Milpa and strawberries: food justice, labor, and the place of Mexican immigrant farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley (original) (raw)
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Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment, 2020
Immigrants—especially those from farmworker or campesino backgrounds—have gained attention as promising recruits for a new generation of sustainable farmers. Nonprofits promoting this aspirational vision of food justice link sustainability to empowered workers and communities of color, and to the preservation or revival of (agri)cultural traditions. I present findings from ongoing research showing that Oregon nonprofit food sovereignty initiatives training Mexican immigrant farmers have achieved successes as cultural, community building, and educational programs, but have struggled to produce viable farm businesses. I contrast these farmers with the less ecologically oriented and less self-consciously “cultural” immigrant farmers who work without organizational support in the same region, and who find an aspirational agrarian good life in more conventional agricultural practices. I argue that activist and academic formulations of food sovereignty linking peasant heritage, sustainability, labor rights, and immigration justice may lead scholars to overstate immigrant farmers’ actual propensity for "alternative" agriculture and ignore those immigrant farmers who fail to conform to this ideal.
Agribusiness and Mexican Farm Worker Families in Washington State 1964 2013
My dissertation examines the different ways that Mexican-origin farm worker households are racialized and integrated into the U.S. capitalist economy and rural society. There has been an exponential increase of Mexican-origin farm worker households in Washington State since 1976, Mexican populations in rural Washington have doubled and sometimes even tripled between the 1980 and 2010 U.S. Census. This demographic change in the make up of rural society has come with varying effects upon race consciousness for Mexican-origin farm worker households. My findings supported my hypothesis that early generations of Tejano or northern Mexico migrants had a different experience of racialization than migrant workers from central Mexico after the end of the Bracero program, and that these experiences differed from the experiences of indigenous, Triqui and Mixteco-speaking migrant workers from southern Mexico beginning in the 1990s after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The settlement of immigrant communities in rural areas in each of these waves of migration has had a profound influence upon each segment of agricultural worker’s experience of race consciousness, racialization, and xenophobic violence as they faced white supremacy of both the U.S. and Latin American varieties. The different degrees of integration of this diaspora into a new racial state has served to maintain a tiered wage system via renewed experiences of racial profiling, hyper-criminalization, surveillance and segregation in particular along the northern border. Basing my dissertation project upon studies that addressed Mexican farm labor in U.S. capitalist agriculture, primarily in California. I conducted a long-term in situ ethnography, collected oral histories and used archival research methods to systematically document two strategies used by Sakuma Bros. Farms and Broetje Orchards to deal with the increased demand for labor in Washington State: a transnational system used in Berry picking and a company town system used in Apple production. My investigation paid close attention to whether or not these large vertically integrated agricultural firms were able to stabilize their respective labor force, whether they have been successful in reproducing a future labor force, and whether or not each strategy of organization was sustainable for both the growers and the farm worker households. I observed the everyday lived experience of Mexican-origin farm worker households articulated and/or integrated into each of these systems. I was able to document the everyday struggles, losses and triumphs of Mexican-origin labor-power at its conjuncture with capitalist agricultural modes of production in Washington State. One group of workers engaged a series of strikes and a launched a consumer boycott. The second set of workers engaged in more subtle negotiations of power with their employer. For the sake of making farmworker agency more visible I conclude my project with a historical context of farmworker struggles in the region.
As White farmers in the United States retire en masse, the racial and ethnic demographics of US farming are shifting to now include a significant number of Latino farm owner-operators. Yet this population of new farmers, contributing specific technical expertise and knowledge, is not represented in current discussions concerning agrarian transitions. This paper draws on interview-based research conducted in the states of California, Maryland, New York, Minnesota and Washington, with first-generation Latino immigrant farmworkers who have transitioned to farm ownership. The majority are practicing small-scale and diverse crop production, with limited synthetic inputs and mostly family labor, as this form of farming allows them to reclaim control over their own labor and livelihoods, while also earning a cash income. The farmers included in this study, and their rationale for farming despite race- and citizenship-based challenges, cannot be understood simply through a lens of class transition. This contribution provides evidence that Latino immigrants’ ascendancy to farm ownership is instead a result of their struggle to redefine their relationship to land and labor in a countrywhere their race and citizenship status have relegated them to the working poor.
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This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers’ inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low-income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers’ place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class-based and racial differences in the food system.
Migrations of Hunger and Knowledge: Food Insecurity and California's Indigenous Farmworkers
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This dissertation explores two elements of farmworker food insecurity in California, the structural conditions of food insecurity, and the use of immigrant/cross-border agricultural and culinary knowledge as coping strategies. The first component, structural and systemic causes for farmworker food insecurity, investigates how farmworker food insecurity is linked to international trade and immigration policies, as well as the historical exploitation of people of color in California's agricultural sector. Rather than simply chronicle a story of exploited laboring bodies, I expand upon on this narrative, exploring the ways that indigenous Oaxacan farmworkers, who for the most part come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their embodied agricultural and nutritional knowledge. I explore the linkages between their place in the food system as both producers and consumers, as they are simultaneously exploited for their ...
Pondering farmworker justice: The visible and invisible borders of social change
Farmworkers play an integral part in both industrial and alternative agriculture, and in recent years the alternative agriculture and farmworker justice movements have been collaborating in more fruitful ways. These collaborations are applauded and are definite steps in the right direction; however, unlike many members of the alternate agriculture community, many farmworkers are discriminated against for their race, class, and citizenship status. These realities endure in that 25% to 50% of farmworkers are estimated to be undocumented individuals, new destinations for new farmworkers are often in states with tight immigration policies, and much of our immigration debate is based on a rhetoric of individual choice. As these types of partnerships become more common, power relations must be addressed and shifted if we wish to see more equal participation from both parties. This commentary outlines a framework for change at all levels of governance, and specifically expresses five ways in which the alternative agriculture movement can begin to shift power associated with race, class, and citizenship, and therefore create and maintain stronger partnerships with the farmworker community. These shifts will not happen overnight and will only occur if we work collaboratively to insist on a more transparent global capitalist system, advocate for immigration laws that are not based on fear, implement local food programs that include farmworker participation and input, and create new organizational policies that encourage individual voice and agency.
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The Jeffersonian narratives about food and farming that dominate the food movement in the United States too often obscure immigrants’ crucial role in US food production. This paper examines the narrative strategies that reveal and obscure immigrant workers’ connections to food by analyzing two popular texts about food and farming: Michael Pollan’s non-fictional The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and Helena María Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). Pollan’s focus on the relationship between farm and fork often erases workers’ visibility in the systems he describes. Viramontes’s novel offers a useful corrective as the text imagines the lives of farm workers, emphasizing the workers’ humanity to oppose the criminalization of farm workers. Reading the two works side-by-side suggests the limitations of a contemporary food movement oriented too heavily towards the consumer and asserts the possibilities of a food justice movement emphasizing workers’ and immigrants’ rights.