Copy and pass around to group. Ask for volunteers to take the part of Workers 1, 2, 3 and 4. Faciltator can read the part of “Reader.”
Worker 1: We are only shoulders here, wanted because we do the work no one else wants to do.
Worker 2: The other day that we were at Mass, I couldn’t feel my face because it was cracked and that comes from the fertilizers. The fertilizer is alive. It is alive. It is alive in the soil! You pick it up and you start with this rash. Then it starts penetrating…
Worker 1: We are only shoulders here, wanted because we do the work no one else wants to do.
Worker 3: We were all shaking because it was so hot, almost dehydrated. You know what I did? I left them…. It was less than an hour before finishing, and I thought for $6 I am not going to die here. I’m leaving. In the field, there were no shade trees. It is just a ditch full of weeds, but that’s where I stayed, and it didn’t matter if there were snakes or thorns. It didn’t matter… All I wanted was shade.
Worker 1: We are only shoulders here, wanted because we do the work no one else wants to do.
Worker 4: You know, the Americans don’t really like us. They only want us to go to the US and work, like animals. The Mexicans go there to suffer doing hard work, while the Americans stay out of the fields. In the time I worked in the United States, I never saw an American in the fields. You never see them out picking. They hire Mexican supervisors to work their own countrymen to death. They’re real tyrants. You can’t even stop because they’re always yelling, “Faster, faster. You’re getting paid to work, not to stand around.”
Worker 1: We are only shoulders here, wanted because we do the work no one else wants to do.
Reader: Our food, which nourishes our bodies, hasn’t yet been totally reduced to technological process. Some would have us forget where food comes from. They seem to believe it is a product of biology labs and machines, with a heavy sprinkling of fertilizers thrown in for good measure. Food nevertheless, at its most nourishing, remains a product of the wholly and holy cycle of nature: seed placed in earth, blessed by rain, harvested and cooked by human hands (and shoulders) as a meal for the body—and the body is community.
From session 1 (page 7) of “Hands of Harvest Hearts of Justice.” Food: A Sacred Exchange” (a farmworker curriculum by National Farm Worker Ministry and NC Council of Churches, 2004). Worker quotes are words of actual farm workers in North Carolina documented by Sister Evelyn Mattern in the 1990’s, except Worker 4, documented by Daniel Rothenberg, found on page 313 of With These Hands
