FRUITS OF LABOUR
Mobile art exhibit and fruit stand aims to reveal hidden injustices faced by migrant workers,
An ill child and growing health-care costs led Rene Lopez to leave his family and home in Colima, Mexico and journey to Canada for work.
Lopez, 44, arrived in Canada as a migrant worker 11 years ago. Today, the father of six works in British Columbia at a vineyard.
“The conditions are not the best,” Lopez told the Star through a translator. “There’s a range of issues, the conditions of work are not always adequate. We have issues with health and health care. We don’t have guarantees of our rights.”
The hidden injustices faced by migrant workers such as Lopez are the framework of a Speaking Fruit mobile art exhibit, conceptualized by Toronto-based artist Farrah-Marie Miranda.
Speaking Fruit was based off the question: If the fruits you grow and pick could speak from dinner tables, refrigerators and grocery aisles, what would you want them to say?
Around and inside the fruit stand, migrant workers’ responses are printed on paper bags filled with fruits and displayed on posters. One message reads: “Modern day slavery exists in Canada.” “One worker wrote something about, if he’s good enough to work here he should be good enough to stay,” Miranda said.
The mobile fruit stand is based at the Art Gallery of York University’s Migrating the Margins exhibition, but will head to OCAD University on Saturday for Nuit Blanche.
Migrant workers collaborated to create the art themselves, transcending language and literacy barriers.
“I want (visitors to the stand) to remember that behind everything they consume . . . there’s a lot of sacrifice undertaken by that worker,” Lopez said. “Behind all of those production, there’s accidents. There’s sometimes even deaths.”
Lopez contributed to the Speaking Fruit exhibit by writing about the cherries, lettuce, wine and ice wine he produced.
“Her project really motivates our voices and motivates people to see the conditions and the people behind the product in ways that creates dialogue,” Lopez said. “And we can freely express ourselves and we can express ourselves in a safe way, as well, so that more people can take notice of everything we live through (in) our work in the farms.”
Evelyn Encalada, a labour studies instructor at York University who served as translator for Lopez’s interview with the Star, said art lets migrant workers to express themselves without fear of reprisal.
“It’s more of a safe way for them to express themselves, so that way they won’t be deported for speaking out,” Encalada said.
In the commodification of the migrant labour force, Encalada said the rest of the person can be forgotten.
“All of their humanity — the rest of their humanity — is erased, including who they are as whole people,” Encalada said. “Many of them are indeed artists, singers, they write beautiful poetry.”
At first, Miranda figured she’d bring in Canadian artists to work with migrant workers.
“But what I encountered in this process is migrant farm workers who are already artists,” Miranda said. “And I think the nature of temporary agriculture labour schemes in Canada is that it does not let migrant workers be their full selves.”
Miranda called the current system two-tiered, where people “who are growing our food, nourishing us, are faced with these conditions and aren’t allowed to stay.”
She pointed out that many of the artists who contributed to Speaking Fruit aren’t in Canada to see the fruits of their labour.
“One worker who is in the film had told me, you know, he wishes that there were two of him, so he could be here and make the money that he needs, and he can also be with his family,” she said.
“And that’s a really ugly choice that Canada forces people to make.”