Beyond Insurgent Indios: Practices that Inspire Protest in Indigenous Farmworker Communities

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. International Conceptions of Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

Baja California's agrarian borderlands are colonial contact zones, where agricultural firms use western science to design export-oriented production and to rationalize the use of farmworker labor. Yet, located outside of this agrarian model extended from California to the Baja peninsula, emerges other types of farmworker resistance not captured by Marxist-inspired theories of labor protest. Drawing ethnographic findings in the San Quintín Valley, a region now home to nearly 100,000 indigenous migrants from southern Mexico, this paper argues that practices expressed in diasporic communities serve as foundation for new forms of farmworker resistance that fall outside of euro-centric approaches for analyzing labor resistance. Labor resistance in the San Quintín Valley is nothing new. But instead of labor protest being rooted at the workplace, it emerges in indigenous farmworker settlements that line the valley. Labor and living conditions are intimately entangled. To address the precarity of life inside of their Baja settlements – that largely materializes from low-wage work – and to force the hand of the state, indigenous migrants utilize a strategy they refer to as la gestión. La gestión, this paper explains, makes indigenous political actions legible within the mestizo-state imaginary of citizenship, but at the same time, hides from the state the practices indigenous migrants used to manage and orient protest for better living conditions, and when needed, more just labor treatment.

Author

• Marcos F. Lopez, Bowdoin College