Ruth Conniff

×

Expand

Greg Anderson/courtesy Wisconsin Examiner

Ruth Conniff

Wisconsin Examiner Editor-in-Chief (and Isthmus contributor) Ruth Conniff takes a look at the changing world of Wisconsin dairy farming and the rural communities that rely on the farm economy in the new book Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers. The book examines confounding questions such as how farmers reliant on labor by immigrants from Mexico came to vote for Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant policy proposals. Conniff will discuss the book with Norman Stockwell, publisher of The Progressive; if you can't make it in person, the talk will be streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

media release: The Progressive and A Room of One's Own bookstore present

An in-person and live-streamed book release event with author Ruth Conniff and her new book: Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers

Ruth Conniff will be introduced by Norman Stockwell, publisher of The Progressive magazine. After which she will take questions from the audience.

Free and open to the public at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore, 2717 Atwood Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin. It will also stream live on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/theprogressive and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/theprogressivemagazine.

Donors who contribute $50 or more will receive a signed copy of Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers  – mailed to their address.

---------------

Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner and editor-at-large and former editor-in-chief of The Progressive magazine. She has appeared on Good Morning America, C-SPAN, Democracy Now!, and NPR and has been a frequent guest on All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. Milked is her first book.

In the Midwest, Mexican workers have become critically important to the survival of rural areas and small towns—and to the individual farmers who rely on their work—with undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico, accounting for an estimated 80 percent of employees on the dairy farms of western Wisconsin.

In Milked, former editor-in-chief of The Progressive, Ruth Conniff introduces us to the migrants who worked on these dairy farms, their employers, among them white voters who helped elect Donald Trump to office in 2016, and the surprising friendships that have formed between these two groups of people. These stories offer a rich and fascinating account of how two crises—the record-breaking rate of farm bankruptcies in the Upper Midwest, and the contentious politics around immigration—are changing the landscape of rural America.

A unique and fascinating exploration of rural farming communities, Milked sheds light on seismic shifts in policy on both sides of the border over recent decades, connecting issues of labor, immigration, race, food, economics, and U.S.-Mexico relations and revealing how two seemingly disparate groups of people have come to rely on each other, how they are subject to the same global economic forces, and how, ultimately, the bridges of understanding that they have built can lead us toward a more constructive politics and a better world.

“Anyone who wants to understand the real relationship between people in the United States and Mexico should read Milked.”—David Bacon, author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants.