LABOR DAY 2022: EVERYONE WANTS TO BE A FARMWORKER

(Ed.'s Note; you've seen them. The Texas Roots ads from HEB Grocery Stores featuring middle-aged and younger white farmers picking vegetables in the fields to bring them to your local HEB and to your dinner table. They are dressed in plaid western shits or worn jeans harvesting onions and other vegetables in the fields.

In the latest ad, a young white woman is driving a tractor with a trailer and delicately picking tomatoes, cherries, and even pears to deliver to the door of a Mexican-American family who seems surprised to see her drive over in her tractor pulling a trailer filled with hampers filled with produce that she has picked by hand.

Does HEB really think that this gratuitous depiction of middle-aged, clean, white farmworkers is going over big with their predominantly Hispanic (or Mexican-American) customers in South Texas?

Those of us who have been farmworkers (and migrants), are somewhat insulted by the depiction of what is hot, dirty, back-breaking labor which leaves you exhausted and aching at the end of a day's work in the fields as a recreational pastime enjoyed by these faux field laborers. And notice that the scenes always seem to be filmed at sundown, when the heat is at its lowest. Then they drive their produce-laden tractor-pulled trailers into the sunset. Touching.

In all the years I spent as a migrant farmworker, I did not see one middle-aged white person working alongside us in the fields. In the towns where we worked, including the Midwest, the townspeople looked down on us and prevented their kids getting too close to us. Our hands were stained green from picking fruits or vegetables from sunup to sundown. And we usually lived in a labor camp outside of the town. First chance most of us got, we left farm work and sought an education and a profession.

Others, too many, remained there.

And this "I'm a farmworker" farce has also been adopted by politicians.
One good example is Republican U.S. Rep. District 34 candidate Mayra Flores who claims she worked in the cotton fields alongside her family when she was 13. There's the plaid shirt and jeans again. Sigh.

She was 13 in 1999, nearly 30 years after every aspect of planting, growing and harvesting cotton had been mechanized by 1970. Herbicides take care of the weeds. In her latest

defense, she now says that she was "hoeing" in the cotton fields. C'mon Mayra.

But it sells and appeals to potential customers (and voters), and that's all that matters to HEB and to Flores.

When a reporter asked her for an interview to ascertain her bona fides as a farmworker, she refused an interview or to provide proof and directed him to talk to "the farmers" instead, repeating her farmworker status claim. And when anyone is skeptical of her claims, she says she is being "victimized" because she is a Latina woman.

Well, some of us aren't buying.)