Author Archives: Nancy Cheng
Visual Icon: Interaction
This image is intended to represent an important aspect of community, symbolizing a core design principle in our upcoming project. This is just my initial idea and expect it to evolve throughout the quarter.
fair food movement
here’s a video put together by the California Institute for Rural Studies that provides a positive approach to improving the conditions of farmworkers in a way that helps save money and provide a better product
Reflections
As a first generation Mexican-American I have witnessed the many struggles that migrant farmworkers face on a daily basis. As I read through the articles, I couldn’t help but reminisce of my early childhood. Some of the fondest memories I have from my childhood were formed in the labor camp, the low income housing for agricultural workers where I lived. From making long lasting friendships to playing around without a care in the world, the memories are endless. One of the most memorable memories I have are of going to the laundromat, often on rainy days, with my mom. I’m not sure why my mom took me, maybe it had to do with the fact that other kids would be there as well. As the moms did laundry and gossiped during those couple of hours, we kids would roam around the laundry room and claim it as our playground. Occasionally one would hear ten cuidado( be carefull) or bajate de ahi (Get down from there) , always knowing that the moms were looking out for your safety. Aside from the obvious function the laundromats provided, it also acted as a gathering place where people got to know each other.
Today the majority of immigrant works come from Mexico and South America; the majority also work in the agriculture industry. One must take into consideration the adversities most immigrants have to face once they arrive. Many of them still have to find jobs and have to a learn how to speak the language (Kevin 2). Above all they often face harsh treatment from employers which, according to Rafael Hernandez, executive director of the Hispanic American Construction Industry Assn., “One of the challenges that always exists is the treatment of the workers- whether they are union or non-union? There is constant abuse, and many are not getting paid the proper wages” (Kevin 2). With this in mind, I believe it is beneficial in designing a proper space where potential(English) classes could be taught, furthermore educating migrant workers.Designing a daycare would be a great contribution for the migrant farm working community. Taking into account the long hours they work, this would be a great space where kids could be looked after.
Many migrant farm working families like to grow their own crops: corn, tomatoes, peppers, etc. The proper design of a community garden would be very welcoming in a community that works hands-on on a daily basis. When I go home many Latino residents grows their own crops regardless of the space they might obtain. For instance, where you would usually see a fence separating the public from private, vegetable plants start to take the place of a fence. We also need to keep in mind that many of the migrant farmworkers might not have families. In some cases they are young adults. Creating a space where outdoor activities can take place would be great.
I believe that we should design a project that responds to the needs of migrant works but at the same time keep it flexible design. Who knows, twenty years from now it could be a different group working in the agricultural fields.
musings.
The assigned reading and articles have neither produced within me answers or brought down a blanket of solace, but have instead inspired questions, hopefully affording me the ability to frame them more appropriately. Here goes:
1. How can architecture help to resolve the fundamental problems that farm workers face? Ultimately, the problem boils down to the fact that they do not get paid enough to afford housing up to ‘US standards.’ There are a milieu of factors that are initiating this core problem, but are they not mainly a centrally social problem? Should the government require a minimum wage that is high enough to support one’s self and regulate effectively enough so that it is enforced, or should everything be left to the hand of market forces and indentured human greed? We can blame the problem on a lack of immigration enforcement, but ultimately we must realize that our standard of living can only be achieved by taking advantage of a majority of the world’s population. Could we encourage the economic development of our neighboring countries instead of exploiting them for labor so cheap that they cannot sustain their own livelihoods and risk passing illegally into our country for slightly better wages? What is wrong with our country? What then, is the role of architecture in solving this problem? Do we truly have a housing shorting, or just an affordable housing shortage? If this is true, is there a surplus in supply elsewhere? Does it make sense to build worker housing, if we can never build buildings as cheaply as those already built and amortized? Is this a fundamentally architectural problem? Or, is there a role for architects to play in society that has value outside of designing a new low-income housing structure?
2. What is the ethnocentric perspective that we are approaching this problem with. Can we step outside of it, and if we did, what would that mean? The following is an excerpt from the NY Times article “Homeless Harvest.”
On either side of the stream in Southern California stood primitive huts that
seemed straight out of prehistoric times, except for their black plastic
sheeting. Nearly camouflaged under the trees and vines, the huts were built from
branches and two-by-fours covered with cardboard and the plastic sheeting that
is used to cover fields to protect young plants from freezing. Essentially crude
wooden frames wrapped with black plastic, they appeared equal parts Cro-Magnon
and Cristo.
and,
The bare wood around the kitchen sink was rotting. The living room had two
beds, while the 10-by-10 end bedroom had three lined up inches apart. Clothes
were slung over twine strung between the walls.
I want to be very clear that I am not interested in romanticizing the conditions of the living that are experienced, but I do want to expose the way that we think about those conditions and how we characterize them, because I believe it says something about the ideal situation. It is not productive to characterize people as primitive for using their ingenuity in the face of scarce resources. We can always assume that everyone should live in a 4,000 sf house? Is this not equally bleak? Is there any social advantage to the unfortunate situation that could be retained in a solution? Is there anything we could learn and incorporate into our own daily lives about conserving resources?
3. If anyone can answer those questions for me, I would be grateful. I do not openly believe there are easy answers, but I do admit I feel it important to at least ask them, to put them out there to ponder and discuss before we approach a solution. Let me attempt to reframe the question more correctly and positively: Can architecture serve to empower its occupants regardless of their current socioeconomic status? Can affordable ownership look to create wealth rather than assuage their poverty situation? Does subsidized housing do anything but slow the rate of financial decay, does it create a positive, improving situation? Can we approach this with incremental housing?
Can we use this concept to break down the barriers of a socially and racially stratified community? Does home ownership encourage ownership of the public sphere/how does shared ownership get incorporated? How do newcomers to a community become legitimized?
Should we spend more time framing the question or developing and solution to it?
Mithun Modularity Case Study
Farmworker Housing Pilot Project
Lopez Community Land Trust, affordable housing
Typology Study
Project Visual Icon: Resilience, the meeting of permanence and flexibility
Reading Response
Immigration Reform
Labor unions can continue to fight for better contracts, but an industry wide branding campaign is more to the point. The current debate as is seen on the national level focuses on immigration reform or empowering farmworkers to ensure their own prosperity and fair treatment. Little attention is paid to addressing the problem of substandard living and working conditions. There already exists in many parts of the United States an ethic of sustainable food production. If all goods produced using farmworker labor came under public pressure to carry on their label a seal certifying that they employ fair and humane work practices, then the pressure would be placed squarely on the growers and producers; where to this point it has not been. When ensuring safer harvests of tuna attention was not paid to commodity import regulation or UDSA/FDA oversight, there was a concerted effort made at public education and branding of the issue with the “dolphin safe” logo. It is not that American’s are comfortable with purchasing goods that nearly enslave immigrant workers; the problem lies in the fact that they cannot tell the difference in the grocery store. A single easily identifiable fair labor logo across the entire agriculture industry would ensure this.
Farmworker Housing
To the point of the farmworker families themselves, there is a profound strength of resilience and fortitude to their character that I admire a great deal. As is typified the Valle article Fields of Toil migrant families remake themselves on a nearly continual basis, piecing together what they need as they find opportunity to acquire and never holding to closely assumptions that are not absolutely sound. Despite this impermanence that is demanded of their lives by economic necessity, there are still very strong bonds of family and community that many affluent Americans would envy and wish they could see in their own families and communities.
I think that any housing response that is made for farmworker families should respect this character of the client. It is important that farmworker housing be scalable as resources permit and easily adaptable allowing for changes in season, occupants, use, and perhaps location. This character of adaptability will be difficult to achieve when paired with the desire for permanence of settlement. I feel that maintaining permanence is of great importance to ensure that residents have buy-in and ownership of the site to allow for the creation of a home rather than a shelter. Creating a long-lasting community is quite important because these social ties are difficult to establish and codify into the built environment through functioning public spaces and sharing of resources; and once established even easier to disrupt. Therefore long term design-life will allow for the establishment of communities and minimize maintenance costs and the possibility for large scale renovations that would disrupt the community. For this balance between adaptability and permanence I feel that the logical design imperative should be a characteristic of resilience. Resilience implies an ability to survive or adapt to change to ensure longevity. Therefore durable materials and assemblies that have lasting value and beauty are more appropriate for building in response to farmworker housing rather than placing the design imperative on minimizing initial costs.
A Response to Isabel Valle’s Fields of Toil
After reading through the article from the CQ Researcher as well as the chapters selected from Isabel Valle’s Fields Of Toil, a few things seem clear: migrant laborers are working in substandard conditions for poor wages, and not provided with adequate housing options. Migrants are marginalized. In Fields of Toil, Valle explains that Raul Martinez wouldn’t go to the doctor or miss a day of work due to illness, because he wanted to be seen as able and dependable in order to be rehired the following season. I can only guess that there are a whole host of other barriers that keep Raul from getting medical attention or choosing to take a day off from work. Does he have access to affordable health care? Is there a language barrier between he and a potential care provider? Can he afford to take one day off of work? This is perhaps a foolish and ill-informed question: would he get sick leave?
I would venture that when a group of people are marginalized, they are less able to get their primary needs met. Said another way, when a group of people is relegated to the position of second-class citizen, they are given less voice, less power, and less opportunity. However, our history of exclusion and prejudice is making citizen-farmers a lot of money. In a country that’s so controlled by the pursuit of profit, it’s almost no wonder that migrant-rights legislation has been so pathetically slow. While migrant advocacy groups have gained traction in recent decades, harsh disparities and inequalities remain. Adequate housing is one important step. Scratch that. How about beautiful, dignified, spacious, welcoming housing is one important step.
Perhaps, in this studio, we have the opportunity to provide the need for a home for people who have existed in substandard “housing” for too long. Perhaps, we have the opportunity to shape spaces that allow for individuals and families to feel safe, get rest, and truly be at home. Reading Valle’s words, it sounds like providing built-in furniture would be important, as many families and individuals are highly mobile, sometimes gaining employment in a new place one day and moving the next. Providing space for privacy seems important in response to Valle’s descriptions of one room houses with multiple families or many single adults sharing four walls. Maybe including kitchen tools would be an important consideration. Further, it seems that ample food storage would be necessary, in response to Valle’s example of Raul Martinez bringing home bags of apples and potatoes from the farms where he worked.
We can work to provide housing. But what about the other human needs? Pay? Health care? Education? Voice? What about those needs?
Explorations
Growing up in the Midwest I know a little bit about farming; my dad rents out 110 acres of arable land to the local family farming operation near Argyle, Wisconsin. I know that farmer’s work long, hard hours. I also know that farmhands don’t get paid well, and the dirtiest and toughest jobs are done by those lowest on the totem pole. The Flannery’s (the family that farms my dad’s land) are a close-knit group, and most of the family is involved somehow in the operation. I think they have one farm hand, though I can’t attest to which jobs he does. They do not employ migrant farmworkers, in fact I am not entirely sure anybody in the area does, probably because of the short growing season.
Coming into this studio, I would put my knowledge of the migrant farmworker world somewhere about a 1.3 out of 10. I know they exist, and are often almost always the reason I can afford to eat food instead of pieces of graphite from the DuckStore. That’s about it.
After reading the bit about migrant farmworkers in the CQ Researcher, I feel like I have a better understanding of the arrangements… maybe I’d bump up my knowledge to a (tentative) 3. What struck me about the current situation as something architecture can alleviate, is the health of the farmworker family. The constant exposure to pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers, all with their pores wide open due to excessive sweating, is staggering. While, as architects, we can’t do much to change the situation in the fields, it is imperative that those chemicals be kept out of the living spaces, away from things like the couch, dinner, and children. Fresh air and cleanliness seem to be the easiest ways to defend against the daily chemical bombardment faced by the farmworkers.
Constant air exchange throughout the household is imperative, at a rate greater than that for a normal home. It is equally important that the air coming in be as clean as possible, and for this reason siting the building to bring in the freshest possible air is a cheap fix. Another way is to purify the air would be to “scrub” it, like in a clean-room environment at a high-tech manufacturing plant. This can be made much more economical using living plants to scrub instead of machines. Programming can help, too. Perhaps a side entrance to the home, leading directly to a sort of clean-up area with laundry and a smallish shower should be included. This room could be physically removed from the living space, as well, but if so the new transition space should probably be completely private.
About two pages into the proscribed excerpt from Fields of Toil, I told my girlfriend, Lisa, that I thought she would really like the book.
“You mean, this one?” she asked, pulling it from our bookshelf. “If you are interested in that, you might like this one, and this one, and this one, too.” It turns out Lisa took an anthropology class on the American Migrant Farmer Experience at the U of O some years ago. We have had some good conversations about migrant farmers, and now I would say my rating is a trepidatious 3.5 out of 10. (For the record, I think a score of somewhere approaching 5 would be solid.)
We talked about education, and cultural divides. She said something about how their is a great cultural divide between adults that does not always exist between children, and that is because of schools. The reason many people choose to live the life of the migrant farmworker is because they want their kids to live happy, full lives with more options than they had. By sending their kids to public school, they are opening those doors. Even eighth-grade dropouts speak English far better than their abroad-born parents. We talked about the historical context of immigrant workers, and how this has always been the case.
On that note, it would be interesting to get some heritage information from the class. I bet we can find some interesting parallels in our pasts….