Contestations of the heart: Mexican migrant women and transnational loving from rural Ontario

Abstract

Canada's temporary foreign worker programs (TFWPs) structure flexible labour regimes that provide 'just-in-time' workers for select industries. Through these programs, workers are commodified into units of production with minimal rights and excessive restrictions on their comportment. In this paper I focus on the restrictions placed on migrant women's bodies, desires, and sexualities through the long-standing Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Based on 16 years of community engaged research in rural Canada and Mexico, I demonstrate that from the point of recruitment in Mexico, to their encounters with Canadian employers, to the seasons of life and work between rural Canada and rural Mexico, migrant women are barred from fully expressing love, desire, and sexualities. I delve into contestations of the heart and argue that the love and desire that migrant women assert are among the many forms of resistance to their commodification within a coercive labour and immigration regime that favours production over reproductions of love and affection. I argue that social justice projects must account for the frontiers of the heart and the right to love beyond borders to be fully emancipatory.

Equal Rights at Work for Women Must Mean All Women

“…In Canada, migrant farmworkers who become pregnant are typically deported and permanently banned from the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. 45 Explicit protections from discrimination based on gender and migration status or foreign national origin are less common than those addressing race or religion. Fewer than half the world's countries-46 percent-explicitly address discrimination based on gender as well as discrimination based on citizenship; a similar share (48 percent) have protections covering both gender and national origin.…”

Acts of Citizenship in Time and Space among Agricultural Migrant Workers in Quebec during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…At the same time, despite their precariousness and "deportability" (Basok et al, 2014;Vosko, 2019), some migrant farmworkers assert their agency by escaping, subverting regulations, or challenging various forms of discipline that are used to control their working bodies, leisure activities, as well as expressions of sexuality and love. These forms of resistance can be collective or individual, formal (i.e., strikes, rallies and protests) or informal "everyday forms of resistance," to use Scott's (1985) famous expression (Basok, 2002;Basok & Bélanger, 2016;Cohen & Hjalmarson, 2020;Grez, 2019;Perry, 2020). In this article, we explore how the COVID-19 pandemic created new conditions and opportunities among migrant farmworkers to assert their rights and engage in "acts of citizenship" as we call them, borrowing this concept from Isin and Nielsen (2008).…”