The White (male) washing of the American Farmer: Dodge Ram Super Bowl Ad Edition. Via The Atlantic  with comments added by Ana Grarian

Dodge Ram turned heads with its high-production value remake of a Farms.com YouTube video, featuring conservative radio broadcaster Paul Harvey’s voice laid over beautiful photographs of Americans farmers.

The arresting images combined with the crackle of what everyone immediately recognizes as old audio made everyone at our Super Bowl party stop and watch. Dodge, I’m sure, had good demographic analysis of their audience, so they knew they could go godly with the message and encounter little backlash. So God made a farmer, and also the advertising agencies who will use him to sell trucks. Quibbles aside, I’d rather have this kind of Americana than GoDaddy’s bizarre antics.

But there’s a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge’s world, almost every farmer is a white, male, Caucasian. And that’s about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.

Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge’s ad. Here’s what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos. (and 3 females)

I couldn’t help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos? The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.

It’s true that whites are the managers of 96 percent of the nation’s farms, according to the USDA’s 2007 Census of Agriculture. But the agricultural workforce is overwhelmingly Mexican with some workers from Central America thrown in. The Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Worker Survey has found that over the last decade, around 70 percent of farmworkers in America were born in Mexico, most in a few states along the Pacific coast. This should not be news. Everyone knows this is how farms are run.

And yet when a company decided to pay homage to the people who grow our food, they left out the people who do much of the labor, particularly on the big farms that continue to power the food system. You want to tell a grand story about the glories of working the land? You want to celebrate the people who grow food? You want to expound on the positive ‘merican qualities that agricultural work develops in people? Great! What a nice, nostalgic idea!

Now, did God make Mexican farmworkers or only white farmers? Is the strength and toughness that comes from hard work God’s gift to white people only?

To borrow Ta-Nehisi Coates’ phrase, the way this ad whitewashed American farming leaves Mexican farmworkers and their children “excluded from the process of patriotism,” even though many identify as American. Almost 75 percent of foreign-born cropworkers have been in the states for more than five years. Hell, more than half of the farmworkers surveyed by the Department of Labor have been in the U.S. for more than ten years. These are members of American communities and prospective citizens.

Contrast the advertisement with what you get from Lisa Hamilton’s Real Rural project, which documented the lives of people living on California’s farms and in its small towns. It’s a better portrait of reality, though no less stirring, as you can see in the portrait below.