The Illegal and the Dead: Are Mexicans Renewable Energy?

Abstract

This article reflects on the production of injury and death among Latino workers in the agro-industrial food complex, with attention to systemic relationships between the United States and Mexico in the post-North American Free Trade Agreement period, which has been characterized by waves of new labor migration that directly enhanced US agricultural profitability. The article draws parallels between literatures on labor productivity and new writings on energy and sustainable agriculture. It examines the usefulness of embodiment as a dialectical approach to eco-social theory, and the concept of "body politic," or a politics of moral ecology, as a means of reasserting the human shape of production systems that have become deformed by the impersonal calculus of neoliberal capitalism.

Workers' Decompensation: Engaged Research with Injured Im/migrant Workers

“…By the mid‐twentieth century, injured industrial workers received considerable attention from both capital and the state. A “risk management” industry emerged to mitigate losses to corporate profits, diverting hazards, and costs onto employees and consumers (Beck ; Rousmaniere ; Smith‐Nonini ). Still, despite growing awareness, it wasn't until 1970 that Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) to regulate workplace hazards nationwide.…”

“…Structural vulnerabilities for im/migrant workers include relationships between the intensification and consolidation of capitalist production and related management and state labor, criminal, and im/migrant surveillance systems (Heyman ; Horton ), shifting political definitions and enforcements of deportability (De Genova , , ; Hahamovitch ; Horton ; Sisk ), and heightened risks and rates of injury, illness, and death amongst affected and afflicted workers all over the world (Grzywacz et al ; Horton ; Jaye and Fitzgerald ; Otero and Preibisch , ; Smith‐Nonini ; Stuesse ; Williams ). For example, Sandy Smith‐Nonini observes how meat and migrants are “processed” together on the poultry assembly lines in North Carolina ().…”

“…The daily lives of undocumented workers are characterized by many layered challenges and uncertainties (Kline ; Saxton ). Their im/migrant, citizenship, race‐ethnic, gender, and class statuses render them flexible, disposable, and cheap (Cartwright ; Holmes ; Otero and Preibisch ; Smith‐Nonini ). Even before the 2018 presidential election of Donald Trump, with the expansion of free trade zones and the movement of U.S. industries abroad, some Americans blamed immigrants for their personal and societal problems (Chávez ; Zimmerman ).…”

Immigration Policing and Medical Care for Farmworkers: Uncertainties and Anxieties in the East Coast Migrant Stream

“…Cartwright recently explored the immigration system itself as a powerful pathogen in the syndemics of the ill‐health of Latino agricultural workers in western United States (Cartwright ). In contrast to the politically neutral public health language of risk, Smith‐Nonini specifically identifies the systemic risks of the dynamics of neoliberal politics, citizenship status, and corporate agriculture that shape migrant vulnerabilities (Smith‐Nonini ). In the examples described by our providers above, deportation of income earners increases illness and anxiety, and restricted access to health care makes it more likely that such suffering will go untreated in a vicious circle that is sustained ideologically in states in which it is politically profitable to enact strict anti‐immigrant laws against workers whose labor is of vital importance.…”

When They're Done with You: Legal Violence and Structural Vulnerability among Injured Immigrant Poultry Workers

“…This has opened the door to the aggressive recruitment of immigrant workers, decreased job security, lower wages, heightened disciplinary measures aimed at increasing productivity, a weakening of working people's collective power, stripped‐down labor protections, and an intense scrutiny of workers' bodies with the objective of protecting corporate profit (cf. Jaye and Fitzgerald ; Smith‐Nonini ). And while workers of all backgrounds are subject to the perils of neoliberal capitalism, those who are new immigrants, non‐native English speakers, undocumented, and unfamiliar with their rights are in a particularly vulnerable position.…”