LaborArt: The Migrant Project

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
The lives of the farm workers who put food on our tables are vividly rendered in a photo exhibit on view through Friday at the Mexican Cultural Institute. In The Migrant Project,  photographer and writer Rick Nahmias documents the work and lives of California farm workers, a "virtually invisible underclass whose days begin in darkness and involve unending hours of stoop labor under the blinding sun," says Nahmias in the text that accompanies the photographs. Nahmias succeeds brilliantly in taking us behind the strawberries, tomatoes and cantaloupes to show us the often appalling working and living conditions of the men and women who feed us, "stories which in their own right have formed a collective saga about the very human cost of putting food on America's table. There is no other sector in our country where people have to work so hard to have so little." On view through this Friday, April 11; 2829 16th St. NW, 10A-5P; Free. 202-728-1647. Click here for Rachel Beckman's Washington Post interview with Nahmias.
- report by Chris Garlock; photos by Rick Nahmias