Fields of Struggle, Seeds of Resistance

Mexican American Immigration and Agricultural Labor in California’s Central Valley

With this term project, I wanted to visually portray the contemporary struggles of Mexican American Immigrants in California’s Central Valley– the backbone of American agricultural labor and production– in pursuit of citizenship and labor rights. I produced a digital illustration of the complex, fraught nature of California’s Mexican American and Chicano agricultural workers and their relationship to American culture and migration. I attempted to illustrate my subjects through a lens inspired by that of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s protest paintings, informed by traditional Mexican folk art and motifs, while including allusions to American culture, emphasizing the interconnectivity between Californian and Mexican culture. With the agricultural industry being largely dependent upon natural resources and weather patterns, agricultural laborers face disproportionately greater ramifications from climate change, which I portrayed through the use of intense lighting, vibrant orange, and stark lighting contrast. 

Medium: Procreate Digital Illustration

Works Cited:

  1. Dorothea Lange, Field Gypsies series, photographs, 1936–1939, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/ghe/cascade/index.html?appid=35a50270f58d44c3af581f460439a927.

  2. Frank Bardacke, “The UFW and the Undocumented,” International Labor and Working-Class History 83 (2013): 162–169, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43302716.

  3. Samuel Truett, “Neighbors by Nature: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Environmental History in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” Environmental History 2, no. 2 (1997): 160–178.