In a small Mexican village in 2019, a woman named Gabiua Cuaquchoa López presented Carrie Schiltz with a beautiful embroidered blouse as an expression of her gratitude. Schiltz, a church worker from Minnesota, was part of a visiting delegation of dairy farmers and others from the Midwest, where López’s son and his family work on a dairy farm. López, through a translator, explained her gift to Schiltz.
“I haven’t seen my son in 15 years,” she said. “Take care of him for me. You are a grandmother to the grandchildren I have never seen. I want to give you this blouse. I don’t know how to say thank you, so I want to thank you with a blouse.”
This exchange, organized through a two-decade-old nonprofit group called Puentes/Bridges, is one of many poignant moments captured by veteran Madison journalist Ruth Conniff in her book, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers, just published by The New Press. Conniff joined the delegation for this trip, as part of a deep dive into the lives of people on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border who, as she puts it, “have been thrown together by global economic forces beyond their control.”
It is an alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking book, as families are separated and new relationships forged. The book has no villains, just people doing the best they can given the challenges posed by a dysfunctional corporate-driven agricultural system and immigration policies that seem deliberately cruel. The book’s title, Milked, is meant to refer to working people in both countries.
By one estimate cited by Conniff, editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner news outlet, Mexican workers perform 80 percent of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. Many are undocumented, paying taxes and Social Security they will never collect. Some have long-standing connections with dairy farmers like John Rosenow, who runs a 1,000-cow operation in Buffalo County. Rosenow, a prominent advocate for the rights of his Mexican workers, is a main player in the book. He was part of the first Bridges delegation, in 2001, to Veracruz, Mexico, organized by Shaun Duvall, an interpreter in Alma, the Buffalo County seat. There he met the wife of one of his Mexican workers and their 18-month-old daughter, whom the worker had never met.
“John reached down with his hands the size of milk buckets to shake hands with this tiny girl with tears in his eyes,” recalls Duvall. “They took back pictures of the meeting and plastered them all over the break room at the Rosenow farm.”
Conniff, like me a former editor of The Progressive (I read the book in draft form and think it is even more excellent now), describes the larger political context that exploits farmers and workers in both Mexico and the United States. This includes “the sense of alienation in rural areas that propelled Trump into office and continues to drive our politics; our country’s rapidly changing demographics and the way a growing Hispanic population is reshaping parts of rural America; the moral panic over immigration that obscures the underlying reality of the United States’ deep economic dependence on immigrant labor; the dangerous consolidation of our food supply; the effects of climate change; and the need to rethink the way we eat, work, and live.”
But this is not a book about policies; it’s about people.
Conniff presents what she calls “a collection of interlocking life stories of people from opposite sides of the border.” We meet Mexican workers in Wisconsin who are trying to make enough money to send back home to build houses to which they hope to return. They stay in touch with their families by phone and video chats. We meet their families back in Mexico, who miss them. For most of these workers, the goal is not American citizenship, it’s to provide for their families, doing work that is essential to the U.S. economy.
On the Mexican side, “the economics of migrant farm work are pretty simple,” Conniff writes. “As one former milker explained, he made $11 an hour working on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, compared to the equivalent of $20 a week he is making now working in a pallet factory in Mexico.”
On the U.S. side, the Mexican workers are valued and indispensable. “They’re some of the best workers I’ve ever worked with,” one farmer tells Conniff. “They’re willing to put in a hard day’s work with a smile on their face. They’re just humble people, fun to work with. A lot of Americans don’t want to do these jobs. And I need people to do them because I can’t do everything myself.”
Indeed, Conniff concludes, “If Mexican workers’ relationship with the United States is a relationship of dependency, the dependents are not immigrants coming illegally to the United States to live off hard-working American taxpayers, as some U.S. politicians claim. The real dependents are U.S. employers, as well as Mexican communities like Texhuacán that survive on migrant labor. Undocumented workers are carrying the economies of both places on their backs.”
But the connection between people in the two countries described in Milked is not just economic, it’s personal. The farmers and workers are part of each other’s lives. “You’re interested in their family, you’re interested in their livelihood. We’re working shoulder to shoulder every day,” Chris Weisenbeck, a dairy farmer in Durand, Wis., tells Conniff. “This is not a corporate structure with a corporate workforce below you. This is family farming.”
Weisenbeck recalls how he cried when his Mexican employees left to return home, both because he would miss them and out of happiness that they “reached what they wanted to accomplish here.” He was angered to hear Donald Trump deride Mexican immigrants during his 2016 campaign, yet admits he voted for him anyway, out of antipathy toward Hillary Clinton and support for Trump’s promise to end the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which President Bill Clinton signed into law.
“It is a strange fact of life on the dairy farms of Wisconsin that many of the same voters who helped elect Donald Trump, the most passionately anti-immigrant president in recent U.S. history, are also deeply devoted to their Mexican employees,” Conniff writes. While Weisenbeck won’t say who he voted for in 2020, he did point out to Conniff that Trump’s call for a wall didn’t keep Mexican workers from making their way to his farm, saying “We still got all the employees that we needed.”
The book provides a larger critique of agriculture policy that is wiping out family farms in both the United States and Mexico. In a chapter called “The Future of Farming,” Conniff visits a nightmarish 36,000-cow Indiana dairy farm that operates as a theme park, and, conversely, the Kentucky farm of writer Wendell Berry, who laments the loss of a way of life. She also meets with Mary Berry, Wendell’s daughter, who runs the nearby Berry Center, which seeks to keep the tradition of family farms alive.
Together with experts including Luis Rey, a professor of Benito Juárez University in Oaxaca, Mexico, where Conniff lived with her family for a year, these sources offer insights into how to create a sustainable farm economy that enriches rather than depletes the quality of the land and people’s lives.
As it now stands, Conniff notes, “Dairy farmers in the Midwest have been producing themselves right off the farm. Urbanites are also on a frantic treadmill, with productivity increasing and wages flatlining. Mexican workers, trapped on this side of the border making money so they can build their dream homes back in Mexico, are waiting for their real lives to begin.
“In many ways, we are all in the same boat.”
Milked holds out the hope that it can be steered into a safer and saner harbor.
Ruth Conniff will discuss Milked at A Room of One’s Own bookstore, 2717 Atwood Ave., on July 19, from 6-7 p.m.
