Fruit Left to Rot in the Fields: Farmworker Representation in Larry Levis’s “Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967”
BY NATHAN XAVIER OSORIO
“Photograph of a lone man working a tilled field, 1966.” Jon Lewis Photographs of the United Farm Workers Movement. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Larry Levis’s Swirl &Vortex culminates with a new volume, A Hotel on Fire. This recontextualized body of work, seen for the first time here in its entirety, bridges together Levis’s posthumous collections Elegy (1997, edited by Phillip Levine), The Darkening Trapeze (2016, edited by David St. John), and previously unknown poems, offering a sweeping panorama of Levis’s masterful elegiac mode in his final years.
Editor and friend of Levis, David St. John, writes in his afterword to the collected poems, “In his elegies, one feels that Levis no longer crosses borders in his poetry as much as he simply dissolves them. He moves past the checkpoints of daily convention, holding a kind of passport of otherness—not of the sublime, but something more final.” Levis’s poem, “Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967,” stands out in the early moments of A Hotel on Fire for its insistence on an unconventional materiality that dissolves the borders between reader, poetic speaker, and subject while wrestling with the historical contexts of the alienating labor struggles intensifying in the background.
The poem begins with Levis’s iconic wry voice letting us know that this isn’t a poem at all, but as the title suggests, a photograph:
I’m going to put Johnny Dominguez right here
In front of you on this page so that
You won’t mistake him for something else, . . .
Levis transforms the poem into an encounter between the reader and a photograph of Johnny Dominguez, a migrant worker and foreman who worked for Levis’s father on his family ranch in the San Joaquin Valley. The valley—an agricultural hub worked primarily by migratory and established Mexican and Mexican American communities—and the figures of Levis’s family ranch return across Levis’s work as a psychic center wherein he enacts an extreme empathy and a tremendous lyrical emotional intensity. This poem marks the opening sequence of Levis’s four-part volume, A Hotel on Fire, and alongside poems like “In 1967” and “The Orchard,” grounds us both historically and geographically.
Dated 1967, the photo at the center of Levis’s poem records the likeness of an employee of his family’s business, but also a cultural moment in the labor history of California farmworkers. That same year, an hour south of Parlier on highway 90, the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), a grassroots coalition organized by Filipino and Mexican laborers, were in the second year of the five-year long Delano Grape Strike. The successful strike, which brought increased wages, better working conditions, and unemployment insurance, produced a rich and expansive body of visual culture that illuminated the struggles and solidarities among laborers in the Central Valley and included things like illustrated posters, pamphlets, and photographs. It’s within this historical context that this brief, twenty-two line long, one stanza poem reveals its central tension: the mistaken identity of Johnny Dominguez as more—or perhaps less—than Johnny Dominguez himself.
This pamphlet published by the UFW union publicized and sought support for a boycott of non-union table grapes. From the National Archives, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The poem’s primary conceit grates against our expectations of how the poetic image accrues meaning with each new connection within the larger constellation of a poem. The poem’s argument pulls us in an opposing direction, challenging us to second guess our temptation to render Dominguez a symbolic stand-in for something other than himself. In cool and plainspoken language, Levis urges us not to mistake Dominguez as:
An idea, for example, of how oppressed
He was, rising with his pan of Thompson Seedless
Grapes from a row of vines. The band
On his white straw hat darkened by sweat, is,
He would remind you, just a hatband.
His hatband. He would remind you of that.
In the 2016 documentary on Levis, A Late Style of Fire, the poet Gerald Stern notes that Levis’s work is one of “witness and caretaking.” Like a docent in a museum, Levis’s crystalline voice creates the conditions for us to witness, quite literally, a photograph as he carefully trains our gaze through the speaker’s narrative voice. Levis’s narration presents the threat of Dominguez’s reduction into a symbol of oppression as a dilution of who he really was. Instead, Dominguez rises from the Fresno County vineyard, not as an earthly sprite or synecdoche for working class immigrants, but a man whose clothing has become visibly marked by his sweat, the embodied consequences of hard work picking grapes beneath the beating Central Valley sun.
A reverent tone begins to surge from within Levis’s precise lyric—yet, as if to temper it, the speaker reminds us that the soaked hatband is just Dominguez’s soaked hatband. This reminder is punctuated for emphasis by the poem’s shortest line and the only sequentially end-stopped lines, as if the humble possessing of a stained hat has the power to halt Levis’s poem from enacting the one-dimensional portrayal that he aims to resist. Perhaps this is the caretaking that Stern celebrates in Levis’s work. Just eighteen years old at the start of the Delano Grape Strike, Levis may have experienced the dissonance of working alongside farmworkers whose reputations were manipulated to different ends by both grassroots labor unions and agricultural corporations vying for the final word on the public image on California farming and the very real fruit of migrant labor which fed families across the country.
However, for Levis, the bodies of people like Johnny Dominguez aren’t metaphors or political battlegrounds of representation, but the real people he worked alongside and to whom his family owed their livelihood. Again, Levis dissolves the frame of the photograph not to allow us to immerse ourselves within the subjectivity of another, but to bring us close while drawing a line between the reader and the subject. Levis creates an intimate proximity that ironically preserves Dominguez’s unknowability, enacting a tender caretaking that affords Dominguez a kind of respect and privacy grounded foremost in the recognition of his humanity.
Midway through, the scope of the poem broadens to think beyond Dominguez as a symbol of oppression and instead describes his perceived “other use.” Levis writes:
As for the other use, this unforeseen
Labor you have subjected him to, the little
Snacks & white wine of the opening he must
Bear witness to, he would remind you
That he was not put on this earth
To be an example of something else, . . .
In this tense moment, Dominguez’s “unforeseen” labor highlights the power dynamics of witnessing and suggests that we engage in ways of seeing that manage to ignore the human cost at the center of the thing we claim to look at. Then, for a change, Dominguez “bears witness” on “the little / Snacks & white wine of the opening,” a world at once indebted to and exclusionary of his body. In 2025, the often ignored space of agricultural fields became newly visible in the ongoing attacks on migrant communities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Through viral social media posts of standoffs between migrant farmworkers and ICE, the public gaze is once again pulled back into the rows of artichokes and strawberries to witness how a militarized police force works violently to renounce and remove groups of migrants whose labor they have decided is no longer worth the cost of their presence. Using terse line breaks, Levis tells us that Dominguez was “not put on this earth, / To be an example of something else” as if to remind us of the danger of political spectacle and the real cost paid by farmworkers laboring to survive within a mercurial country.
As the great grandson of a farmworker who worked the groves of Orange County as part of the Bracero Program, a binational guest worker initiative between the United States and Mexico which operated from 1942 to 1964, I find solace in how Levis opens up the possibilities to know a person by foreclosing how history might transform them into a symbol that ultimately dwarfs their humanity. For the longest time, when I thought of my great-grandfather I could only think of the photos of U.S. reception centers where Braceros were fumigated with dangerous DDT to render them “clean” enough to work in our country’s fields. Levis’s elegy for Dominguez encourages us to witness the lives at the center of the documents history leaves behind more carefully and to defiantly celebrate the vastness of what makes people real.
Leonard Nadel, “A masked worker fumigates a bracero with DDT at the Hidalgo Processing Center, Texas, while others wait in line,” 1956, gelatin silver print (National Museum of American History, Archives Center, Washington, D.C.)
Levis concludes his poem:
Johnny Dominguez, he would hasten to
Remind you, in his chaste way of saying things,
Is not to be used as an example of anything
At all, not even, he would add after
A second or so, that greatest of all
Impossibilities, that unfinishable agenda
Of the stars, that fact, Johnny Dominguez.
In this final moment, the aperture of the poem opens yet again. Using the negative “not,” Levis invokes the celestial so that the arc of Johnny Dominguez begins with him rising from the earth with Thompson grapes and concludes with him likened to the stars. However, Levis tempts us with rich metaphor while cleverly dodging the problem of representation he’s carefully laid out. After all, the poem ends with Dominguez reminding us through Levis’s voice that he is not to be seen as an example of oppression or the “unfinishable agenda of the stars”—not even the fact of Johnny Dominguez himself—challenging us to sit with the unknowable reality of another’s being.
