Fault Lines in the Fields: Structural Inequalities and Environmental Precarity Among Women Farmworkers

• In Event: Gender and Race at Work

Abstract

This article examines how intersecting inequalities shape the labor conditions of women farmworkers in California’s Central Valley. Drawing on 35 in-depth interviews with Mexican and Mexican American women and guided by feminist research methods, I explore how gender, citizenship status, and age structure workplace hierarchies and exposure to risk. My findings reveal that women experience persistent gendered discrimination in both field and packinghouse labor, where assumptions about women’s physical “weakness” limit their employment opportunities and wages. Undocumented women face additional barriers to securing stable work due to heightened immigration enforcement and background checks, while age-based discrimination often excludes older women from the most desirable positions. Across settings, women report pervasive sexual harassment and assault, with few mechanisms for protection or recourse. The analysis further demonstrates how the climate crisis—particularly California’s drought conditions—has intensified these inequities by reducing job availability and forcing women to travel greater distances for work, often without access to reliable transportation. These findings illustrate how environmental change and social hierarchies intersect to reproduce gendered, racialized, and legal precarity within agricultural labor.

Author

• Evelyn Pruneda, California State University-Chico