Structural Vulnerability and Hierarchies of Ethnicity and Citizenship on the Farm

Abstract

Every year, the United States employs nearly two million seasonal farm laborers, approximately half of whom are migrants (Rothenberg 1998). This article utilizes one year of participant observation on a berry farm in Washington State to analyze hierarchies of ethnicity and citizenship, structural vulnerability, and health disparities in agriculture in the United States. The farm labor structure is organized along a segregated continuum from US citizen Anglo-American to US citizen Latino, undocumented mestizo Mexican to undocumented indigenous Mexican. The ethnography shows how this structure symbolically reinforces conflations of race with perceptions of civilized and modern subjects. These hierarchies produce what is now understood in medical anthropology as structural vulnerability among those with poor living and housing conditions, producing social disparities in health. The ethnographic data argue against the common presumption that social hierarchies are willed by powerful individuals by showing the structural production of these social inequalities and their concomitant health disparities.

Key Words:

• health disparities
• indigenous Mexican migrants
• farm workers
• unauthorized immigration
• US-Mexico migration

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Seth M. Holmes

SETH M. HOLMES, PhD, MD, is a medical anthropologist and physician whose work focuses broadly on the role that perceptions of difference play in the production and reproduction of social hierarchies and health disparities. In addition to research and teaching, he undertakes part-time clinical work in HIV primary care among Latino and Latin American immigrant patients.