A Foodie's Guide to Capitalism by Eric Holt-Giménez

Author:Eric Holt-Giménez
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781583676608
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Immigrant farm labor is another modern-day example of “superexploitation.” In the United States during the Second World War, the labor of white farmworkers largely disappeared as men went to war and women moved into the factories. Peasant farmers from Mexico were imported under the Bracero Program to pick the country’s crops. Mexican farm women largely stayed behind, taking care of families. The farm labor workforce has been treated as disposable ever since, with increases in productivity coming from increases in hours and a relative decrease in pay. Because it is treated as inexhaustible, there is no thought to the reproduction of the immigrant labor force, even in the twenty-first century.

However, the last three decades of neoliberal globalization have steadily destroyed household and village economies in the Mexican countryside, driving women across the Northern border in search of work. The massive transition of both the productive and reproductive workforce from South to North has allowed segments of the U.S. food system to prosper, especially large corporate farms producing fresh fruits and vegetables, processing enterprises, and restaurants. Similar patterns have played out in other parts of Latin America, Asia, and Africa as impoverished men, women, and children flood into North America and Western Europe searching for work.11

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