Ethnic Studies

Approximately 75% of farmworkers in the United States are Latino migrants, and about 50% of hired farmworkers do not have authorization to work in the United States. Farmworkers face numerous chemical, physical, and biological threats to their health. The adverse effects of these hazards may be amplified among Latino migrant farmworkers, who are concurrently exposed to various psychosocial stressors. Factors such as documentation status, potential lack of authorization to work in the United States, and language and cultural barriers may also prevent Latino migrants from accessing federal aid, legal assistance, and health programs. These environmental, occupational, and social hazards may further exacerbate existing health disparities among US Latinos. This population is also likely to be disproportionately impacted by emerging threats, including climate change and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Latino migrant farmworkers are essential to agriculture in the United States, and actions are needed to protect this vulnerable population.

I've had Nina Simone's “sinnerman” on repeat for months. The propulsive force of Simone's 1965 live version of this gospel song drives its ten-minute ferocity straight into the contemporary American zeitgeist. As she tells her audience in the lead-up to a lesser-known performance of the song, recorded in 1961, Simone learned “Sinnerman” when she was a “little bitty girl in revival meetings. It happened when my mother and lots more like her tried to save souls.” The song's judgment-day tale of redemption's refusal is told doubly, both by the sinner—“I cried rock / don't you see I need you, rock”—and by those from whom the sinner begs, if not forgiveness, then simply some measure of mercy from the divine justice to come: “Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?” The break in the middle of the 1965 recording strips the song down to Simone's handclaps on the second and fourth beats. All that remains is the tenuous intensity of the time neither of redemption nor of damnation but merely of “accompaniment” in the in-between (Tomlinson and Lipsitz). Called forth from that time, in all of Simone's live recordings, and missing from those of Les Baxter or the Weavers just a few years earlier, comes the insurgent cry for “Power!” over and over, to the point of near exhaustion.