What a depressing week it was. For one thing, Sen. Hillary Clinton persists in her campaign to put another Republican in the White House, and for another, there was state Rep. Doug Bruce of Colorado Springs. His remarks led Rep. Kathleen Curry, then chairing the House debate in the legislature, to cut him off. And that led to so many threats against Curry, presumably from Bruce fans, that she has asked the State Patrol for extra protection.
At issue was a bill for the state to work with the federal government to bring in more temporary agricultural workers — legal immigrants with visas. When it was Bruce’s turn to speak, he said, “I don’t think we need 5,000 more illiterate peasants in Colorado.” Curry stopped him there.
Bruce later said he was “trying to make illegal immigration an issue for the House.” If so, he was clearly out of order, because the bill on the floor concerned legal immigration. Thus it was proper for Curry to cut him off to keep the discussion on topic.
Should she have, though? Isn’t society best served by a robust debate? Was the phrase “illiterate peasants” accurate, even if some found it offensive?
My American Heritage Dictionary gives the primary definition of peasant as someone included among “small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers on the land where these constitute the main labor force in agriculture.” So agricultural workers are peasants.
As for their literacy, who knows whether they can read and write? I’m unaware of such tests for agricultural field work. Does Bruce mean literacy in English, or will Spanish or Nahuatl work? Further, the term “literacy” has been so expanded that many of us suffer from some newly discovered form of illiteracy. I earn my meager livelihood with “English literacy.” I manage tolerably on “computer literacy” and “cultural literacy,” but I scored zero on a magazine test for “emotional literacy.”
The assumption behind Bruce’s statement is that if one is literate, in the sense of being able to read and write English, then one will find better work than providing our food.
I grew up in farm country and I’ve done farm work. Not the brutal stuff like thinning sugar beets with a short-handled hoe, but still, there’s nothing like bucking hay when it’s 105 degrees in the shade, and there is no shade, to make one yearn for the classroom.
It is my considered opinion, as a history buff, that slavery and agriculture were invented at the same time in human history, and there’s a reason for this connection. Few people ever wake up in the morning and think “Gee, I can’t wait to get out there and pull thousands of flax plants out by the roots.”
Last year, Colorado was so short of farm labor that state prison inmates were allowed to work the fields at harvest time. This indicates that Bruce is wrong about his primary point, and that we need more “peasants,” literate or not, during harvest season.
Along the way, we might give agricultural workers some respect for their grueling toil for long days under the hot sun. They put food on our tables. “Peasant” should be a term of honor in a society that professes to admire hard work.
Why isn’t it? There’s an urban bias in our language, reflected in the unflattering connotations of terms for rural folk: hick, hayseed, rube, yokel, yahoo, clod, bumpkin and, of course, peasant.
The final definition in my dictionary says a peasant is “an uncouth, crude, or ill-bred person; boor.” And a boor is “a crude person with rude or clumsy manners.” So whatever else you want to say about “peasants,” it appears that we have one serving in our legislature.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
