Prifogle: Racial Formation in the History of Michigan Farmworker Aid

Emily Prifogle (Michigan Law) examines the history of informal religious aid societies’ access to migrant farmworkers in Michigan in Rural Social Safety Nets for Migrant Farmworkers in Michigan, 1942-1971 (Law & Social Inquiry). This work traces both the evolution of farmers’ formal property rights (or lack thereof) to regulate aid workers’ access to migrant camps and the informal ways in which local community actions both assisted farmworkers and kept them subordinated in rural society.

For her specific case study, Prifogle evaluates the informal safety nets offered by the Michigan Migrant Ministry from the 1940s through the 1960s. Prifogle paints a vivid picture of how church women in particular both filled gaps in labor protections and government services for migrant agricultural laborers and served farmers’ interests in having a stable and controllable workforce by policing migrant morality, maintaining rural segregation, and performing de facto surveillance.

By exploring how changes in aid and activism in the mid-1960s led farmers to press trespass charges against aid workers who had previously been welcomed to assist agricultural laborers, Rural Social Safety Nets connects the assertion of private property rights and the intentional physical and social isolation of migrant labor camps. Rural Social Safety Nets ends with the contention that rural America has been shaped by communities’ use of formal law and informal systems of welfare (like the Michigan Migrant Ministry) to define people of color as outsiders.

For more on this theme of how racial boundaries have been constructed across the rural Midwest in the Twentieth Century, see this fantastic talk Prifogle shared as part of our Spring 2021 Rural Law and Policy Series: Racial Boundaries across the Heartland's Legal Landscapes in the Twentieth Century.

This digest was produced with significant contribution from Aurora Kenworthy, UNL Law Student.