By Janelle Faignant
Arts Correspondent
Several years ago, Julia Doucet, a nurse at a free clinic, and her colleagues noticed a common thread among some of the patients coming in. They were some of the more than 1,200 migrant workers from Latin America working on Vermont dairy farms.
“The young men and women who are working in our county’s dairies leave their families, their language, and culture and come up here and live in rural Vermont,” Doucet said. “Their focus is on providing for their families back home, which they left out of necessity due to economic hardships.”
“About 50% of the patients that we see are immigrants or workers from Latin America,” she added.
General healthcare needs of Vermont’s migrant farm workers are most often met by free clinics like the Open Door Clinic. Mental health issues — depression, anxiety, substance abuse — resulting from isolation, trauma, loneliness and other factors, are common.
“We were seeing people coming in with chronic issues — stomach pain, headaches, fatigue — all sorts of physical symptoms. The doctor would do testing to rule out anything serious and it soon became evident that these were manifestations of their mental state,” Doucet said by phone recently.
“Often they don’t have access to transportation, and all they’re really doing is going to work, to home, to work, to home and there’s not a lot of anything else to their lives,” she explained. “There’s a lot of loneliness, a lot of isolation, a lot of desperation.”
But the stigma around mental health left her trying to find a “back door” to address the issues in a way that was embraced.
Doucet spoke with the director of counseling at Middlebury College at the time, who emphasized the power in people telling their stories. Then Doucet was in her car listening to VPR and heard a story about a comic school in White River Junction, and a “light bulb went on.”
“If we could collect people’s stories anonymously and share them,” she said, “the workers (would) realize they aren’t alone.”
“This is a totally hidden story that most people who live all their lives in New England don’t realize is going on,” artist Marek Bennett said.
Doucet partnered with the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, and Bennett, a New Hampshire cartoonist, and began pairing migrant storytellers with regional cartoonists.
The workers told their stories in Spanish, they were recorded, transcribed, translated into English, and given to the cartoonists. The artists illustrated the stories and brought them back to the storyteller, who could then give feedback.
The result is a new non-fiction graphic novel called “The Most Costly Journey” — a collaboration between the Latin American migrant workers, the Open Door Clinic, Vermont Folklife Center, UVM Extension Bridges to Health, UVM Anthropology, and Marek Bennett’s Comics Workshop.
It’s a collection of personal, moving accounts of these immigrants who are vital to the state’s economy and creating the food we eat.
The stories were told simply — with drawings and captions made from breaking down the stories into bite-size pieces. Some of them have titles like “A Heart Split in Two,” “One Suffers to Provide for the Family,” “Far From My Family,” and “It’s Worth It.”
In one titled “Something Inside,” a man says, “In order to not feel alone I have focused myself on that which is art … Because many of us feel alone, what is the least we do? It’s to fall into a vice — to succumb to alcohol. That damns us. I tell you to keep from having bad thoughts I take up (or make myself do) some sort of artwork. Art has filled me with much spirit.”
Bennett said the cause and the artwork “are inseparable.”
“It gives us a perspective into those lives and it gives the storytellers something they can share with their families and their community here,” he said.
Bennett drew the graphic art for three different stories in the book. They each started with a transcript from an interview at the clinic. From that, he worked up a draft that was submitted to the storyteller, who made suggestions and remarks. Bennett then re-drew the story to reflect the truer depiction of it.
Each artist had their own different ways of creating the illustrations and Bennett says that’s part of what makes the book special.
“When you flip through it, every eight pages or so is a totally different world created,” he explained. “Some did it digitally, some did it by hand, some did a mix.”
Bennett drew his illustrations by hand using pencil and ink on paper. “I used very simple office supply pens and pencils. Nothing too fancy. Then I scanned them into the computer.”
“This kind of book wouldn’t work to have one artist interviewing people and drawing all their stories,” he added. “It really needs that variety. It’s a visual indication of how different all the storytellers are, and yet the themes are common between all the stories.”
In one case the storyteller thought the way that Bennett had drawn a sequence of events made it seem like it happened slowly, when it really happened quickly. That feedback was given to Bennett, who re-drew it to portray a more accurate picture.
“It was about watching a woman die who had been bitten by a snake,” Doucet said. The drawing helped the laborer realize that in that moment, there was no time to think. Telling his story and seeing it visually helped him understand that he couldn’t have done anything differently.
“The biggest impact was on the people who shared their stories,” Doucet said. “To see it separate from themselves really helped them come to terms with some really traumatic experiences.”
janellefaignant @gmail.com
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