The Dallas Morning News

 

Monday, December 1, 2003

 

VIEWPOINTS; Pg. 15A

 

Cultivate Hispanic farmers

 

Constance Hilliard

 

I have been wondering:  Whatever happened to the romance we Americans once had with the family farm?  Or did our interest apply merely to Anglo farmers?

 

As the adult children of white farmers have abandoned the farm in droves, their places are being taken by Hispanics.  And the misty-eyed passion with which many Americans once spoke of the family farm simply has vanished.

 

Hispanic farmers are struggling for their very lives.  And even if nobody else seems to care, this proud descendant of farmers certainly does.

 

The problem is that the federal Agriculture Department has been foreclosing on an ever-growing number of Hispanic-owned farms.  And agribusiness conglomerates are waiting in the wings to gobble up the properties at a pittance.

 

I recently spoke with Lupe Garcia, a New Mexico farmer who, with several hundred other Hispanic farmers, sued the Agriculture Department in 2000.

 

Mr. Garcia, who lost his family farm to foreclosure, claimed that minority growers are refused loans on the same terms that the department offers to white male farmers.

 

The lawsuit is still languishing in the courts.

 

The allegations against the Agriculture Department are hauntingly reminiscent of the problems that black farmers articulated in a lawsuit that was brought against the department and settled in 1999.

 

Those African-American growers called the Agriculture Department “the last plantation” because of its seemingly impenetrable old-boy network of white farmers.

 

The department secretly dismantled its civil rights investigative unit in 1982 and, as a result, accumulated the biggest backlog of discrimination complaints in the federal government.

 

Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has since set up a civil rights office to expedite minority complaints.

 

But according to Mr. Garcia and other minority critics, that new office lacks both the budget and the authority to change deep-seated institutional biases – that is, discriminatory practices embedded within the Agriculture Department itself.

 

Many Hispanics say a farmer seeking a loan must apply to a county board, presumably made up of neighbors.  Such a board is called upon to judge not merely the applicant’s creditworthiness but the person’s character as well.

 

The problem for Hispanic farmers is that almost all of the “neighbors” have been Anglo males, and their hankering for new land, acquired cheaply, sometimes influences their character assessments of minority applicants.

 

Why are Hispanic farms worth saving?

 

Devon G. Peña, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, has described them as true family enterprises in which the whole extended family pitches in and helps.

 

Hispanics often embrace farming as a way of life rather than simply as a means of making money.

 

Surely, the rural work ethic personified by Hispanic farmers is something worth preserving.

 

 

Constance Hilliard is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas.  Her e-mail address is connie@unt.eduHi