Life on the Other Border: Farmworkers and Food Justice in Vermont

"Life on the Other Border is the second book on this list that I teach in my Dartmouth class. I assign it because Teresa Mares lays bare the sacrifices that farm workers make to produce Vermont’s most important agricultural product—milk. Mares is an anthropologist, so her work is based on participant observation. “Teresa Mares lays bare the sacrifices that farm workers make to produce Vermont’s most important agricultural product—milk” Most people associate Latinx immigrants with the southern border. But Vermont, which is close to Canada, attracts many migrant workers from Mexico and Central America. Most of the dairies where they work sit within a hundred miles of that border, some even closer, within 25 miles. Since these workers are living in close proximity to the border, they are subject to constant surveillance by border patrol. Because Vermont is 95% white, all Latinos in the state are presumed to be border crossers and without legal documentation. As a consequence, they are afraid to leave where they live and work to seek healthcare or food, or for any other reason. Given Vermont’s demographics, Latinos stick out in ways that they wouldn’t in California or Texas or Arizona. So their lives, in this border region, are in some ways harder than the lives of immigrants near the southern border. Teresa documents all of this, as well as the rise of a new food labor organization called Migrant Justice/Migrante Justicia . She does. She observes that some dairies are more abusive and less accommodating than others in terms of workers’ living space and access to food that they want and need. These migrants are coming from Mexico or Guatemala and they want to approximate their cuisine. Some farmers are wonderful and work to offset the imposition of Customs and Border Protection enforcement and the discrimination that their workers face in the mostly white society of Vermont. But it is almost necessarily a patron-like system. In other words, the owners control the destinies of those workers because of the racial configuration of Vermont and workers’ dependency on dairy owners."