How My Book Came to Be: #1 Alice Driver
On writing and publishing "Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company" — the first in a new, candid behind-the-scenes series.
The idea for Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company is rooted in my childhood in the Ozark Mountains. The Ozarks are the headquarters of the largest meatpacking company in the U.S., Tyson Foods. I am from Oark, a town of less than 200 people. My parents, a potter and a weaver, moved to the Ozarks in the 70s as a part of the back-to-the-land-movement. The movement was interested in sustainability, and my parents wanted to grow their own food, build their house, and make art. I grew up without a TV and spent my time reading. From earliest memory, I wanted to write.
When the pandemic arrived in 2020, I applied for funding from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) and the National Geographic Covid-19 Fund to write an article about the labor conditions for meatpacking workers at Tyson Foods. I returned to Arkansas to work on one article for the Arkansas Times with funding from the EHRP. Working in Arkansas was challenging and it is a generally hostile environment because most people in the state have some connection to Tyson money.
When I graduated from high school, my parents encouraged me to do whatever I wanted as long as I could pay for it. I applied to Berea College in rural Kentucky which was founded in 1855 to educate freed slaves and students with limited economic resources. Students work for the school in jobs ranging from landscaping to administrative positions and in exchange pay little or no tuition. I studied Spanish and English at Berea College and there met poet Nikky Finney and writer bell hooks. I became friends with CE Morgan, Jill Damatac and Bobi Conn who have all become writers. Over two decades after meeting at Berea, Jill and I share the same editor at One Signal, Alessandra Bastagli.
I graduated from Berea with no debt, but I didn’t know how to make a living as a writer. After graduation, l worked at a coffee shop and lived in a cabin in the woods in Berea that had an outhouse. I wanted to save money and figure out how to become a writer. My Spanish professors at Berea, Dr. Fred de Rosset and Dr. Margarita Graetzer, encouraged me to apply to graduate school in Spanish. I applied to the Hispanic Studies program at the University of Kentucky which would allow me to focus on Latin American literature and to become fully bilingual. I received $15,000 a year in exchange for teaching Spanish courses at the University of Kentucky.
When I finished my Ph.D. in 2011, I received a $25,000 postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico. The fellowship gave me the time to turn my dissertation into a book which was published in 2015 by the University of Arizona Press. When the fellowship ended in 2013, I had a few months of savings and decided to try freelance writing. I didn’t know a single editor and had no idea what I was doing. But I knew that if I didn’t try to make it as a writer, I would never be able to live with myself.
I spent the next decade working as a bilingual freelance writer based in Mexico City, eventually working for National Geographic, Time, and other dream publications. In 2013, my mom began volunteering in rural Arkansas with Karen refugees from Myanmar, most of whom worked at Tyson Foods. I thought of writing about them, but at the time editors weren’t interested in the topic. I wanted to write more books, but I didn’t know how to get an agent.
While working on that article, I got Covid and spent a month in bed sleeping about 15 hours a day. During that time, I could not work and ran out of savings. I ended up moving in with my parents, and as workers continued to die and receive insurmountable medical bills, I wanted my writing to do them justice. There were many moments where I thought I would not be able to continue with the work because it was harrowing.
When the pandemic arrived in 2020, I applied for funding from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project (EHRP) and the National Geographic Covid-19 Fund to write an article about the labor conditions for meatpacking workers at Tyson Foods. I returned to Arkansas to work on one article for the Arkansas Times with funding from the EHRP. Working in Arkansas was challenging and it is a generally hostile environment because most people in the state have some connection to Tyson money.
In July, I found out that I had received funding from National Geographic, which was when meatpacking workers began to die of Covid. I hired Arkansas photographer Liz Sanders to work with me, and her photos of workers form a powerful, poetic part of my project. While working on that article, I got Covid and spent a month in bed sleeping about 15 hours a day. During that time, I could not work and ran out of savings. I ended up moving in with my parents, and as workers continued to die and receive insurmountable medical bills, I wanted my writing to do them justice. There were many moments where I thought I would not be able to continue with the work because it was harrowing. The New York Review of Books published the article funded by National Geographic in April 2021.
Within a week, several book editors wrote me to encourage me to submit a book proposal. Around that same time, Kirsty McLachlan, an agent in London, contacted me via Twitter. She encouraged me to write the book proposal, which I worked on for nine months. The proposal sold at auction with five publishing houses bidding on it which was a complete surprise to me. I had no expectations that the book would sell or that I would receive enough money to cover my living costs while writing it.
In practical terms, reporting this book involved following a group of poultry processing workers at Tyson Foods for four years. I like long-term, immersive projects, and I reported most of this book in Spanish. I spent a lot of time driving around Arkansas to interview workers in poultry towns like Springdale, the headquarters of Tyson, Green Forest, and Rogers. I conducted interviews in-person, often sitting in the kitchen with poultry workers from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Arkansas is one of several states that have strong Ag-gag laws which prevent anyone from entering a meatpacking facility with the purpose of writing about, photographing or otherwise documenting labor conditions. I never set foot on Tyson Foods property nor saw the inside of a poultry plant.
Workers are afraid of retaliation if they speak about labor conditions publicly. They voiced being afraid of being fired and blacklisted from getting another job in Arkansas if they spoke to a journalist. The only workers in my book identified by their real names are either dead or no longer work at Tyson.
Tyson Foods is a force in Arkansas, and workers are afraid of retaliation if they speak about labor conditions publicly. They voiced being afraid of being fired and blacklisted from getting another job in Arkansas if they spoke to a journalist. The only workers in my book identified by their real names are either dead or no longer work at Tyson. When workers started to become infected with and dying of Covid, with many reporting that they were asked to continue working after testing positive, they wanted justice for the dead. Venceremos, an Arkansas organization directed by Magaly Licolli and co-founded with 16 immigrant women poultry workers, provided a safe space for workers to organize for justice. In 2022, I traveled with Venceremos and Arkansas poultry processing workers to Florida to visit the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). The CIW, like Vencermos, is a worker-led organization, and it has successfully helped implement safer labor conditions for agricultural workers for over two decades. I wanted my book, despite the difficult subject matter, to tell the story of workers organizing to demand safer labor conditions. My hope is that people who read my book will be inspired by the immigrants and refugees, including undocumented people and children, who form the backbone of our food system.
After I turned in the book manuscript in 2024, it went through an independent fact-check. After responding to the fact-checker, I sent the manuscript to the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic. I spent several months going through a legal review with professors at the First Amendment Clinic. This book represents the past four years of my life, and I am thankful to the workers, labor organizers, residencies, writers, lawyers, fact-checkers, editors, and photographers who have supported me.
Read the whole “How My Book Came to Be” series.
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This is heartbreaking and inspiring. Alice, thank you for your service to humankind and all the work you've done to provide a voice for the voiceless. Our industrial ag system is so embedded with and founded on cruelty -- both to animals and humans. I am in awe of your persistence and courage in creating this book. BIG bravo to you!
Thank you for all your work on behalf of workers and for sharing it in this article. Congratulations on publishing your book!