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Coping with precarity: subsistence, labor, and community politics among farmworkers in northern Mexico

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Abstract

This article examines the precarious lives of indigenous migrant laborers in Baja California employed in the production of fresh fruits and vegetables for consumer markets in the United States. Neoliberal agrarian policies have rendered farmworkers a structurally vulnerable labor force with limited rights and benefits compared to workers in other employment sectors. To counteract government-sanctioned unions and other detrimental state policies, farmworkers have developed a multilayered agenda of individual and collective strategies for resistance, as well as labor mobilizations for independent unions. Their political struggle requires an analysis that avoids reducing them to the unidimensional category of labor and captures the close integration and synergy between labor and community organizing by which they seek to advance the full range of their rights as workers and citizens.

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Notes

  1. I have used the real names of the colonias and pseudonyms for workers.

  2. A third and comparatively smaller union is the Confederación Revolucionaria de Obreros Campesinos or CROC.

  3. For a detailed history and analysis of these transnational organizations, their leadership, and political demands and organization, see Stephen (2007), and Velasco (2005).

  4. Ethnic brokers, however, are often criticized by growers and many workers as “corrupt” for taking advantage of their position to “collect money” from the negotiating parties. For a history of conflicts among indigenous leaders in San Quintín and a cultural interpretation of their role as brokers, see Velasco’s discussion (Velasco et al. 2014: 234–239).

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Funding

This study was funded by grants from the NSF (no. 0849636) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (no. 7828).

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at Arlington, Box 19444, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA

    Christian Zlolniski

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Correspondence to Christian Zlolniski.

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Zlolniski, C. Coping with precarity: subsistence, labor, and community politics among farmworkers in northern Mexico. Dialect Anthropol 43, 77–92 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9532-7

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