Who said you can’t get an opinion across through social media and not get noticed? Case in point: The Ram Trucks “So God Made a Farmer” Super Bowl commercial that we wrote about late Sunday night after a few of our fans posted their opinions on our Facebook wall and asked us to share our thoughts. We did. The story went viral.
The next day, our founder wrote an op-ed piece for NBC Latino. That went viral, too.
In addition, we received several user-generated videos that wanted to show Ram Trucks another perspective of farming in the United States. Those went viral as well, especially the one video we co-branded with our friends at Cuéntame.
Last night on MSNBC’s The Last Word, that video we did with Cuéntame led a segment on Eric Cantor and the GOP’s rebranding. Here it is.
Yes, but there’s a big difference between a farmer and a farmworker. I was a migrant farmworker from the age of 9 through my first year of college, but I’ve never been a farmer. (Not that I wouldn’t have liked to have been a one. – As a kid I used to dream of someday being a farmer. But, I went in another direction.) And, while, yes, there certainly are many latino farmers, (people who actually own and/or run the farm), your “fixing” of the ad missed the point altogether when you focused almost entirely on farmworkers rather than on farmers. I do agree that latinos were totally excluded when there are, in fact, many farmers who happen to be hispanic. And, of course, the great majority of farmworkers in this country today are hispanos. (The Dodge ad does include one picture of a black farmer. – Seems like they could have found at least one hispano to include also.)
Either way, I liked and enjoyed the ad (the original one): It’s well made and it features Paul Harvey, one of my all-time favorite radio personalities. And, if we dissect it, scrutinize it, analyze it, and evaluate from a/an ethnic/political/social approach, I think we might all be missing the point of the overall presentation of the ad: a beautiful portrait of an American worker – the farmer.
[…] rights groups Cuéntame and Latino Rebels challenged the obfuscation of this narrative with their parody of the Dodge Ram Farmer Superbowl […]