Guest Workers

Lyrianne Gonzalez in New York is looking for Florida descendants of the federal program that brought foreign workers to farms here. The guest worker program dates back decades, and usually brought foreigners to American farms for set periods of time, and then the workers went back home. But some guest workers chose to pursue legal U.S. citizenship, and then settled in Florida and other farm states.

An anthropologist pursuing his Ph.D. at Brown University spent the past few months researching the H-2A guest worker program in Florida’s citrus...