This is a guest post by Nancy Groce, Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center.
The American Folklife Center recently published a new Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) collection to the Library’s website. The collection documents the work of poultry farm workers in North Carolina. To date, more than 50 collections featuring in-depth interviews with over1200 contemporary American workers have been recorded by Archie Green Fellows, added to the AFC archives, and made available online. Many OFP projects document farmers, ranchers, and agricultural workers – but this is the first one in AFC’s substantial archives that focuses on chickens!
This collection was created by anthropologist Leigh Campoamor of Durham, North Carolina, who received a 2022 Archie Green Fellowship (AGF) to research and document “Poultry Workers of North Carolina.” Poultry, primarily chicken and chicken eggs, is the main agricultural product of North Carolina. The U.S. poultry industry, concentrated in the American South, has undergone major changes over the last few decades. These changes and the voices of poultry farm owners, poultry house workers, and others involved in the poultry industry were recorded by Campoamor during her fieldwork. This oral history collection provides insights into the on-the-job experiences of the people whose work keeps America fed.
To mark the publication of this new OFP collection, I recently spoke with Leigh Campoamor. Here are excerpts of our conversation:
Nancy Groce: Thanks for agreeing to this interview! We’re delighted to receive your collection on poultry workers–especially because it’s an industry which had been under-represented in our archives. Between the bird flu epidemic and increasing egg prices, it’s also one that has gotten a lot of attention recently. To start, please tell me a little bit about yourself.
Leigh Campoamor: So, I am a cultural anthropologist. That’s what my PhD is in. I have an undergraduate degree in history. My research focus has mostly been Latin America, although I also teach about the United States.
I’m really interested in labor history, migration, and the relationships and connections between workers in different parts of the world — what labor historian Aviva Chomsky calls “linked labor histories” of workers and migration between Latin America and the U.S. (2008).
NG: What sparked your interest in poultry workers?
LC: I’ve been based in North Carolina, although I’ve moved away and come back and moved away and come back, for over 20 years. I am also an organizer and educator in North Carolina, so I felt it was really important to engage in a research project that was specifically about North Carolina.
My research interests are people’s experiences with work, and how this connects to broader historical trends — more so than the agricultural part, which I had to learn more about when creating this project. Also, in the context of the pandemic, [I became interested in] the popularization of the concept of essential workers – that there were certain kinds of jobs that you can’t stay home from. And, I was fascinated by the links between people who have very different kinds of backgrounds and yet all work in the same industry here in North Carolina.
NG: How and why did you apply for an Archie Green Fellowship?
LC: Julia Gartrell, a friend and colleague of mine in Durham, had previously done an AGF fellowship — an oral history project on “Fixing, Mending, Making New: North Carolina’s Repair Professionals.” She sent me a link to the application information, and I was like, “This is amazing!” As someone who switched from being an historian to an anthropologist, whenever I had a chance to do something more archive-ish, I get excited. I kind of nerd out when I get into archives!
The AGFs allows researchers to get into real details with the people they interview. I love talking to people, and learning from them, and hearing about their life histories; what brought them to where they are now.
NG: And what interested you about poultry workers?
LC: I realized how huge of an industry it was in North Carolina. It’s a primary commodity of North Carolina. People in the United States are eating a lot more poultry than other kinds of meat now, and there was also the issue of the bird flu going around.
I noticed that the AFC archive had collections about meat packing in the Midwest, dairy farming in New York, and produce markets in the Southwest, but there wasn’t actually a lot of research into the poultry industry.
NG: You interviewed a wide range of people: from small and large farm owners to more recently arrived immigrant workers to long-time poultry workers, and even a teenager raising turkeys for her 4-H project. How did you make connections and decide who to interview?
LC: Initially I got in touch with a couple of journalists I know who have some connections to food and agriculture. And I got in touch with a couple of nonprofits that work with agricultural and immigrant workers. I also reached out to farmers I had encountered at farmers markets, and colleagues of friends at university agriculture departments and agricultural extension agencies.
Eventually, I did 18 interviews for the project — a nice variety of people from different sized farms, people raising chickens in pastures versus in industrial chicken houses, people with widely different backgrounds, different ages, both workers and farm owners. Some interviews were done in English and others were in Spanish.
NG: In addition to learning about their daily jobs, were there things that surprised you?
LC: Even though I knew that poultry packing relies on immigrant labor, I didn’t realize how many of the folks who are in-charge of these huge chicken houses were immigrants. The scale of the chicken houses was just incredible! There are tens-of-thousands of chickens and they’re in charge, working for a farm owner who is subcontracted to one of the giant poultry companies like Perdue or Tyson. Their job is basically to walk through the chicken houses all day and monitor how the chickens are doing. The companies build in a margin for error and a certain number of chickens are expected to die. Much of the job of these workers is removing dead chickens. It’s pretty disgusting as a job and makes you think about the expendability of chicken’s lives. I heard from people what that was like the first time they did it and how they got used to it.
It was also pretty jarring to learn about the levels of debt farm owners go into by contracting with the giant poultry companies that dominate the industry.
And the other thing that was really interesting was just how different people’s backgrounds were — people who have landed in more or less similar roles within the industry. There were farm owners who came from suburban backgrounds and others who had inherited their farms and can trace back their farming roots for centuries.
Similarly, the immigrant workers who I interviewed came from very different backgrounds. I think sometimes people assume that agricultural workers from, say, Mexico all have an agricultural background. They don’t. Same with their level of schooling, and whether they came from a city or from a more rural area, and whether they worked in agriculture as kids or not. For some of them, working on a farm was a totally new thing.
Which is why having individual stories within a trade is so important. It helps both us and people in the future realize the diversity of workers and their roads to certain careers.
NG: Are you planning on doing any more poultry interviews?
LC: Currently, I’m finishing up a book on working children in Lima, Peru. And then, now that I’ve had a little bit more distance from this poultry project, I’m coming back to it. I’m definitely looking forward to writing about it. As a former academic, I am very interested in writing for non-academic outlets. That’s what I plan to do from now on.
Works Cited:
Chomsky, Aviva. 2008. Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
A special thanks to Melanie Zeck, Reference Librarian at the American Folklife Center, for her assistance with editing this post.