Harvest Pilgrims: Mexican and Caribbean Migrant Farm Workers in Canada

• Vincenzo Pietropaolo
• Between the Lines; 2009
• Paperback; 144 pages
• 9781897071540

Like migratory birds, most of Canada's 20,000 "guest" farm workers arrive in the spring and leave in the autumn. Hailing primarily from Mexico, Jamaica, and smaller countries of the Caribbean, these temporary workers have become entrenched in the Canadian labour force and are the mainstay of many traditional family farms in Canada. Many of them make the trip year after year after year.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo has been photographing guest workers and recording their stories since 1984 - in the process travelling to forty locations throughout Ontario and to their homes in Mexico, Jamaica, and Montserrat. The resulting photographs have been highly acclaimed internationally through many publications and exhibitions, including a travelling show curated by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography that opened in Mexico City.

With a foreword by Naomi Rosenblum, this beautiful and timely book of photography and exposition aims to shed light on a subject about which many Canadians know all too little.


Vincenzo Pietropaolo is an award-winning photographer whose work has been widely published in Canada and abroad. An Italian-Canadian, he and his family immigrated to Canada in 1959. He is the author of Celebration of Resistance: Ontario's Days of Action (1999) and Not Paved with Gold: Italian-Canadian Immigrants in the 1970s (2006).