Plantation Politics: U.S. Empire’s Farmworkers Paradox

• In Event: Latina/o Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 2: Labor, Exploitation, and the Political Economy of Latinidad

Abstract

This study examines the everyday interactive – as well as historical and contemporary legal – processes through which farmworkers in the U.S. are rendered simultaneously indispensable to the food supply and a burden to the nation. To understand this paradoxical treatment of farmworkers, I put Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Michael Foucault’s concept of biopower into conversation to conceptualize plantation politics. I define plantation politics as the systematic legalization of death worlds to erase the humanity, rights, and autonomy of farmworkers while offering marginal access to food, water, and shelter not meant to reproduce their lives but rather to sustain a disposable labor force from whom knowledge, wisdom, labor, relationships, and well-being are extracted. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews, pláticas, and oral history with Hispanas, Latinas, Hispanos, Latinos, Mexicans, and Mexican American farmworkers, I identify three paradoxical characteristics the plantation regime unfolds in contemporary U.S. empire: the indentured of farmworkers to the plantation regime and its palpable wound on their bodies, mind, and well-being; the dependency of the plantation regime on domestic and foreign child labor; and the extraction, exploitation, appropriation, and erasure of farmworkers’ generational, community, and experiential knowledge. Despite living under the constant violence, exploitation, and dehumanization of plantation politics, farmworkers resist, survive, and thrive. This study aims to rehumanize farmworkers as people who possess knowledge, wisdom, families, hearts, souls, and dreams. The experiences of farmworkers enrich and contribute to conversations about racial capitalism and decoloniality.

Author

• Alejandro Tovar Sosa, University of New Mexico