Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers

By Ruth Conniff

A compelling portrayal by the veteran journalist of the lives of farming communities on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border and the surprising connections between them

“Conniff brings her skills and insights to a particularly urgent project: moving beyond the polarizing politics of our current era, and taking a deeper look at how people who have been pitted against each other can forge bonds of understanding.” —E.J. Dionne Jr., co-author of 100% Democracy

Winner of the Studs and Ida Terkel Award

In the Midwest, Mexican workers have become critically important to the survival of rural areas and small towns—and to the individual farmers who rely on their work—with undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico, accounting for an estimated 80 percent of employees on the dairy farms of western Wisconsin.

In Milked, former editor-in-chief of The Progressive Ruth Conniff introduces us to the migrants who worked on these dairy farms, their employers, among them white voters who helped elect Donald Trump to office in 2016, and the surprising friendships that have formed between these two groups of people. These stories offer a rich and fascinating account of how two crises—the record-breaking rate of farm bankruptcies in the Upper Midwest, and the contentious politics around immigration—are changing the landscape of rural America.

A unique and fascinating exploration of rural farming communities, Milked sheds light on seismic shifts in policy on both sides of the border over recent decades, connecting issues of labor, immigration, race, food, economics, and U.S.-Mexico relations and revealing how two seemingly disparate groups of people have come to rely on each other, how they are subject to the same global economic forces, and how, ultimately, the bridges of understanding that they have built can lead us toward a more constructive politics and a better world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The New Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781620977200

Ruth Conniff

Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner and editor-at-large and former editor-in-chief of The Progressive magazine. She has appeared on Good Morning America, C-SPAN, and NPR and has been a frequent guest on All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers (The New Press) is her first book. Conniff lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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INTRODUCTION

John Rosenow and Stan Linder, two septuagenarian dairy farmers from Western Wisconsin, are driving along a winding mountain highway in Veracruz. A snow-capped volcano, the Pico de Orizaba, Mexico’s highest peak, looms on the horizon as Stan’s Ford Transit van navigates the narrow road, past lumbering donkeys, wooden shacks with piles of charcoal for sale outside, sheep grazing on the steep hillsides, and a man with a team of oxen plowing a field in the valley below. The two farmers are here to visit the families of their Mexican workers. As Stan’s van enters the village of Astacinga, John takes out his cell phone and places a FaceTime call to his employee Roberto Tecpile, who is back on the farm in Wisconsin.

John holds the phone up to the windshield and Roberto gives Stan directions to his house, telling him where to turn as he drives through the village, the sunshine bouncing off the brightly colored houses on either side of the road. Then John flips the phone around and Roberto shows the farmers the very different landscape back in Wisconsin, where deep snow has fallen overnight. Temperatures have dropped well below zero, he tells them, panning the black and white scene. Snow is piled high on the roof of the barn.

Just then the van reaches Roberto’s place in Mexico. It’s a ranchstyle house with a bright pink, faux-brick facade surrounded by a manicured lawn that looks like a miniature golf course, with low rock walls and raised beds full of blooming roses. Roberto has been away, working in the United States, for twenty of his forty years. He has returned to Mexico a few times during that period, to get married, start a family, and then go back to the United States to continue earning money to build his house. He wants to Americanize, says John, as he gets out of the van to meet Roberto’s wife, parents, and three children, Kevin, Aaron, and Megan, whose made-in-the-U.S.A. names were bestowed on them from afar by their father.

Another vehicle pulls up behind the farmers—a crew from PBS NewsHour is following them. PBS is filming a documentary about the farmers’ decades-long relationship with their Mexican workers and their annual trips to Mexico sponsored by a nonprofit group called Puentes/Bridges, which seeks to build understanding between Midwestern dairy farmers and the Mexican workers who do much of the labor on their farms.

Kevin, Roberto’s teenage son, cannot join the group. He is tending the sheep, his family explains. But everyone else comes out to hug John. He asks Veronica, Roberto’s wife, through an interpreter, if she has a message for her husband. The kids are doing well in school and behaving themselves, she says.

Everybody really loves Roberto, John tells her, as the PBS cameras roll. He’s kind and smart and he’s the one of my employees I like the most.

But the kids really miss him, Veronica says. And Megan wants to meet her dad. Veronica was pregnant with Megan the last time Roberto left home, and he has only seen his five-year-old daughter on FaceTime.

John takes a tour of the house with Roberto’s father, Gerardo Tecpile, a small man with broken teeth, a plaid shirt, and a shredded baseball cap. It’s all concrete, Gerardo says proudly. All the houses in the area used to be made of wood, he adds. Now, little by little, we are making them with laminate and cement. Everything has changed. Gerardo is supervising the construction, buying materials and hiring builders with the money Roberto wires home from the United States.

John asks if most of the concrete houses in the area are being built by people milking cows in the United States and sending back money. Yes, Roberto’s father says. A lot of young men go up there and save. Kevin might be going next to join his father on John’s farm in Wisconsin in a couple of years, he adds.

Roberto’s mother chimes in to say that she never wanted her sons to leave. I didn’t want them to go, but their uncles took them, she says.

Kevin is eager to follow his dad to the United States, Veronica says, and has dropped out of high school. I scolded him, but he doesn’t understand, she says. I’m not going to let him go, because the border is really dangerous.

The PBS crew captures the conversation with Roberto’s wife and mother, who cry as they describe how hard it is to be separated for so many years when the men in the family leave to work in the United States. When the camera shuts off, the PBS reporter gathers the family together and, through his interpreter, encourages the children to stay in school and keep studying. That’s what their father wants, he tells them.

But Kevin, who is not there to hear the reporter’s advice, already has other plans. In less than two years he will be gone, joining his father to work on John’s farm.

In Wisconsin, where I grew up, dairy farmers have become increasingly dependent on undocumented Mexican labor as low milk prices and massive consolidation have driven a historic farm crisis across the Midwest.

Under pressure to grow their operations in order to compete with the growth of giant farms, family farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota began hiring Mexican workers about twenty years ago, as they moved from family operations with very few employees to bigger dairies that needed paid labor to handle all the cows. There were not many American workers willing to do the dirty, exhausting jobs on the farm. But Mexican workers in the area were glad to move over from seasonal agricultural jobs to full-time, year-round work on the dairies. They have now become essential. By some estimates they perform about 80 percent of the labor on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, even though, unlike seasonal agricultural workers, they cannot get a visa because their jobs are year-round. Thus, most of the people producing our nation’s milk are working illegally.

Images of red barns, green fields, and contented-looking cows jostle for space on cartons of milk, tubs of yogurt, and packages of butter and cheese in the grocery store dairy aisle. Looking at the labels, the average consumer can imagine a farmer leading a cow from the pasture into the barn, then sitting on a three-legged stool and milking her by hand, gently squirting the milk into a pail. But that nostalgic picture has little to do with the reality of modern dairy farming in the United States.

The typical U.S. dairy cow never grazes in a field at all. Instead, she lives in a huge building with a concrete floor, where she munches on a carefully monitored diet of grain and supplements. Modern dairy farms are noisy places with lots of machinery. Dairy farmworkers labor around the clock, pushing groups of cows into the milking parlor in shifts that run continuously from morning to night. The average cow produces about nine gallons of milk per day during three rotations through the milking parlor. After her teats are painted with a disinfectant, she is hooked up to a milking machine that pulls milk out of her udder and sends it flowing through pipes into a refrigerated holding tank where it is cooled. Every day, a refrigerated milk truck arrives to siphon hundreds of gallons of milk from the farm’s holding tank and carry it to a processing plant, where it is pumped into insulated silos and mixed with milk from other farms to be pasteurized, homogenized, and bottled for sale.

Feeding, pushing cows into the milking parlor, running and maintaining equipment, scraping manure, and tending to the animals and machinery is hard work that must be done every day of the year.

Meanwhile, making a living from dairy farming has become an increasingly tenuous proposition. Over the last decade, Wisconsin, which advertises itself as America’s Dairyland on state license plates, has lost nearly half of its dairy farms. The state is ranked number one in the nation for farm bankruptcies. People have been forced to sell the land that has been in their families for generations. Government programs to deal with farmer depression and suicide are a hot topic in the state Capitol.

It is startling to realize that even as dairy farms disappear— the number of dairy herds in Wisconsin dropped from 15,838 in 2004 to just 6,774 in 2021—the number of cows has stayed the same, at about 1.2 million. There are simply fewer herds. Wisconsin has stuck it out as a haven for small, family farms for a lot longer than most states, with more farms and smaller herds. But even in Wisconsin, the larger farms are quickly taking over. In 2007, nearly 80 percent of the state’s dairy cows were in herds of fewer than 500 animals, and 10 percent were in herds of over 1,000. By 2017, 27 percent were in herds of over 1,000, and the smallest farms, with fifty cows or fewer, had all but disappeared. California, which surpassed Wisconsin as the nation’s top milk producer in 1993, has more cows—1.75 million—but only about one-tenth as many farms, 83 percent of which have herd sizes over 1,000. Over the last thirty years across the country, even though milk production has risen by 50 percent, the number of dairy farms has fallen by more than three-quarters, and most cows are on farms with herd sizes well over 1,000.

The farm crisis in the United States is matched by a rural crisis in Mexico that has driven millions of subsistence farmers off their land, sending them into the cities and walking across the desert looking for work.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), en acted in 1994, changed the landscape for farmers in both the United States and Mexico. Mexico lost more than 900,000 farming jobs in the first decade after NAFTA. When cheap U.S. corn flooded the market under the trade deal, prices plummeted and Mexican farms went belly-up. Thousands of men migrated to the United States in search of jobs. Rural parts of Mexico that used to be dotted with subsistence farms have emptied out, as young people stream north to find a way to earn a living. In the United States, NAFTA accelerated the get big or get out trend touted by President Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, turning food into a commodity traded on the global market and setting off wild price fluctuations that ruined small, family farms and favored agribusiness giants.

We think NAFTA was a disaster, says John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders in Wisconsin. U.S. corn dumping basically put 2 million Mexican farmers out of business and sent them north to survive. In fact, the empty return grain cars sometimes contain Mexican immigrants—even dead ones, as our Iowa members can attest.

For many years, politicians in both major political parties in the United States have acknowledged that the U.S. immigration system is outdated and badly broken, giving rise to a shadow economy of smugglers, false identification, and millions of vulnerable illegal workers upon whom the U.S. economy depends. A comprehensive fix that recognizes this reality has proven elusive, while fear-mongering and get-tough policies proliferate. These measures have not ended undocumented immigration because they fail to address the reason people come here in the first place—demand by U.S. employers for their labor.

Undocumented workers who arrive in the United States with no legal protection face exploitation, abuse, and wage theft. Trillium Farms, an egg producer in Ohio that relied on the forced labor of teenagers smuggled in from Central America, was the subject of a federal investigation in 2018 that led to the imprisonment of several people who helped bring the teens to work long hours in filthy conditions on the company’s chicken farms. The teens lived in squalid trailers, while their earnings were seized to pay off debts to the people who smuggled them and found them jobs. Other recent exposés of rape and abuse of migrant workers reveal the vulnerability of the United States’ undocumented workforce. During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than two-thirds of undocumented immigrant laborers were essential workers in the United States. Yet racism and fear of immigrants, deliberately stoked by U.S. politicians, as well as the terror of deportation and lack of basic social supports, has made life harder for these workers, even as the United States depends on them more than ever.

Some of the stories in this book touch on abusive labor conditions, wage theft, and exploitation. But that is not my main focus. Instead, this book is a collection of interlocking life stories of people from opposite sides of the border who have been thrown together by global economic forces beyond their control. Both groups of people are under enormous pressure. And both are widely misunderstood. The divisive, anti-immigrant rhetoric now in fashion in the Republican Party, which pits rural Americans and undocumented immigrants against each other, completely misses the point that the two groups have a great deal in common.

The title of this book is Milked, and there’s no doubt that both the dairy farmers and the undocumented workers who prop up the U.S. agricultural economy are getting squeezed. But one thing that shines through in their stories is their resilience and determination not just to survive but to thrive, even in the toughest of circumstances. That’s one of the qualities that draws these hardworking people together.

Shortly after Donald Trump became president, my family and I decided to pull up stakes and move from our home in Madison, Wisconsin, to Oaxaca, Mexico, for a year. It seemed like a good time to get out of the United States, immerse ourselves in another language and culture, and get a fresh perspective on the wider world.

We moved into a house at the end of a dirt road. Avocado, lime, and mango trees grew in the yard. From our deck, we gazed out at the mountains that surrounded us. We were awakened each morning by the braying of our neighbor’s donkeys. Another neighbor played merengue music on the radio in the outdoor cookhouse across the road from us, where she made fresh tortillas. We marched in predawn religious processions and attended late-night parties where people danced with baskets of exploding fireworks on their heads.

We fell in love with the pace of life—the way neighbors would take the time to stop and strike up a conversation at the local market, the sense that spending time with people was more important than rushing off to the next appointment.

Thrown into the deep end at local schools, our three daughters were warmly welcomed and became fluent in Spanish. Their new classmates were curious, kind, and tactful about Trump, who was in the news every day, especially after he called Mexicans rapists and criminals. Don’t worry, our president is an idiot, too, one of my oldest daughter’s new friends consoled her.

It quickly became clear, during our year in Mexico, that the people we met knew a lot more about us than we knew about them. They were keenly aware, in a way that most Americans are not, of the ways in which our two countries are intertwined. A little boy in our youngest daughter’s class surprised my husband with the question: Why do you still have Texas?

Not only did Mexican kids know more about our country’s history than our kids did, almost everyone we met in Mexico had lived in the United States for a while or had family here. Mexicans know all about our two countries’ economic interdependence. They live it. People from Mexico working in the United States sent a record $36 billion home to their families in 2019, more than the petroleum-rich country took in from oil exports. That number grew even larger during the pandemic, when Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador praised Mexicans sending back money from the United States as living heroes. On the U.S. side of the border, Mexican workers prop up industries from food service to construction to agriculture.

Coincidentally, just as my family was getting ready to leave Trump’s America for Mexico, I came across a local news story with the headline: America’s Dairyland and Trump in the Rearview Mirror as Workers Return to Mexico. The article described Miguel Hernández and Luisa Tepole and their two little boys, both born in Wisconsin, packing a Honda pickup truck with all their belongings. After years of working on Doug Knoepke’s dairy farm in Pepin County, they were getting ready to make the 2,300mile drive back to Veracruz. "It looks like a scene from The Grapes of Wrath," Doug told a local reporter as he gazed at the couple’s truck, rigged up with a makeshift wooden corral in the back, piled high with black trash bags stuffed full of clothing, appliances, and children’s toys. Doug embraced Miguel warmly. After sixteen years of working together, he hated to see him go.

While living in Mexico, I became fascinated by the decadeslong relationship between the dairy farmers of Wisconsin and the rural Mexican towns that supplied them with labor. I wanted to know more about why the Mexican workers came to Wisconsin and what made them go back.

I contacted Alexandra Hall, the reporter from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism who wrote the article about Mexican workers heading home from Doug’s farm, and she put me in touch with Shaun Duvall, a high school Spanish teacher from Alma, Wisconsin, who had worked for years as an interpreter and ambassador of cultural understanding between the dairy farmers of Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Mexican workers on their farms. Shaun, a radiantly warm person with an ear for languages and a talent for friendship, was adored by the Mexican workers and the U.S. farmers alike. She had made it her life’s work to help build cross-cultural understanding and had founded the nonprofit group Puentes/Bridges, which regularly took delegations of farmers to Mexico so they could get to know the families of the people who worked for them.

To my delight, Shaun and her husband, Jamie, came over for dinner when they were visiting Oaxaca. Shaun, known affectionately in Mexico as Maestra Juanita, happily connected me with her huge network of friends on both sides of the border.

That is how this book, about the deep ties between rural people in the Midwest and Mexico, began. (In a few cases, I have changed the names of people who preferred not to be identified. All of my interviews with Mexican sources in both the United States and Mexico were conducted in Spanish, with the exception of Jaziz Hernández, who spoke to me in English.)

A year after I read the article about Luisa and Miguel moving back home to Mexico from the dairy farm in Wisconsin, I visited their hometown, San Juan Texhuacán, high in the mountains of Veracruz. The same Honda pickup truck the family had packed up and driven all the way home was parked on the street.

Miguel was at his new job, driving a taxi, when I visited as Luisa showed me the house they had nearly finished building. Standing in the garden, we were surrounded by a breathtaking view of the mountains. Clouds sailed by at eye level, crossing in front of a crazy quilt of cornfields pitched at impossible angles on the steep slopes. From the garden you could see the bright yellow colonial church in the village below.

Luisa showed me the chickens she was raising to sell, using the incubator she brought back from the States. She was growing herbs and vegetables. Pots of roses bloomed by the kitchen door.

Just before they left, the pressure of living in the United States had become unbearable, Luisa told me. After the 2016 election, people in town seemed to feel emboldened to shout insults and make nasty remarks about Mexican workers. Some men yelled ugly things at her husband in the street, telling him to go back to his own country. There was an immigration raid at the gas station in the little town of Durand, ten minutes from the farm where they lived. We were living in fear that they would grab us, and the boys would be left behind, she said. Both Luisa and Miguel grew up in Texhuacán. But they met, married, and had their children, six-year-old Thomas and four-year-old Liam, in Wisconsin.

After Miguel was pulled over while driving (the police said he threw a cigarette out the window; the family says he doesn’t smoke), their older son Thomas got very nervous. Every time we’d see the police, he would say, ‘Papa! The police! Stop! Hide!’ Luisa recalled. For their children’s peace of mind, and their own feeling of safety, Luisa and Miguel decided to move back to Veracruz. Like a lot of Mexican workers, they had not come to the United States to pursue the American Dream. Instead, they spent years earning enough money to build their dream house in Mexico. And they were glad to finally be home.

Historically, through a pattern of circular migration, many Mexicans have crossed the border and worked for a while to earn U.S. dollars, with the goal of eventually going back. Ironically, by closing down the free flow of migrants across the border, the United States increased the number of undocumented Mexicans living in this country. Beefed-up border enforcement, resulting from a moral panic over Latin American immigration, has had the unintended consequence of causing many more undocumented immigrants, the majority of whom are from Mexico, to stay and settle here, increasing their numbers from 3.5 million in 1990 to a peak of nearly 12 million by 2010.

My older son wants to go back, Luisa told me when I visited. It was hard on him when he started school in Mexico in the fall. He had lived in Wisconsin all his life, and the other kids made fun of the way he spoke Spanish. But the teacher was kind and said she would help Thomas learn Spanish and he could teach her English. As the school year drew to a close, his Spanish had improved.

And there were other benefits of being back home in Veracruz.Cousins and friends stopped by and yelled to the kids to come out and play. Back in Wisconsin, they weren’t allowed to go outside alone and they only saw their friends at school. There they spent a lot of time on TV, the tablet, the computer, Luisa said. Here they can go out with their friends and run. It’s healthier.

The food at home was healthier, too, she added. They ate the eggs her chickens laid and more fresh vegetables and fruits. But most of all, she said, We are free here.

To me the most interesting part of writing this book has been uncovering the unexpected friendships between such seemingly different groups—Midwestern dairy farmers, many of whom voted for Trump, and the undocumented immigrants they have come to depend on, appreciate, and deeply admire.

After I moved back to the United States, I joined the farmers on the Puentes/Bridges trip to Mexico in 2019. The story of that journey forms an organizing structure for this book, and I return to it in the chapters that follow as John Rosenow, Stan Linder, and Tommy Johnson travel among the villages of rural Veracruz to visit the families of workers who have been coming north for generations, keeping the dairy farms of the Midwest going and building up their villages in Mexico with the money they send home.

Dairy farmers who have visited rural Mexico describe seeing something there that they recognized from their own lives—an agrarian, communal way of life that has become endangered by rural depopulation and the decline of family farms and small towns. There is a strong sense of community in the little villages in Mexico that reminded the farmers who visited on Bridges trips of what life was like in Wisconsin fifty years ago. The first time dairy farmer Chris Weisenbeck went to San Juan Texhuacán, he arrived to see the whole community working to help construct a neighbor’s house. As he put it, It’s about neighbors helping neighbors and everybody working together. Small town Mexico, small town U.S.A.—same thing.

In some ways, Midwestern farmers have found that they have more in common with farmworkers from rural Mexico than they do with the people who live in nearby cities in their own country.

When Donald Trump appealed to the forgotten men and women of America, he was speaking to a sense of loss among rural voters who feel the rest of the country has turned its back on them, viewing them with contempt.

One of the reasons rural voters in swing states across the Midwest supported Trump was his promise to scrap NAFTA. Trump’s term in office coincided with trade wars that damaged rural economies. And the renegotiated NAFTA agreement—the USMCA—did little to address the core problems of farmers. But despite doing little to improve farmers’ overall circumstances (apart from a massive infusion of new federal aid right before the 2020 election), Trump tapped a deep sense of resentment among rural people who feel overlooked, and they voted for him again— in even bigger numbers—in 2020.

Recent election results show that the Republican Party as a whole has consolidated its hold on rural areas, while the Democratic Party has become the party of cities. The politics of resentment—the term coined by University of Wisconsin political scientist Kathy Cramer to describe rural alienation—is alive and well and a driving force in American politics. Meanwhile, neither political party has offered serious, systemic solutions to the complicated problems that afflict rural places.

The problems go much deeper than electoral politics. The story of the relationship between rural people in the United States and Mexico shines a light on some of the most urgent issues confronting all of us today: the sense of alienation in rural areas that propelled Trump into office and continues to drive our politics; our country’s rapidly changing demographics and the way a growing Hispanic population is reshaping parts of rural America; the moral panic over immigration that obscures the underlying reality of the United States’ deep economic dependence on immigrant labor; the dangerous consolidation of our food supply; the effects of climate change; and the need to rethink the way we eat, work, and live.

There’s more at stake here than the idyllic milk carton picture of red barns and happy, grazing cows. As retired dairy farmer Jim Goodman puts it, The whole model is so dependent on a few things: cheap labor, intensive chemical use, and manure being heavily spread.

As a handful of massive corporate farms manage more and more of our food supply, everyone is vulnerable to the ill effects. If something goes wrong, the whole food system could crash, and there wouldn’t be much left, says Rebecca Goodman, who, with her husband, Jim, recently sold the family’s forty-five cows. It’s a food system that doesn’t make room for calamity.

Building a more humane, resilient, and sustainable economy, in rural and urban areas alike, is an urgent matter for all of us. This book touches on global issues of existential importance to everyone on the planet. But there are more personal issues at stake, too, about how we want to live and work and our relationships to each other, our communities, and the land.

A shared set of agrarian values has helped build the relationship between dairy farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota and undocumented Mexican workers. That relationship is a hopeful sign that the toxic narrative of division and resentment that has dominated American politics in recent years doesn’t tell the whole story. As Shaun Duvall says, People are more than political labels. We have more in common than we realize. That is what this book is about.

1

ROAD TRIP TO MEXICO

These villages are sending us their best when they send their young men up north.

It was the coldest week of winter, with temperatures dropping into the double digits below zero, when Stan Linder, age seventy-six, fired up his boxy white Ford Transit van and began the long drive south to Mexico from his dairy farm in Stockholm, Wisconsin.

The news on the radio was all about the standoff in Washington, DC, over President Trump’s proposed border wall. The longest government shutdown in history, over funding