The Vulnerable Harvest

Abstract

This essay explores contemporary literary and artistic strategies to reframe discourses of immigration in the United States, which have frequently represented immigrants as terrifying and disruptive threats or, alternatively, as defenseless and abject victims. The essay analyzes two artistic representations of undocumented Mexican laborers in the US dairy industry, the art exhibition The Golden Cage: Mexican Migrant Workers and Vermont Dairy Farmers (2008), by Caleb Kenna and Chris Urban, and the young adult novel Return to Sender (2009), by Julia Alvarez. Both the exhibition and the novel draw on the same poetics of vulnerability that the United Farm Workers’ Take Our Jobs campaign employs and that Judith Butler theorizes, serving as artistic representations of the ways in which immigrant farm laborers, farmers, and the national food supply are all exposed to risks as a result of unsustainable immigration policies. The essay posits that this artistic focus on the shared vulnerabilities of all residents functions as a strategic disruption of other portrayals of immigration, offering a counternarrative of interconnectedness and mutual responsibility to define the boundaries of our national and international communities.