NPR’s The Salt recently featured an interview with Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, about the unfair and unsafe conditions faced by migrant workers who provide Americans with fresh fruit and vegetables. During his research in the field, Holmes traveled with migrant farmworkers back and forth from Oaxaca, Mexico and up the West Coast, even crossing the border illegally through Arizona and getting arrested. He lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends. In the vehement debates on immigration reform and health reform, this book provides the necessary stories of real people and insights into our food system and health care system for us to move forward to fair policies and solutions.
In the interview, Holmes reflects on why Americans tend to be largely ignorant of the plights of those who pick their produce:
Do you think that the American public cares about the labor required to produce our food?
“We talk so little about the people who do the work that gives us the fresh fruit and vegetables that we want. Farmworkers are pretty hidden, and there’s a concept from Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, called , meaning self-deception. My simplified version of that is that we consciously hide from ourselves the difficult realities of the workers. We somewhat know them, but we don’t think about them much. In that way it seems like ‘communal bad faith.’ “
Next time you shop, you can support farmworkers by patronizing the farms on this list, who provide their workers with health coverage and good working conditions.
Greetings from the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting in New York! At left, Judith A. Levine poses at the UC Press booth with her new book, Ain’t No Trust, which explores issues of trust and distrust among low-income women in the U.S.—at work, around childcare, in their relationships, and with caseworkers—and presents richly detailed evidence from in-depth interviews about our welfare system and why it’s failing the very people it is designed to help. Levine was recently interviewed by NBC News about her thesis that distrust perpetuates inequality.
Stop by our booth at ASA to meet editors and staff, enter our raffle, and check out our brand new releases in Sociology!
Head over to Harper’s Magazine to read a six-question interview with Rebecca Solnit, in which she talks about her two new books, Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas (UC Press) and The Faraway Nearby (Viking), and her continuing project to define the self in terms of physical, natural, political, or communal spaces.
Solnit is particularly interested in showing the grander scope of personal narratives—the way people are “interfused with the natural world, biologically and psychically.” She makes the point, too, that often “our metaphors and analogies are drawn from spaces, the natural world, the animal world, and our own bodies, and all these things can also represent each other. [...] We need the natural and sensual world not only for ecological, biological, and maybe spiritual reasons, but for intellectual and imaginative ones.”
Unfathomable City, co-authored with filmmaker and native New Orleanian Rebecca Snedeker, uses essays and 22 full-color two-page-spread maps to make these imaginative connections and plumb the depths of New Orleans. The maps’ precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced.
Asawa’s son Paul Lanier sitting on the wooden pattern for the Hyatt on Union Square Fountain, 1973. Photo by Laurence Cuneo, www.ruthasawa.com
We are sad to note the passing of sculptor Ruth Asawa, who died Monday at the age of 87 at her home in San Francisco. Asawa was a pioneering modernist sculptor who was recognized nationally for her wire sculpture, public commissions, and activism in education and the arts. Asawa studied at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where she worked alongside luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Franz Kline, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Josef Albers. She was the “first Asian American woman in the nation to achieve recognition in a male-dominated discipline,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa, published by UC Press in November 2006, establishes the importance of Asawa’s work within the larger national context of artists who redefined art as a way of thinking and acting in the world rather than as merely a stylistic practice. In her lifelong experimentations with wire, especially its capacity to balance open and closed forms, Asawa invented a powerful new vocabulary. Committed to enhancing the quality of daily life through art produced within the home, she contributed a unique perspective to the formal explorations of twentieth-century abstract sculpture.
Below, watch a profile of Ruth Asawa on KQED’s Spark.
Despite some signs that the economy is getting better, poverty is still a persistent threat for the majority of Americans, a new study by the AP has found. Survey data showed that 4 in 5 adults have struggled with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives. It also found that the number of the nation’s poor is at a record high—46.2 million, or 15% of the population.
The findings were based in part on research by John Iceland, author of Poverty in America: A Handbook, a seminal text on income inequality. UC Press will release a thoroughly revised third edition of the book this month. Poverty in America will help make sense of the new AP findings by examining why poverty remains pervasive, what it means to be poor in America today, which groups are most likely to be poor, the root causes of poverty, and the effects of policy on poverty.
Today in The Atlantic, Hilary Levey Friedman writes about the gendered notions that influence parents’ choice of after-school activities for their girls. If you’ve ever wondered about how your daughter’s extracurriculars can shape her path later in life, take a look at the study.
The article is adapted from Friedman’s new book, Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture. In offering a behind-the-scenes look at how “Tiger Moms” evolve, Playing to Win introduces concepts like competitive kid capital, the carving up of honor, and pink warrior girls.
Hilary Levey Friedman is about to go on a cross-country tour to discuss the findings of her book. Check the tour schedule at her website, hilaryleveyfriedman.com.
While the initial printing is 100,000 copies, the first run numbered 65,000. Take a look at what that means…
It means 250,000 lbs. of paper
Which is six truckloads worth.
It means 50 million printed pages
That takes six days on the press.
That’s 8.5 million pages printed per day
Which comes out to 11,000 books printed per day
That takes two days to bind.
Number of books bound per day: 32,500
It means 9,500 books per truckload
For a total of seven trucks filled with 65,000 finished copies of:
The summer issue of California Magazinefeatures an interview with UC Berkeley professor Lynn Ingram, co-author of The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow. The new book, which Ingram wrote with colleague Frances Malamud-Roam, documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. Looking at the region’s current water crisis from the perspective of its climate history, the authors ask the central question of what is “normal” climate for the West, and whether the relatively benign climate of the past century will continue into the future.
As a paleoclimatologist who studies climate data over the course of thousands of years, Ingram is able to identify patters not readily apparent to scientists looking at a smaller window of only 50-100 years. Citing the megadroughts and floods of centuries past, Ingram cautions against assuming that California’s relatively mild climate is here to stay. “We’re in this state of complacency where we think that everything is going to be just fine somehow,” Ingram tells California. “Unfortunately, I think that’s not the case.”
Silt washes down the Yellow River. Photo credit: Imaginechina
Traveling the 38th Parallel authors David and Janet Carle highlight some important climate change issues on their blog, Parallel Universe 38°N. First, they point to some amazing photos of 30 million tons of silt washing down the Yellow River in China, a key story in their book. According to the Huffington Post, “To counteract rising water levels that endanger levees, China blasts the river’s mud and sand downstream at an incredible 91,820 cubic feet per second.” See more stunning images on their blog.
The Carles also write about the Iberian Lynx, an animal they researched for Traveling the 38th Parallel that is endangered due to climate change. New research shows that the “species may face extinction unless efforts to reestablish them are shifted northward,” the authors write.
Tomás R. Jiménez, author of Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity, recently contributed an op-ed to the L.A. Times on the immigration bill just passed in the Senate whose fate will now be determined by the House of Representatives. Jiménez and co-author Helen B. Marrow argue against claims that Mexicans who immigrate to the U.S. show no interest in assimilating into American culture and will remain a “permanent underclass.”
To the contrary, they say, “Many Mexican immigrants and their children have traveled paths to becoming full Americans that, even if slower, are not unlike the paths followed previously by European immigrants.” Advocating an approach testable by social science data, the authors write:
For Mexicans, who have been immigrating to the United States for a century, the historical moment of arrival and the number of generations removed from the immigrant generation are crucial parts of the story. When accounting for both, the best analyses suggest cautious optimism. Each passing generation of Mexican Americans does better than the one before at making economic gains and progressing toward full integration into U.S. society.
One comprehensive study published in 2008 tracks Mexican Americans’ experiences in the large Mexican centers of Los Angeles and San Antonio, where sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz found significant and steady upward educational mobility. On average, first-generation parents completed just 4.1 years school in the 1900s to 1930s. Their second-generation children completed 10 years in the 1930s to 1950s, and their third-generation grandchildren completed 13.1 years of school in the 1950s to 1980s. Later-generation Mexican Americans also narrowed the gaps in educational attainment with non-Latino whites to 1.3 years from 3.4 years.
Read the rest of the op-ed for Jiménez and Marrow’s full arguments, including an analysis of border security.
NPR’s The Salt recently featured an interview with Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies, about the unfair and unsafe conditions faced by migrant workers who provide Americans with fresh fruit and vegetables. During his research in the field, Holmes traveled with migrant farmworkers back and forth from Oaxaca, Mexico and up the West Coast, even crossing the border illegally through Arizona and getting arrested. He lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends. In the vehement debates on immigration reform and health reform, this book provides the necessary stories of real people and insights into our food system and health care system for us to move forward to fair policies and solutions.
