A migrant worker picks tomatoes in Fort Blackmore, VA. Laura Elizabeth Pohl for Bread for the World/Flickr. Creative Commons.
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, OH unveiled a new exhibition in 2010 titled Invisible: Slavery Today, in the hopes that it would make the history of nineteenth-century abolitionism more relevant to today’s visitors. The exhibit, designed in collaboration with several prominent anti-trafficking advocacy organisations, depicts five types of trafficking victims. One of these is ‘Mariano’, an undocumented farmworker who was smuggled into the United States from Guatemala on the promise of a job and a better life. A critical reading of ‘Mariano’s story’ reveals the ways in which punitive, carceral solutions are framed as ‘abolition’, as well as how US Government and US State Department narratives are reinforced by non-profit advocacy organisations and museums.
Migrant farm labour has increasingly become part of the narrative of how and where trafficking happens in the United States. Mariano’s character is partially drawn from the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a farmworker-led, grassroots organisation that has successfully brought lawsuits against growers on enslavement charges. CIW is one of the few farmworker organisations that has adopted the language of ‘modern day slavery’ to describe the most extreme cases of brutality against migrants. Official acknowledgement of such abuse constitutes an important note of self-critique amid the State Department’s largely coercive pursuits to criminalise trafficking in other countries. Yet, the dynamics of labour trafficking remain represented in a good (the state) versus evil (individual traffickers) dramatic frame. This emphasises the violence inflicted on individual migrants by individual smugglers. It also downplays state violence and state responsibility for the basic conditions inhabited by both sets of precarious individuals. This opens up rhetorical space to paradoxically rely on immigration, police, defence, and state department officials to ‘rescue’ undocumented workers from the dangers the state itself creates.
