Modification of Social Identity in Experience-Toughened Trans-Migrant Agricultural Workers~!2009-08-25~!2010-01-18~!2010-03-22~!

Abstract

Diversion and subversion occur in the playful humor in which trans-migrant farm workers engage to alleviate the gruffness and roughness of farm labor and to re-assert the human potential for creativity, with words, if not in action and behavior. This essay considers nuances of the humor response in formal interviews as markers of significant points of transition. Narrators use humor to reflect on alterations in behavioral experience that directly affect the personal identity they have come to accept and to believe is a reasonable representation of who they are.Keywords: Trans-migrants and immigrants, farm work, humor, resilience, identity.Told that we are "post" the second of two social revolutions that mark us as different from the eras that preceded each, we bear witness through the ethnographic enterprise to a potential within the Information Era for minimization of the human capacity for creativity [1-2] and dissuasion against any resistance to social domination [3]. These possibilities affect those spaces and settings where people converge to perform activities related to what, for some represents industrial work (the second social revolution), and what, for some represents agricultural work (the first social revolution). One learns by spending time in these spaces and settings: this is the foundation of ethnographic enterprise. For more than a decade, I co-occupied spaces with men and women who perform or have performed farm labor, particularly in low-income, high-risk areas where they spent time when not working. I encountered the sense of play as resistance described by José Limón [2, 4] among men and women whom he studied in south Texas, and by Ron Jenkins [5], who reviewed historic and contemporary examples of ways that play and humor generate a forum to seek potential solutions to social injustice and institutional oppression.

From Gambits to Case Data

“…Some were horrendous, but many were not unlike experiences that one might hear in a life story narrated by someone from mainstream society. Humor was embedded in the narrative style of those interviewed (Bletzer, 2010;also Gamburd, 2008). Important first times are remembered.…”

An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors

“…Some were horrendous, but many were not unlike experiences that one might hear in a life story narrated by someone from mainstream society. Humor was embedded in the narrative style of those interviewed (Bletzer, 2010;also Gamburd, 2008).…”