Late in January—as the newly polished Trumpist sledgehammer began wrecking American civics in earnest—social media started circulating broad claims about farm workers fearful of the new administration’s promises of impending roundups and deportations of undocumented people. An Instagram image of farm fields and produce shelves claimed, “Central California farmworkers are not showing up over fear of deportation.” On TikTok, a short video showed pickers stooped in a green field, with text overlayed, “Texas is reporting 28% of farm workers are not showing up to work. California is reporting 46%.” In my own Bluesky feed, a red banner announced that “California citrus farmers report 75% of farm workers didn't show up today. Acres of oranges, limes, and lemons are rotting as harvest season is 'virtually halted.'”
If only there was a song about, like, exactly that.
“The crops are all in, and the peaches are rotting / The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps,” Woody Guthrie wrote in 1948. In a double-barreled critique of farm policy and immigration issues, he reported why no one was picking the fruit: “They’re flying ’em back to the Mexican Border.”
The dubious percentages in those memes turned out to be hyperbole, but their misinformation expresses a deeper and growing fear among immigration allies—one that’s been realized in recent weeks as numerous flights (either chartered by immigration officials or conducted by the U.S. military) have flown south to return migrants to Colombia, El Salvador, and other countries. Whether we export people in planes or train cars, the operation is the same: dehumanize a population and remove it.
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By 1948, the ever-restless Woody Guthrie was spending less time rambling the open road, the lifestyle for which he tends to be known, and more time knocking around his house near Coney Island, writing songs about things he’d read about rather than things he’d seen. These are the years Woody’s progressive Huntington’s disease began to present more clearly. Early biographer Henrietta Yurchenco quoted an observation by Woody’s wife Marjorie: “As early as 1948, we began to notice that he was more reflective, and often depressed by trivial things.”