21 pages, This article reconsiders the concept of `alternative media', and describes a set of alternative media projects produced over six years in and around migrant farm worker camps in southern California. The media projects described here (small-format videos within marginalized labor communities), challenge assumptions about `alternative media' on three levels - as a theoretical concept, as media practice and as a political project. The article argues the need to attend to the complex spatial and institutional contexts that inflect and complicate any local alternative media project. This examination of how the lived spaces of the migrant camps are both avowed and effaced by local residents and contractors underscores the tortured logic of the region. The study reveals not just how the landed status quo organizes workers lives as parts of its `scenic' landscape. It also describes how indigenous `Mixteco' labor organizers simultaneously work to exploit and resist the same conditions. Occupying semi-public contact-zones and no-man's lands (legally ambiguous spaces), provides migrants with a material beach-head from which to claim other rights that have more legal teeth (including fair labor, health and safety, and civil rights laws). Compared to the conventional video forms the producers/researchers set out to produce, these practices suggested that migrants' unauthorized occupation of space is a consequential form of `alternative media' in its own right; a transnational community response to policies of globalization and `free-trade'.
17 pages., via online journal, The scholarly and journalistic literature usually treats urban agriculture as a new phenomenon, but it is a neglected dimension of urban history. Some U.S. cities, at least in the Northeast, had food-raising and processing practices not just in colonial times but up until the relatively recent past. Three areas of history are explored that have mostly omitted discussion of city food production but nonetheless provide important frameworks to explore such production: urban development, agricultural, and immigrant history. Woven throughout this piece is evidence from a study of Waterbury, Connecticut. Local food production did not die when the Industrial Revolution came to Waterbury. Farms and other food-producing, processing, and marketing operations remained and even adapted to the growing city’s needs and resources. The city government both supported and undermined agriculture in ways that add to an understanding of urban history and are lessons for current urban agriculture policy.
Parker, Kim (author), Horowitz, Juliana Menasce (author), Brown, Anna (author), Fry, Richard (author), Cohn, D'Vera (author), and Igielnik, Ruth (author)
Format:
Research report
Publication Date:
2018-05-22
Published:
USA: Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 198 Document Number: D09679
