Michael and Carrie Kline, Talking Across the Lines

This is a teaser, a taste of what is in the second of our two podcasts featuring Angelique Bickford, a 26-year-old first time mother. While working in the packing shed, she fell in love with Maico, another employee on the organic farm. She learned Spanish easily to communicate with him and her fellow workers and after a period of shy courtship they decided to make a life together. Right when their baby was born, four members of their family living nearby were violently seized—the door knocked down—without a warrant or provocation, and abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, some detained, others deported. Angelique and her partner lived in fear, all the while loving their life together with their housemates and their new precious child. But soon enough, on the way to work Maico too was pulled out of the vehicle in which he was riding early one morning this spring. He too is in detention. Angelique expresses hope, a sense of calm mixed with distress and outrage, along with her own theory as to why so many of her new family members and co-workers are being seized.

Angelique Bickford is a nearly-26-year-old first time mother. She is a natural, and her three-month old daughter is calm and happy. This is remarkable given the circumstances. While working in the packing shed, she fell in love with Maico, another employee on the organic farm. They managed to embark on a special relationship despite great shyness. Right when the baby was born four members of their family living nearby were violently seized—the door knocked down—without a warrant or provocation, and abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, some detained, others deported. Angelique and her partner lived in fear, all the while loving their life together with their housemates and their new precious child. But soon enough, on the way to work Maico too was pulled out of the vehicle in which he was riding early one morning this spring. He too is in detention. Angelique expresses hope, a sense of calm mixed with distress and outrage, along with her own theory as to why so many of her new family members and co-workers are being seized.

We present this field interview with Mireya Katrina Tsironis Genius made with Carrie Kline in April of 2025. Now in her early thirties, Mireya Genius is an organic vegetable farm manager in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts. She traces her involvement in agriculture to her childhood on the Isle of Crete where her parents had settled in a small traditional village with plenty of room for vegetable farming, which soon captivated her with its possibilities. She learned to raise chickens from an elderly half-blind woman, and became watchful of older people. Her pursuit of farming eventually brought her in conflict with old Greek male farmers who found her youthful enthusiasm annoying and her interest in driving a tractor out of the question. So she finished up her studies and looked to settle in other parts of the world before landing in western Massachusetts eight years ago to make a start in commercial farming. Mireya Genius came because here she can more fully express herself. She enjoys working in a group—it makes the time pass—and she was learning new farming practices from fellow workers. “People here in the fields were speaking Spanish,” she recalled.” They called themselves ‘Hispanics’ and knew the ropes. I learned fast. I was white and bi-lingual (Spanish) and assumed to have good leadership skills. So I progressed in my employment goals, even learned to drive a tractor! ‘Here,’ they said. Go ahead.’ No discrimination.” Yet she found people in Massachusetts slow to accept her socially and suffered acute loneliness for a time, often crying in asparagus fields, wondering what she was doing here. She fell in love with the workers she was soon supervising and came to find out the divide she was feeling was widespread. She decided to try to bridge the gaps dogging her work, for instance, that United Statesians in general don’t bother to learn about other people. “They just like to get things like coffee cheap, without knowing how it is produced, or the people who produce it. The same with nameless migrants working in the hot summer sun to grow the vegetables we eat. We don’t even know their names, living situations, social needs, or the threats of deportation that presently haunt them, whether or not they are legally in our valley. Many of them come for medical reasons. They like the quality of farming life.”

Wally and Juanita Nelson were civil rights activists, peace activists, war tax refusers, subsistence farmers, and advocates for simple living. They were members of groups such as CORE (Congress on Racial Equality), FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation), and Peacemakers. In western Massachusetts they were founding members of the Greenfield Farmers' Market, the Free Harvest Supper, the Valley Community Land Trust, and Winter Fare. They were recipients of numerous awards during their lifetime, including the Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abbey in Sherborn, Mass., the Sacco and Vanzetti Award from Community Church in Boston, and the Local Hero Award from CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture) for championing local food and agriculture. (Excerpted from https://www.nelsonhomestead.org) As folklorists, gatherers of oral testimonials and audio producers, we Klines, along with production assistant Nicholas Boyer, produced an hour-long audio tapestry. This is an interweaving of many of the 25 voices we've recorded near and far under the guidance of the Nelson Legacy Project Archival Committee. Each interview averages 90 minutes. We excerpt short portions in order to weave a conversation on the themes of the Nelsons' lives—race, or the one human race, nonviolence, war tax refusal, joy, dance, land trusts and the action around the Kehler-Corner home seizure in Colrain by the IRS, the local food movement and simple living. Most all of our documentaries have music woven throughout. We created a short piece on the Nelsons called You Don't Gotta. You can hear it on the Project website where you can also enjoy a great many other audiovisual pieces and writings featuring the Nelsons.

“New Lights in the Dawnland” Recorded and Produced by Michael Kline, Talking Across the Lines, Sunderland, MA Time 2:00:08 “New Lights in the Dawnland” is a two hour audio documentary based on five individually recorded voices recounting 13,000 years of Indigenous history of Northfield and surrounding areas in Massachusetts and Vermont leading up to the arrival of English colonists in the 17th Century and the impacts of colonialism that followed. Replete with tribal songs, flute and drum interludes and ambient sounds, this conversational telling of the story creates its own imagery, to the considerable satisfaction of those whose voices are interwoven throughout.  The five narrators recorded for “New Lights in the Dawnland” spoke from memory and the heart where memory dwells without notes or prior discussions as to the intended content of their testimonials. The five voices belong to old friends who have paid increasing collective attention to their own Indigenous cultures and histories, buttressed by a decade of archaeological research of their homelands and battlefields. It is a study of the confluence of the focused efforts of the five in the service of wider understanding and inclusion – among themselves and non-Indigenous neighbors. This production, then, has it's roots in intertribal memory and legend passed through a multi-generational conduit of oral tradition. Its sources are enriched through spiritual interaction with natural surroundings, as well as, more recently, the surfacing of old letters, diaries and other written colonial records. This production does not purport to be a polished or footnoted, scholarly, historical, rendering of Squakheag's past. Library bookshelves groan with euro-centric studies which have long peddled destructive stereotypes and historical inaccuracies. The response of these narrators is a passionate reaching out in search of balance and reciprocity in the telling of a shared past as a cornerstone to peace and reconciliation. It is dedicated to the life, accomplishments and speedy recovery of Doug Harris and his devoted new wife, Genevieve Frasier.