Race, immigration and the agrarian question: farmworkers becoming farmers in the United States^*

* This article was written before Donald J. Trump became president of the United States. At the time of publication, the political climate regarding immigration was changing rapidly. As the president makes moves to increase immigration enforcement and forcibly remove large numbers of undocumented persons, the human and civil rights of immigrants in the United States are in danger. Undocumented immigrants and those in their community are living in fear. Those engaged in this research, who have made a home in the United States and succeeded in starting their own farm businesses, may start to pull back from their public engagement in agrarian spaces. Although the historical context of the interaction between immigrants and federal agencies such the USDA is unchanged, opportunities for immigrants and undocumented immigrants, in particular, will most likely become less available in the near future. It is reasonable to expect that gains in social justice and accessibility, which have been moved forward as part of ‘the new era for civil rights at the USDA,’ as discussed below, will be reversed. Making resources available in Spanish and prioritizing the hiring of bilingual USDA staff who specialize in immigrant outreach, already slow in coming, will most likely be delayed. Yet, the movement of people and knowledge across the US--Mexico border has a deep-seated history, and cannot be halted indefinitely. I believe the racial and ethnic shifts in US agriculture described in this contribution are inevitable; it is just a matter of speed and justice for those involved.

Abstract

As White farmers in the United States retire en masse, the racial and ethnic demographics of US farming are shifting to now include a significant number of Latino farm owner-operators. Yet this population of new farmers, contributing specific technical expertise and knowledge, is not represented in current discussions concerning agrarian transitions. This paper draws on interview-based research conducted in the states of California, Maryland, New York, Minnesota and Washington, with first-generation Latino immigrant farmworkers who have transitioned to farm ownership. The majority are practicing small-scale and diverse crop production, with limited synthetic inputs and mostly family labor, as this form of farming allows them to reclaim control over their own labor and livelihoods, while also earning a cash income. The farmers included in this study, and their rationale for farming despite race- and citizenship-based challenges, cannot be understood simply through a lens of class transition. This contribution provides evidence that Latino immigrants’ ascendancy to farm ownership is instead a result of their struggle to redefine their relationship to land and labor in a country where their race and citizenship status have relegated them to the working poor.

Keywords:

• agrarian questions
• immigrant farmers
• race and food
• farm labor

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research assistants at Goucher College, Sea Sloat, Sarah Meade, and my research assistants at Syracuse University, Sara Andrea Quinteros-Fernandez, Rebecca Lustig and Fabiola Ortiz Valdez. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants of the 2013 Conference on Food Sovereignty at Yale University, where the first version of this paper was presented, as well as Lindsey Dillon, Clare Gupta, Ryan Galt, Rick Welsch and Julie Guthman for comments on earlier versions. Most importantly, I would like to thank all participants in this study for their time and willingness to discuss their lives and livelihoods with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* This article was written before Donald J. Trump became president of the United States. At the time of publication, the political climate regarding immigration was changing rapidly. As the president makes moves to increase immigration enforcement and forcibly remove large numbers of undocumented persons, the human and civil rights of immigrants in the United States are in danger. Undocumented immigrants and those in their community are living in fear. Those engaged in this research, who have made a home in the United States and succeeded in starting their own farm businesses, may start to pull back from their public engagement in agrarian spaces. Although the historical context of the interaction between immigrants and federal agencies such the USDA is unchanged, opportunities for immigrants and undocumented immigrants, in particular, will most likely become less available in the near future. It is reasonable to expect that gains in social justice and accessibility, which have been moved forward as part of ‘the new era for civil rights at the USDA,’ as discussed below, will be reversed. Making resources available in Spanish and prioritizing the hiring of bilingual USDA staff who specialize in immigrant outreach, already slow in coming, will most likely be delayed. Yet, the movement of people and knowledge across the US--Mexico border has a deep-seated history, and cannot be halted indefinitely. I believe the racial and ethnic shifts in US agriculture described in this contribution are inevitable; it is just a matter of speed and justice for those involved.

1 This number is out of 2,109,303 total principal operators in 2012 (USDA 2014). The number of operators who were also owners before 2012 is not available. These numbers do not tell us how many are first-generation immigrants. These numbers are also problematic in that almost none of the farmers I interviewed had ever heard of the Agricultural Census, being that they farm on mostly rented land, often under informal agreements, and rarely live on the farm or have paperwork documenting their land rental agreements. Additionally, Hispanic/Latino is considered an ethnicity, not a race, by the census, and if they check this box they must also choose a race, such as White, Black or Native American, none of which are representative of the farmers I interview. I would argue Latino immigrants are generally being undercounted in these numbers and that non-White Latinos (Indigenous or Mestizo) are not being counted at all.

2 I use the term ‘alternative farming/production’ to broadly imply that they are growing in a way that does not fit within standard agro-industrial practices. I recognize this is an imperfect term, as inclusion in the alternative food movement is contested, and there is no clear definition of practices. Oftentimes the market pressure on or cooptation by industry of alternative producers, such as organic or small-scale growers, leads to practices that are not in line with the assumptions of consumers. Certainly, alternative production, especially in the US context, is by no means anti-capitalist or necessarily more just in terms of labor (see Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Allen 2004; Goodman, DuPuis, and Goodman 2012; Gray 2013; Guthman 2014, among others).

3 In discussing the persistence of the peasantry, Kautsky rejected any notion that peasants could be politically conscious or self-aware. In contrast, McMichael (2006) argues that, rather than being reduced to historical notions of linear capitalist development, the peasantry today ‘rejects the temporality of capitalist modernity that regards peasants as pre-modern, and the spatiality that removes and divides humans from nature’ (478). In this study, farmworkers’ struggle to continue an agrarian livelihood, despite its economic challenges, may in part be understood through Chayanov’s (1986 [1919]) work, describing the processes, motivations and justifications for a continued global peasant class of agrarian producers. As with this case study of immigrant farmers, Chayanov sees the peasant class as one that works in relation to the capitalist system, yet operates distinctively in terms of capital and labor. Family labor, as opposed to wage labor, is most prevalent, and capital’s purpose includes recreating the farm, as opposed to solely creating surplus value. Specifically, he states that peasants differ from capitalist agriculturalists in that ‘The peasant farm continues to produce where the capitalists’ farm stops’ (Chayanov 1986 [1919], 89 in van der Ploeg 2013, 16).

4 Following Chayanov, and attempting to distinguish between those cultivating in the United States and ‘peasant regions of the world’, Wolf (1966) differentiates between the ‘American’ entrepreneurial farmer and the peasant producer. This divide does not hold true in a present-day agrarian context. As others have noted, the class ‘peasant’ is much more dynamic and complex, and the reduction of peasants to an essentialist category erases diversity among them (Reinhardt 1988). van der Ploeg (2013) identifies a global movement of what he terms repeasantization. He argues repeasantization occurs as part of a larger drive for food sovereignty, led by La Via Campesina and other self-proclaimed peasants, as small-scale family farmers look to maintain and increase autonomy in the face of widespread agricultural industrialization. However, work that attempts to redefine these binary categories, for example by studying ‘the petty commodity producing peasant subsector’ (Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010b, 271), often fails to recognize the existence of these producers outside of developing countries and related racial dynamics.

5 Although immigrant workers and farmers may come from many geographic and class backgrounds, and possess prior experience on industrial farms and in urban areas, the farmers I discuss in this contribution are specifically those that migrated from agricultural regions of Mexico and Central America. Although some produced food for market, all produced for subsistence as well. It is important to note that while not all small-scale producers in Latin America use low chemical inputs (Galt 2014), this was the self-reported pre-migration experience of those in this study.

6 In this paper I use the term Latino, although participants in interviews used Latino/Hispanic interchangeably.

7 Some came before the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided legal status to undocumented immigrants who had arrived before 1982.

8 In Washington and California, many farmers interviewed identify as Triqui or Mixteco (indigenous to Mexico). Indigenous Mexicans are the newest and fastest growing group of farmworkers to California. They enter in the lowest paying jobs in the agricultural labor market and often struggle with social isolation from other immigrant farmworkers due to their different culture and language (Mines, Nichols, and Runsten 2010; Minkoff-Zern 2012a).

9 In Washington I interviewed six farmers, all first-generation immigrant orchardists, who had bought a fruit orchard from their previous employer. They do not fit the description of growing techniques discussed in this paper as closely as the diversified growers who make up the majority of the study do. This immigrant farming population, although statistically significant based on state-level USDA reports, is an anomaly based on my national study. In these cases the workers must be documented in order to access federal loans, which are necessary given the high capital inputs required to operate these farms. They also buy their farms at below-market rates, and are dependent on the goodwill of their employers to sell it to them. This is not to say they do not have a place in my analysis, but for the sake of this contribution, I am referring primarily to the diversified growers who make up most of my interview population. Additionally, in the Northern Central Coast of California, there is a large number of Latino industrial strawberry growers. They are largely second-generation immigrants, not having worked as farmworkers themselves, and are therefore not included in this study (for further discussion of this group of farmers, see Guthman 2016).

10 The National Agricultural Statistics Service defines a farm as any business ‘from which $1000 or more of agricultural products were sold or would normally be sold during the year’ (USDA 2014).

11 This can also be true for new White farmers, who are also excluded from new markets, especially in places like the Bay Area of California, where local markets for alternatively produced fruits and vegetables are saturated. Yet, as this research shows, for farmers of color, the barriers to enter agrarian spaces where they are not merely laborers are especially high.

12 Hiring family labor by no means ensures labor justice on the farm (see Feldman and Welsh 1995; Reed et al. 1999; Riley 2009). I am not claiming that family labor is inherently a better system or more equitable, only that it is evidence of a particular form of farming. The question of labor is always looming, as most would prefer not to hire outside their families. Yet if they are to survive economically, which may entail growth in size, they may also have to begin hiring non-family labor. Some farms did have a few non-family laborers. In these cases, they were hiring other immigrants from Jalisco, Oaxaca, Chiapas and other parts of Mexico. Wells’ (1996) research shows that Mexican farmers in the US (in comparison to Japanese and Anglo farmers) are more likely to emphasize the importance of family labor as a key to farming success. She credits this difference largely to Mexican farmers’ simultaneous lack of economic resources and wealth of available family labor.

Additional information

Funding

I am grateful to the Goucher College Postdoctoral Fellowship, American Association of Geographers, and David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics at Syracuse University for funding to conduct this research.

Notes on contributors

Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern

Dr. Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern’s research and teaching broadly explore the interactions between food and racial justice, labor movements, and transnational environmental and agricultural policy. This focus builds on her extensive experience with sustainable development and agricultural biodiversity projects abroad, combined with work on migrant health issues domestically. She has spent many years working on farms and with agriculture and food organizations in Guatemala, New York and California. Her current project looks at immigrant farmers’ roles in agrarian change in the United States today. She earned a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell University in sustainable agriculture and development.