A Glimpse Inside a Mississippi Poultry Plant

Severiano, a 22-year-old Tzotzil speaker from Chiapas, spends his days hanging live chickens by their feet on a conveyor belt in a poultry processing plant in Central Mississippi.  He arrived here last year by paying a coyote US$2,000 to bring him from Tamaulipas, Mexico, and today he hangs a staggering 50 birds per minute.  He sends 85% of his earnings home, where he says he will start a small business when he returns to his rancho next December.  Less than a minute down the line from him, Dorothy, a single African-American mother in her 30s, separates livers from gizzards of these very same birds as she tries to ignore the dull pain in her forearms that gets worse by the day.  She glances at the brown men all around her, speaking a language she doesn’t understand, and wonders what their lives were like before coming to Mississippi.  Still further down the line stands 47-year-old Ernesto, who, in Argentina, was a banker.  Now in the U.S., he debones chicken breasts for $6.50 an hour.  He, his wife, and two children share a dilapidated trailer with a couple from Uruguay.  Their tourist visas expired nearly two years ago, but no one seems to care.  If he’s lucky, he says, they’ll never go back; Mississippi is home now.

 

 

Text by Angela C. Stuesse Community Education Associate, Poultry Worker Justice Project and Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin.  From "Poultry Processing, People's Politics: Industrial Exploitation and Organizing across Difference in a Transnational Mississippi"    

        

Art by Adam Rosenblatt 2003, prepared for Equal Justice Center worker rights workshops