A Stiles Tea this Tuesday given by journalist Richard Marosi was the first in an annual fall series called Chewing the Fat. Unlike in past years, however, this year’s series is hosted not only by the Yale Sustainable Food Program, but also by the newly created Yale Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). The series will focus on “the intersection of Racial Justice and Food” and will highlight those who are working at the nexus of these two interconnected issues.
Stiles Head Stephen Pitti, who also serves as the Founder Director for RITM, hosted nearly sixty students and community members in the Stiles House on Tuesday afternoon for the tea with Marosi. He opened the conversation with Marosi, and thoughtfully moderated throughout.
Marosi was an interesting pick to launch this fall’s series. Long-time journalist for the LA Times, he’s best known for his work on government corruption and US-Mexico border issues. The way he tells it, Marosi fell into investigative journalism almost unintentionally when he was drawn in by outrage of various stories in LA County, and then sent down to Mexico to report on the drug war of the early 2000s. Marosi seems to be a natural storyteller, and throughout the tea launched into many tales of his adventures on the border.
While all border issues are tied up with agriculture, Marosi’s work that is most tied to food issues is his 2014 series on Mexican farm laborers, which made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In four stories, Marosi depicts the dangerous and degrading conditions faced by laborers in the farm industry in Mexico, and traces their produce to the United States. At Yale, he explained that the tie to US consumers was what made the story so compelling to print, because it meant that his audience was physically connected, through the act of eating, to his subject matter.
As the tea progressed we continued to explore this question of what makes a compelling story, and Marosi’s journalistic process. Stories must expose “something new,” Marosi repeated, and also must humanize an issue while portraying it accurately. Often researching contentions issues, and doing his own investigative work has brought Marosi in contact with an enormous range of people, from smugglers in Tihuana to ICE officials, whose trust he must win over in order to hear their stories.
A journalistic culture of story-seeking and impartiality pervaded Marosi’s language. When asked about his opinion on the Syrian refugee crisis, and the parallels it has to the migration he’s witnessed, he quipped that he “shies away from opinions,” and commented on the complexity of the situation rather than offering any particular analysis. When writing about border issues, which have become so partisan and politicised this election – as Marosi mentioned despairingly with a number of allusions to Trump – nearly any statement that one could make about the border could be deemed a political statement. I wonder if the need for a semblance of journalistic impartiality has been limiting for Marosi; certainly his commentary tended towards individual narratives rather than systematic analysis.
Those gathered for the tea seemed to range in their reactions to Marosi. Many asked inquisitive questions about his process and experiences, some of which were not fully answered. One student asked about the examples of resistance or attempts to unionize he had encountered among laborers, and another asked how Marosi avoided voyeurism when writing about people with much less social and economic privilege than himself, neither of which Marosi responded substantially. Marosi was also quick to generalize about Mexico, recounting a tale of a dangerous city he had visited, overrun with drug cartels, and then generalizing by saying that “large swaths of Mexico” are completely lawless. Stephen Pitti interjected during the talk to say that the United States also struggles to enforce worker laws, perhaps gesturing to recurring problems of wage theft right here in New Haven. His interjection responded to a general sense among some that I spoke with at the talk that Marosi’s detached and absolute cynicism about Mexico was reductive, and did not adequately encompass the culpability of the United States in these complex issues. More than that, he repeatedly referred to drug cartels as savages, a word whose loaded racial history made it an uncomfortable choice for some who listened.
Despite the sometimes jarring language of Marosi’s talk, his work to expose labor and border issues has been groundbreaking, and it would have been hard not to come away with a new perspective on investigative journalism. As the Chewing the Fat Series continues, we will continue to hear from impressive speakers, many of whom will be addressing their work without the need to be “opinion-less.” Later this week, writer Michael Twitty spoke about culinary justice and the many intersecting histories of food and race in the United States. A full list of upcoming Chewing the Fat events can be found here.