How did undocumented immigrants come to dominate the workforce on U.S. dairy farms?

The full show transcript is available on our website: https://history.wisc.edu/ask-a-historian/

How did undocumented immigrants come to dominate the workforce on U.S. dairy farms? Professor David McDonald interviews PhD candidate Dustin Cohan about the history behind recent headlines that have highlighted Wisconsin dairy farmers’ reliance on undocumented immigrant laborers.

As Dustin explains, the agricultural transformation in America’s Dairyland that began in the 1970s shifted the scale and labor model of dairy farms across the state, creating a new demand for hired labor. This, in turn, reshaped the lives and work of Wisconsin dairy farmers, undocumented laborers working in the dairy industry, and the migrants’ communities of origin in Veracruz, Mexico.

Timestamps 

03:13 Changes in the dairy industry from the 1970s-1990s

8:17 Why many migrant laborers on Wisconsin dairies are from Veracruz, Mexico

18:36 Why Americans aren’t doing this work in the dairy industry

21:15 What it’s like to work on a dairy farm

26:57 The relationship between Wisconsin farmers and migrant workers

31:33 How migrant labor in Wisconsin has transformed communities in Veracruz

Episode Links:

Dustin Cohan is a PhD candidate in U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he studies immigration and labor history in the 20th century. https://history.wisc.edu/people/cohan-dustin/

David McDonald is the Alice D. Mortenson/Petrovich Distinguished Chair in Russian History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he teaches courses on imperial Russia and the history of sport and popular culture. https://history.wisc.edu/people/mcdonald-david/

“Undocumented Workers Are The Backbone of Dairies. Will Trump Change That?” HuffPost, 6 October 2017. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wisconsin-dairy-industry-undocumented-workers_n_59c3cfb7e4b06f93538cfd3f

“Wisconsin’s dairy industry would collapse without the work of Latino immigrants—many of them undocumented.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 18 February 2020. https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/special-reports/dairy-crisis/2019/11/12/wisconsin-dairy-farms-rely-immigrant-workers-undocumented-laborers/2570288001/

Puentes is the organization based in western Wisconsin that seeks to build bridges between immigrant workers from Veracruz and Wisconsin’s rural farming community. https://www.puentesbridges.org/

Ana Minian’s Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration explains how the mid-1980s U.S. immigration crackdown ultimately forced many Mexican migrants to stay in the United States permanently. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737037

Our music is “Pamgaea” by Kevin MacLeod. Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4193-pamgaea CC BY 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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