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Abstract
Each year, migrant workers from Mexico and the Caribbean travel to Canada via a bilateral agreements to provide labour essential to the agricultural sector. One destination for these workers is Niagara-on-the-Lake (NOTL), a microclimate in which labour intensive crops such as tender fruits and grapes are grown. These local crops form the basis of a significant gastrotourism industry. This industry turns on the narrative of an historical idyll in which producer and consumer share a close relationship, one manifested in the farm-to-table discourse that permeates NOTL. Yet agricultural production in the area is entirely dependent upon a globalized labour force, a dependence that is inconsistent with the narrative of locality. The structure of this transnational labour program and the requisite aesthetics of tourism in NOTL render migrant workers and their labour invisibility and this invisibility, in turn, exacerbates the precarity of transnational workers within global capitalism.
摘要
每年, 来自墨西哥和加勒比的外来工人通过一项双边协定前往加拿大, 为农业部门提供必要的劳动力。这些工人的一个目的地是尼亚加拉湖上地区(NOTL), 这里是一种小气候, 适宜种植鲜果和葡萄等劳动密集型作物。这些当地作物构成了重要的美食旅游业的基础。这一产业开启了一种历史田园诗般的叙事, 生产者和消费者之间有着密切的关系, 这种关系在弥漫于尼亚加拉湖上地区的”从农场到餐桌”的话语中得到了体现。然而, 该地区的农业生产完全依赖于全球化的劳动力, 这种依赖与地方性的叙述不尽一致。这种跨国劳工计划的结构和旅游业所必需的审美观使移徙工人及其劳动难以呈现, 而这种跨国劳动的隐形又加剧了跨国工人在全球资本主义中的不稳定性。
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the men and women who support our agriculture and who have shared their time and stories generously.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 VQA is a quality designation of wine provided by a provincial body that regulates the labelling of wines and ensures that the wines are made from grapes grown and cellared in the province. (VQA Citation2016).
2 Caribbean signatories to the program include Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines
3 Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a non-governmentally mediated program that brings agricultural workers from any country to stay and work in Canada on a two years work permit (Government of Canada, Citation2019)
4 Kayla Baumgartner was a Research Assistant for this project from April 2016 to August 2017 and visited NOTL four times to observe the townsite and to meet with workers.
5 While Niagara-on-the-Lake designates a region that includes the small towns of Virgil, Queenston, St. David’s and the Old Town, as well as rural areas, in this paper, we focus on the Old Town because it contains the vast majority of the heritage designated properties (44 of 61; Niagara-on-the-Lake, 2014); it is also the site of the Shaw Festival theatres and the Niagara Historical Museum, and is the hub of tourist services, including bike rentals and wine tours.
6 Ultimately, this application of UNESCO World Heritage designation was unsuccessful (Zettel, Citation2017)
7 Signature Kitchens is comprised of 14 restaurants in NOTL ‘commit[ted] to excellence through the use of high-quality local ingredients, a focus on outstanding VQA wines, and the delivery of professional service’ (Signature Kitchens, Citation2016).
8 In Ontario, employees’ work permits are tied to their employers. They may be transferred, with their permission, to another employer in the same sector. Transfers are also possible, though rare, in circumstances of abuse or exploitation (Contract… Citation2018). Many farm workers who labour in vineyards and orchards are transferred to either harvest apples or work in greenhouses in the fall.
9 Workers are permitted to change farms when it is agreed to by the worker and by both farm owners. In Ontario, this often happens in the fall, with workers typically transferring farms to pick apples. In 2014, remittances from Jamaican farm workers were reported to be approximately 1.7B JMD/19.7M CAD (Smith-Edwards, 2015). Annual remittance flows from all countries account for approximately 15 percent of the Jamaica’s gross domestic product (McIntosh, Citation2019).
10 In 2014, remittances from Jamaican farm workers were reported to be approximately 1.7B JMD/19.7M CAD (Smith-Edwards, Citation2015). Annual remittance flows from all countries account for approximately 15 percent of the Jamaica’s gross domestic product (McIntosh, Citation2019).
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Kristin Lozanski
Kristin Lozanski is an Associate Professor of Sociology at King’s University College at Western University in London, Canada with expertise in globalization, gender, and racialization. Her research interrogates migrant agricultural labour, transnational surrogacy, and birth tourism as disparate modes of transnational mobility to/from Canada, which overlap with reproduction, belonging, and citizenship.
Kayla Baumgartner
Kayla Baumgartner is a PhD candidate in Geography at Western University. Her research interests include migration, gender, sexuality, and the social construction of space. She is particularly interested in how LGBT migrants “queer” the migration process itself and how they adapt to new environments. Kayla is currently finalizing her PhD dissertation, which looks at spaces of belonging for lesbian migrant women in urban South Africa.