LatinaLista — Farmwork is hard enough. Being a migrant farmworker — subjected to the whims of a “profit-first, workers-last” employer mentality can be life-threatening, but being a female migrant farmworker, well, there are no words to describe the horror of what that can mean. Add “undocumented” in the mix and for many women it means suffering untold abuse in silent.
Luckily, there’s a new documentary premiering on PBS’ Frontline that will show with both words and film just how real and deadly, both emotionally and physically, the danger is to women migrant farmworkers.
Rape in the Fields/Violación de un Sueño is a film that reveals how the vulnerability of migrant farmworkers is exploited on several different levels by their employers and their co-workers.
Traveling from the almond groves of California’s Central Valley to the packing plants of Iowa, from the apple orchards of Washington’s Yakima Valley to the tomato fields of Florida, the investigative team spoke with dozens of women who say they have been sexually abused on the job. And they have found that in the vast fields and orchards of today’s agribusiness, it’s easy for a rapist to stalk his victims — who are often, but not always, undocumented women.
The documentary is a unique project in that it has three partners — PBS’ Frontline, Univision News division and the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the Center for Investigative Reporting. All three entities combined their forces to create a documentary that will be broadcast both in English – on PBS stations on Tuesday, June 25, 2013 and in Spanish — on Univision on Saturday, June 29, 2013.
Both versions of the film will also be available online. The Frontline website will stream the English version at the time of its broadcast and it will be kept online as part of the site’s documentary archives. The Spanish version will be added after its broadcast on Univision.
The sexual abuse of immigrant women in our farms, fields and factories is a story that needs to be told — and this unprecedented broadcast partnership with Univision is a remarkable opportunity to expand the footprint of this important journalism.”
FRONTLINE #3111: RAPE IN THE FIELDS from WGBH Station Relations on Vimeo.
