Migrant farm workers have been coming to Nebraska’s Panhandle for more than 100 years. Arriving in late spring, they would work the fields. Using hoes, they would thin and weed the sugar beet crops.

Clouds of lung-choking dust would rise from the back roads as truckloads of migrants were shuttled to farm fields. Staying until late September or early October, they harvested the crops. Today the dust is gone; the fields are all but empty, except for the crops; each spring the cavalcade of migrants, traveling along the highways from Texas and Mexico heading for Nebraska, has diminished.

Round-up ready sugar beets, which now weeds and thins the crop, has almost eliminated the need for migrant farm workers.

The purpose of this documentary photography project is to record, both visually, using still and video photography, and through the use of audio, the lives of migrant farm workers and the lives of subsequent generations of migrants who have settled in the area.

Thank you for visiting,
Bruce Thorson, associate professor
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
College of Journalism and Mass Communications

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