University Press of Kansas Crafting Dignity: How Immigrant Dairy Workers Transform Rural Communities

Based on years of ethnographic research in rural Kansas, Crafting Dignity is an eye-opening look at why Latin American immigrants came to work on dairy farms in the Heartland and how their presence is transforming both the industry and their local communities. Immigrants in the United States are overrepresented among essential workers in agro-food production. In the dairy industry alone, immigrants constitute 51 percent of the labor force and produce 80 percent of the country’s milk. Whereas most food production in the United States today is controlled by large corporations, at least 97 percent of US dairy farms are family owned and operated. Based on five years of ethnographic research in “Dairy City,” Kansas, Alisa Garni tells the story of people who traded suits and office jobs abroad for dangerous work on US dairy farms, the white dairy farmers who rely on them to keep their family-owned operations afloat, and the rural communities that were dying before recent immigrants arrived. Crafting Dignity follows immigrant employees from three competing family dairy farms in rural Kansas and examines how labor relations on each farm affect people’s settlement experiences in Dairy City, as well as their impact on the local community. In detailing how people’s work lives are woven into the broader social fabric of rural America, Crafting Dignity sheds fresh light on how managers’ labor practices interact with social, political, and historical forces to impact the viability of farms and communities. In an era of increased political anxiety about immigration and migrant labor, Crafting Dignity shows what life is really like for these workers and how more just labor practices foster a better life—not only for the laborers but for the community as a whole.