poverty

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Central Valley Opportunity Center: Gaining Ground in the War on Poverty

Authored by Anton Sherin

The cover of the Central Valley Opportunity Center's 1984 Annual Report
The cover of this annual report by The Central Valley Opportunity Center exemplifies the organization’s mission to generate labor mobility for low-income migrant farmworkers.

When “The Central Valley Opportunity Center 1984 Annual Report” was published, nearly all farmworker families living in the Central Valley of California lived below the Federal lower-living standard (CVOC, n.d., 8). Seventy five percent of migrant farmworkers spoke little to no English and language barriers combined with their itinerant existence meant that few were educated beyond the sixth grade. CVOC’s report gives a detailed account of the actions the organization took in 1984 to support migrant farmworkers’ struggle for survival. This report is valuable for understanding the foundations and efficacy of CVOC’s current operations.

The Central Valley of California is a temperate, 450 mile stretch of well irrigated, nutrient rich soil (Norton, n.d.). The 350 different crops grown there generate a quarter of the produce consumed in the United States (Perez 2019). This massive agricultural operation attracts a broad array of migrant workers to the region and wage growth is undermined by competition for unskilled positions. CVOC is one of many community-based organizations that emerged in the 1970s to address the needs of low-income migrant farmworkers in California (Tony Silva, pers. comm.). 

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Investigating Unfair Labor Practices in Haiti

Authored by Alana Coulum

Haiti 1

This is the front of the VHS Tape. The front cover features two people from the Institute interviewing a woman wearing a mask to protect her identity

For my academic service-learning project, I chose to volunteer at the Center for Migration Studies, which is an institute devoted to the advocacy of migrants around the world. It is an organization backed by an international group of Catholic ordained and lay people, and the institution holds an impressive amount of immigration information in their archives. I was tasked with cataloguing their audio/visual collection, which was small but disorganized. In the collection, there were many documentaries telling the stories of immigrant groups who came to the United States. The Center for Migration Studies in general has an enormous amount of resources about Italian-Americans and their experience. One VHS tape in particular caught my eye because of its title: “Mickey Mouse in Haiti”. This is a video exploiting the terrible working conditions of laborers in Haiti making apparel for The Walt Disney Company. This was part of a campaign sponsored by the Institute for Global Labour and Rights, to convince Disney to raise the minimum wage for factory workers in Haiti. The entire documentary is available here on the Institute’s official YouTube page.

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