By Yolanda Pinzon Uribe, Outreach and Special Programs Director
We cannot talk about change without remembering what came before. There is a tendency to look at what is happening today in the fields and think of it as something new—something recent, something tied only to current policies or economic shifts.
But the truth is, much of what we are seeing has deep roots.
The crops may be different.
The systems may have new names.
The workers may come from different places.
But the structure of the work—the way it depends on human labor, on long hours, on limited protections—has existed for generations.
There was a time when this labor was carried out by enslaved people. After slavery ended, it did not disappear. It transformed.
Systems like sharecropping emerged, creating new forms of dependence—where workers labored the land without truly gaining stability or ownership.
The names changed. The conditions, in many ways, did not.
Years later, programs like the Bracero Program brought Mexican workers to the United States under formal agreements.
On paper, these programs created structure. In reality, many workers continued to face harsh conditions, limited protections, and little control over their work and living environments. They were needed. But not always protected.
Today, we have systems like the H-2A visa program. There are contracts, regulations, housing and basic transportation. We can say that there has been progress. And that matters.
But even within these systems, something remains. Farmworkers continue to experience conditions that are different from other labor sectors.: Access to healthcare is still limited, work hours are long and unpredictable and income is not always stable.
Protections do not always translate into lived reality. Because legal does not always mean protected. When we look at the fields today, we are not just seeing the present. We are seeing layers of history. We are seeing how systems evolve, but also how certain patterns persist.
And this is where the light comes in. History, when we choose to look at it honestly, does not trap us in the past. It guides us. It helps us understand what we are seeing, and more importantly, what we might otherwise miss.
Because if we do not recognize what has been carried forward, we risk calling something “new”, but that has been happening all along. And only by seeing that clearly can we begin to understand what truly needs to change.