Abstract
This article discusses the system of export agriculture in northern Mexico and its impact on transnational farmworkers employed in both sides of the US–Mexico border. Since the late 1990s, a transnational industry producing fresh produce for consumer markers in the USA has taken hold in the San Quintin Valley in Baja California, transforming the economic and social fabric of this border region. This industry has generated a new labor regime predicated upon the employment of a flexible and cheap source of indigenous workers from the poorest states in southern Mexico. I examine the contours of this regime, the forms of labor resistance it has elicited, and the new types of labor migration it has generated by Mexican workers to the USA. As I show, indigenous farm laborers engage in novel forms of labor and political protests to claim for their rights. These developments, I argue, speak of the class formation of transnational farmworkers who, mobilizing local and transnationally, combine traditional labor demands with wider claims for their civil and political rights.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Ethnographic fieldwork was funded by grants from Mexico’s CONACYT, and the NSF and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
The Agrarian Reform Law of 1992 was another central element of the neoliberal policy assemblage. The reform privatized formerly communal ejido lands, making it easier for international companies to buy or rent land for commercial agriculture, especially in the northern states that could readily export fresh produce to the USA and Canada.
References
Alonso-Fradejas, Alberto. 2015. Anything but a story foretold: multiple politics of resistance to the agrarian extractivist project in Guatemala. Journal of Peasant Studies 42 (3–4): 489–515.
Arcury, Thomas A., and Sara A. Quandt. 1998. Occupational and environmental health risks in farm labor. Human Organization 57 (3): 331–334.
De Grammont, Hubert Carton, and Sara Ma. Lara Flores. 2010. Productive restructuring and ‘standardization’ in Mexican horticulture: consequences for labour. Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (2): 228–250.
Domínguez, Juan Carlos. 2015. Rebelión en San Quintín. PRO, March 21, http://www.proceso.com.mx/399069/399069-rebelion-en-san-quintin
Echánove Huacuja, Flavia. 2001. Working under contract for the vegetable agroindustry in Mexico: a means of survival. Culture and Agriculture 23 (3): 13–23.
Fischer, Edward F., and Peter Benson. 2006. Broccoli & desire: global connections and Maya struggles in postwar. Guatemala: Stanford University Press.
Gertel, Jörg, and Sarah Ruth Sippel. 2014a. Seasonality and temporality in intensive agriculture. In Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture: The social costs of eating fresh, ed. Jörg Gertel and Sarah Ruth Sippel, 3–22. London: Routledge.
Gertel, Jörg, and Sarah Ruth Sippel. 2014b. Epilogue: the social costs of eating fresh. In Seasonal Workers in Mediterranean Agriculture: The social costs of eating fresh, ed. Jörg Gertel and Sarah Ruth Sippel, 246–252. London: Routledge.
Gonzalez, Humberto. 2014. Specialization on a global scale and agrifood vulnerability: 30 years of export agriculture in Mexico. Development Studies Research 1 (1): 295–310.
Griffith, David. 1987. Nonmarket Labor Processes in an Advanced Capitalist Economy. American Anthropologist 89: 838–852.
Griffith, David. 2014. Managing and Mismanaging Migration: An Introduction. In (Mis)managing Migration: Guestworkers’ Experiences with North American Labor Markets, ed. David Griffith, xi-xxxii. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Harvey, David. 2010. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hernández-Romero, Manuel Adrián. 2012. Nothing to learn? Labor learning in California’s farmwork. Anthropology of Work Review XXXIII (2): 73–88.
Holmes, Seth M. 2013. Fresh fruits, broken bodies. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Horton, Sarah Bronwen. 2016. They leave their kidneys in the fields: illness, injury, and illegality among U.S. farmworkers. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hoy. 2016. Sindicato de jornaleros en San Quintín es reconocido por el gobierno de Baja California. Los Angeles, Jan 12, 2016. http://www.hoylosangeles.com/noticias/mexico/hoyla-mex-sindicato-de-jornaleros-en-san-quintn-es-reconocido-por-el-gobierno-de-baja-california-20160112-story.html
Lara Flores, Sara Ma. 1996. Mercado de Trabajo Rural y Organización Laboral en el Campo Mexicano. In Neoliberalismo y Organización Social en el Campo Mexicano, ed. Hubert C. de Grammont. México: Plaza y Valdes.
Lara Flores, Sara Ma. 2006. El trabajo en la agricultura: un recuento sobre América Latina. In Teorías sociales y estudios del trabajo: nuevos enfoques, ed. Enrique de la Garza Toledo, 323–343. Barcelona: Anthropos.
Lara Flores, Sara Ma., and Kim Sánchez Saldaña. 2015. En búsqueda del control: enganche e industria de la migración en una zona productora de uva de mesa en México. In Asalariados Rurales en América Latina, ed. Alberto Riella and Paola Mascheroni, 73–94. Uruguay: CLACSO.
Llambi, Luís. 1994. Comparative advantages and disadvantages in Latin American nontraditional fruit and vegetable exports. In The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems, ed. Philip McMichael, 190–213. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Marosi, Richard. 2015. Farmworkers in Baja California protest low pay, poor conditions. Los Angeles Times, March 18. http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-baja-farmworkers-20150318-story.html
Martin, Philip. 2014. The H-2A program: evolution, impacts, and outlook. In (Mis)managing Migration: Guestworkers’ Experiences with North American Labor Markets, ed. David Griffith, 33–62. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
McMichael, Philip. 1994. Introduction: agro-food system restructuring—unity in diversity. In The Global Restructuring of Agro-Food Systems, Philip McMichael, 1–18. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Muller, Birgit. 2010. My own boss? Strategies of resistance and accommodation of rural producers to neoliberal governance. Antropologica 52: 233–236.
Narotzky, Susana. 2016. Where have all the peasants gone? Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 301–318.
Ortiz, Sutti. 2002. Laboring in the factories and in the fields. Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 395–417.
Ortiz, Sutti, Susana Aparicio, and Nidia Tadeo. 2013. Dynamics of harvest subcontracting: the roles played by labour contractors. Journal of Agrarian Change 13 (4): 488–519.
Paciulan, Melissa, and Kerry Preibisch. 2013. Navigating the productive/reproductive split: Latin American transnational mothers and fathers in Canada’s temporary migration programs. Transnational Social Review 3 (2): 173–192.
Palerm, Juan Vicente. 2014. An inconvenient persistence: agribusiness and awkward workers in the United States and California. In Hidden Lives and Human Rights in the United States: Understanding the Controversies and Tragedies of Undocumented Immigration, ed. Lois A. Lorentzen, vol. 3, 55–119. Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Preibisch, Kerry. 2014. Managed migration and changing workplace regimes in Canadian agriculture. In (Mis)managing Migration: Guestworkers’ Experiences with North American Labor Markets, ed. David Griffith, 83–106. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Preibisch, Kerry, and Gerardo Otero. 2014. Does citizenship status matter in Canadian agriculture? Workplace health and safety for migrant and immigrant laborers. Rural Sociology 79 (2): 174–199.
Raynolds, Laura T. 1994. Institutionalizing flexibility: a comparative analysis of Fordist and post-Fordist models of third-world agro-export production. In Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, ed. Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, 143–162. Westport: Grenwood Press.
Rogaly, Ben. 2008. Intensification of workplace regimes in British horticulture: the role of migrant workers. Population, Space, and Place 14: 497–510.
Silverman, Stephanie J., and Amrita Hari. 2016. Troubling the fields: choice, consent, and coercion of Canada’s seasonal agricultural workers. International Migration 54 (5): 91–104.
Syring, David. 2009. La Vida Matizada: time sense, everyday rhythms, and globalized ideas of work. Anthropology and Humanism 43 (2): 119–142.
Velasco, Laura, Christian Zlolniski, and Marie-Laure Coubes. 2014. De Jornaleros a Colonos: Residencia, Trabajo e Identidad en el Valle de San Quintín. México: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte.
Wells, Miriam J. 1996. Strawberry fields: politics, class, and work in California agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wright, Angus. 2005. The Death of Ramón González. The Modern Agricultural Dilemma. Austin: The University of Texas Press (rev edition).
Zlolniski, Christian. 2011. Water flowing north of the border: export agriculture and water politics in a rural Community in Baja California. Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 565–588.
Zlolniski, Christian. 2017. Growers, Unions, and farm laborers in Mexico’s Baja California. In Uncertain Time: Anthropological Approaches to Labor in a Neoliberal World, ed. E. Paul Durrenberger, 209–232. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zlolniski, C. Export agriculture, transnational farmworkers, and labor resistance in the Mexico–US borderlands. Dialect Anthropol 42, 163–177 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9491-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9491-z