have settled in their communities and work in their facilities.
That was one of the things that interested me most about doing the reporting for the book is that it’s Trump country. When you drive through rural Wisconsin, you see huge Trump banners in cornfields. There are many multi-generational Republican voting families out there. However, some of the same farmers and ranchers I spoke to who voted twice for Trump have longstanding relationships with their Mexican workers and have been going to Mexico to visit their workers’ families for years. They have a really deep sense of connection with these rural people.
As one farmer explained to me, it is an agrarian community. Farmers felt a strong bond with other people who found farm work honorable, unlike many Americans who do not find farm work honorable. [The farmers] worked with them on their farms because they are not employers with large corporate operations that simply hire employees. There are people who work side by side with the workers on their farms.
These are two groups of rural people who are indeed brought together by some of the same global economic forces. So they’re agrarian, they grew up doing farm work, and they’re struggling in a global economy that makes it really hard to make a living that way. They find themselves working together and over these past two decades, they have built a deep sense of connection and economic interdependence.
So most of the unemployment that caused all these economic migrants to come from Mexico is a direct result of NAFTA and the policies that allowed us to sell cheap corn to Mexico.
About 900,000 subsistence farmers in Mexico were driven off their land when the United States dumped a lot of cheap subsidized corn into Mexico, where corn is almost an object of reverence. [This was] a result of NAFTA, and that’s an interesting connection to Trump-voting farmers as well. Many farmers talked about voting for Trump the first time because they liked what he had to say about NAFTA, how it was a bad deal for people like them, how he would represent the interests of the little guy and of the forgotten people. and the women of America. The global trade deal was really hard for farmers in the Midwest and it was really hard for Mexican farmers who really fought behind that deal.
What I found so fascinating were the portraits you painted of these older, white, conservative men traveling in these small villages in Mexico. Did this start through a program?
It was the brainchild of local high school Spanish teacher Shaun Duvall in Alma, Wisconsin, who was contacted by the University of Wisconsin agricultural extension agent in her area. She was asked to translate for Spanish-speaking farmers and workers with whom they had difficulty communicating on their farms. She began traveling to farms in Western Wisconsin and serving as a translator, and also a sort of ambassador of cultural understanding between Mexican workers and Wisconsin dairy farmers.
After many translations, she decided to set up night classes in her classroom at Alma School and taught Spanish to the farmers and English to the night workers. But she did not make much progress with learning the language. So she decided to take the farmers to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she had gone to language immersion school for a week when she first became a Spanish teacher. She took a group of farmers to this language immersion school and they spent the week there.
They had a free weekend at the end of time and decided to go visit some of their workers’ families. They went to this little mountain town and had this really moving experience of meeting the families of their workers—parents who were really grateful to them for taking care of their sons and daughters and giving them employment. It opened their eyes to a whole different world that they had not been aware of. And they started going every year, and Duvall created a non-profit organization called bridge / bridge. She gets a batch every year, and it’s just become a touchstone for these farmers, for the workers and their families.
“Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers Together” describes the unlikely friendships cultivated between owners and undocumented workers. Photo by The New Press.
Can you share stories of farmers and workers you met who found them particularly instructive or inspiring?
I was particularly moved by the story of Bill Brown, who was a very shy guy who voted twice for Donald Trump. His employee Blanca Hernandez, a very energetic, powerful woman, came and worked in the town’s farm. When Bill talks about Blanca, he starts to cry because he is so grateful for everything she did to help organize and get his farm in better shape and allow it to survive and continue.
Blanca came to the United States four times. Once, she smuggled herself into the trunk of a car and almost drowned, and she went through incredible hardships walking through the desert at night, getting here, and working hard to save money.
She is now a teacher in her hometown of San Juan Texuacán in Veracruz, Mexico. She teaches bilingually and has a mission for children who are very poor in the area. She went to their homes during the pandemic and created study corners for them. She was careful to teach math using materials they could easily get, because they couldn’t buy school supplies. So she has sticks and little leaves and lights up when she talks about it.
But it overturns the popular political narrative about immigration and the idea that somehow the Mexican workers who come here illegally — and they’re almost all illegal on dairy farms because there’s no year-round visa for low-skilled agricultural work — that they are benefiting from a system here, and they are providing a great economic benefit.
I think the story of the relationship between Bill and Blanca just shows this really interesting sense of kinship between these two groups of country people. The fact that Bill was a Trump voter didn’t seem to make any difference to his admiration and love for Blanca. Blanca, who doesn’t see herself as a victim in any way, is just a really strong, can-do woman. I think in a way she embodies that entrepreneurial spirit that Americans like to think of as an American quality.
