From Fields of Power to Fields of Sweat: the dual process of constructing temporary migrant labour in Mexico and Canada

Abstract

This article examines the social construction of migrant labour forces through an analysis of the exterior and interior conditioning in an agricultural contract labour programme between Mexico and Canada. I argue that forms of exterior conditioning, especially employers' point-of-production control, establishes the context within which migrant workers' experience unfolds, for which reason it contributes to their ‘interior conditioning’. But I argue as well that the result is shaped by workers' employment of a ‘dual frame of reference’ through which they gauge Canadian wages and working conditions the only way they can, which is in relationship to Mexican ones. Given that neoliberal policies have reduced the options available in Mexico, and diminished the attractiveness of those that remain, contract labour in Canada presents one of the few opportunities many poor, rural Mexicans have to acquire the income necessary for a minimally dignified life. Consequently most workers in this programme do everything possible to please their employers and continue in the programme.

Notes

I am indebted to Marcus Taylor for several helpful suggestions.

1 But see Cohen's critique of this concept in R Cohen, The New Helots: Migrants in the New International Division of Labour, Aldershot: Avebury, 1987, pp 223–241.

2 S Castles, ‘The guest-worker in western Europe—an obituary’, International Migration Review, 20 (4), 1986, pp 761–778. See also Cohen, The New Helots.

3 A Portes & B Roberts, ‘The free-market city: Latin American urbanization in the years of the neoliberal experiment’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 40 (1), 2005, pp 43–82.

4 D Harvey, Imperialism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.

5 Calderón is cited in D Bacon, ‘Displaced people: NAFTA's most important product’, NACLA , 41 (5), 2008, p 26.

6 Ibid.

7 See I Ness, ‘Forging a migration policy for capital: labor shortages and guest workers’, New Political Science, 29 (4), 2007, pp 429–452.

8 Cohen, The New Helots, pp 187–188.

9 R Waldinger & MI Lichter, How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

10 I thank Marcus Taylor for this phrasing.

11 J Lechuga Montenegro, La Estructura Agraria de México: Un análisis de largo plazo, México, DF: UAM-Azcapotzalco, 2006.

12 S Zermeño, ‘Desolation: Mexican agriculture and campesinos in the 21st century’, NACLA , 41 (5), 2008, pp 28–32; and R Madueño Paulett, ‘El campo mexicano en el proyecto de nación’, in A Sánchez Albarrán (ed), El Campo No Aganta Más, Mexico, DF: Miguel Ángel Porrúa and UAM-Azcapotzalco, 2007, pp 139–185.

13 See José Luis Seefoo (ed), Desde los colores de maíz: una agenda para el campo mexicano, Zamora: Colegio de Michoacán, 2008.

14 Cited in Zermeño, ‘Desolation’, p 30.

15 M Estrada Iguíniz (ed), 1995 Familias en la crisis, Mexico, DF: Antrologías Ciesas, 1999; M Gonzalez de la Rocha, ‘From the resources of poverty to the poverty of resources’, Latin American Perspectives, 28 (4), 2001, pp 72–100; and S Wiggins, N Keilbach, K Preibisch, S Proctor, G Rivera Herrejón & G Rodríguez Muñoz, Changing Livelihoods in Rural Mexico, Research Report DFID–ESCOR Grant R6528, Department of Food and Agricultural Economics, University of Reading, 1999.

16 On Barkin's views, see D Barkin, ‘The reconstruction of a modern Mexican peasantry’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 30 (1), 2002, pp 273–290; and S Hamilton, BR DeWalt & D Barkin, ‘Household welfare in four rural Mexican communities: the economic and social dynamics of surviving national crises’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 19 (2), 2003, pp 433–462. For a summary of the impact of government reforms on rural areas, see D Bacon, ‘Displaced people’.

17 V Satzewich, Racism and the Incorporation of Foreign Labour: Farm Labour Migration to Canada since 1945, New York: Routledge, 1991; and Satzewich, ‘Unfree labour and Canadian capitalism: the incorporation of Polish war veterans’, Studies in Political Economy, 28 (Spring), 1989, pp 89–110.

18 V Satzewich, ‘Business or bureaucratic dominance in immigration policymaking in Canada: why was Mexico included in the Caribbean Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program in 1974?’, International Migration and Integration, 8, 2007, pp 255–275.

19 This amnesia also contributes to the racialisation of Mexican contract workers, essentialised culturally and compared favourably with Canadian workers judged less capable (subjectively if not objectively) of performing stoop labour. On employers' evaluation of workers' reliability, see T Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes: Transmigrant Mexican Harvesters in Canada, Montreal: Mcgill-Queen's University Press, 2002.

20 N De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and ‘Illegality’ in Mexican Chicago, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, p 8.

21 Innumerable variables may affect the outcome: enterprise size, its economic situation, the depth and valence of personal relations between employer and employee, etc.

22 D Rodríguez, ‘Experiencias de un migrante: relatos etnográficos’, BA thesis, Autonomous University of Tlaxcala, 1993, pp 74–75.

23 W Cornelius, ‘The structural embeddedness of demand for immigrant labor: new evidence from California’, in MM Suarez-Orozco (ed), Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspective, Cambridge, MA: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 1999, pp 113–144; and D Griffith, American Guestworkers: Jamaicans and Mexicans in the US Labor Market, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.

24 ‘Caught between a rock and a hard place’.

25 Interview, Mexican Consulate, Toronto, 29 August 2003.

26 G Verduzco & MI Lozano, ‘Mexican farm workers’ participation in Canada's seasonal agricultural labor market and development consequences in their rural home communities', a component of the North–South Institute's Research Project on ‘Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (CSAWP) as a Model of Best Practices in the Employment of Caribbean and Mexican Farm Workers’, Ottawa, 2003, p 71.

27 International Organization for Migration Guatemala, ‘Seasonal Agricultural Workers Project Guatemala–Canada’, 2006, at www.oim.org.gt/Informe%20Trabajadores%20al%20Canada%20(English).pdf, accessed 2 March 2007; K Preibisch, ‘Local produce, foreign labour: labour mobility programs and global trade competitiveness in Canada’, Rural Sociology, 72 (3), 2007, pp 418–449; and M Brem, Migrant Workers in Canada: a Review of the Canadian Seasonal Agriculture Workers Program, Policy Brief, Ottawa, ON: North–South Institute, 2006. Workers in the International Migration Organization-sponsored Foreign Workers Program (FWP) pay for housing, which SAWP employers must provide cost-free. See G Valarezo, untitled MA thesis draft, Queen's University, Kingston, 2007.

28 Migrant Resource Centre, Simcoe, Ontario, 3 September 2003.

29 K Preibisch & L Binford, ‘Interrogating racialized global labour supply: an exploration of the ethnic replacement of foreign agricultural workers in Canada’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 44 (1), 2007, pp 5–36.

30 A Weston & L Scarpa de Masellis, Hemispheric Integration and Trade Relations—Implications for Canada's Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, Ottawa: North–South Institute, 2003, p 6.

31 S Larkin, ‘West Indian workers and Ontario farmers: the reciprocal construction of a divided world’, unpublished MA thesis, University of Western Ontario, London, 1989, pp 85–86.

32 Ibid, p 77.

33 P Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.

34 E Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, New York: Anchor, 1961. On resistance in the SAWP, see O Becerril, ‘Transnational work and the gendered politics of Labour: a study of male and female Mexican migrant farmworkers in Canada’, in L Goldring & S Krishnamurti (eds), Organizing the Transnational: Labour, Politics, and Social Change, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007, pp 157–172; and A Smith, ‘Legal consciousness and resistance in Caribbean seasonal agricultural workers’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society/Revue Canadienne Droit et Société, 20 (2), 2005, pp 95–122.

35 A wildcat strike broke out in Leamington in May 2001 in protest at abusive treatment, poorly maintained housing and paucity of banking and transport services; about two years later, in April 2003, a second wildcat strike protested the introduction of a computerised piecework system on the part of a large greenhouse corporation. In each case suspected ‘ringleaders’ were quickly rounded up and sent back to Mexico. See Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes; and Becerril, ‘Transnational work and the gendered politics of labour’. Wildcat strikes and work stoppages may have been more common in the past, especially among Caribbean workers. Satzewich, ‘Business or bureaucratic dominance in immigration policymaking in Canada’.

36 A Ong, ‘The gender and labor politics of postmodernity’, Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 20, 1991, pp 279–309; and J Scott, Weapons of the Weak, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.

37 E Wall, ‘Personal labour relations and ethnicity in Ontario agriculture’, in Vic Satzewich (ed), Deconstructing a Nation: Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism in ’90s Canada, Halifax: Fernwood Publishers, 1992; and Basok, Tortillas and Tomatoes.

38 Cited in Becerril, ‘Transnational work and the gendered politics of labour’, p 171.

39 R Cohen, Migration and its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour and the Nation-State, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006; and Cohen, The New Helots. Kingsolver explains strategic alterity as ‘a dimension … of capitalist logic and practice—through which the paying of low wages or no wages to members of specific groups was justified … .the practice of shifting between strategic assertions of inclusion and exclusion for the purposes of both devaluing a group of people and of masking that very process of devalorization’. AE Kingsolver, ‘Farmers and farmworkers: two centuries of strategic alterity in Kentucky's tobacco fields’, Critique of Anthropology, 27 (1), 2007, pp 88, 89.

40 On structural violence, see P Farmer, ‘On suffering and structural violence: a view from below’, in Nancy Scheper-Hughes & Philippe Bourgois (eds), Violence in Peace and War, London: Blackwell, 2004, pp 281–289; and P Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. See also N Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992.

41 BL Cordero, ‘Ser trabajador trasnacional: procesos hegemónicos y transformación de clase en un circuito migratorio trasnacional’, PhD dissertation, Graduate Sociology Program, Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006. On the material benefits experienced by some long-term participants in the SAWP, see L Binford, The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program: A Development Program or Poverty Alleviation Program?, Ottawa, ON: Canadian Foundation for the Americas Policy Paper, 2006; and G Verduzco & MI Lozano, ‘Mexican farm workers’.

42 Waldinger & Lichter, How the Other Half Works, pp 40–41, 179.

43 Brem, ‘Migrant workers in Canada’.

44 See Alberta Federation of Labour, ‘Temporary Foreign Workers: Alberta's disposable workforce—the Six-Month Report of the AFL's Temporary Foreign Worker Advocate’, 2007, at http://www.afl.org/upload/AFLTFW.pdf, accessed 15 December 2007.