PhD candidate Dvera Saxton (American University), supervised by Dr. Brett Williams, will investigate the relationship between types and scales of regional socioeconomic production systems and worker health. The research, which will be carried out among migrant farm workers in Central Coast California, will focus on the differential effects of the organization and scale of work in both conventional and organic agricultural production systems. Research questions include: 1) How are production and labor organized? (2) How do organizational differences shape farm worker health experiences? (3) How do farm workers respond to the physical effects of work? Research methods will include ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and health perception maps. This research is important because it will contribute to social scientific theory of the new relationships between the organization of work and embodied human experience in the context of changing agricultural production systems. Findings from this work also will elucidate the social effects of sustainable production systems. Supporting this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
My anthropological research explores how corporate agricultural labor and market structures shape farmworker health in on- and off-farm contexts. I discovered that the economic, political, and social power of corporate agribusinesses in California pervades not only the workplace, but policy making, and state and non-profit social and health safety nets. These arrangements perpetuate inequalities, reproducing many layers of disparity and vulnerability for farmworkers. These exclusionary or unenforceable laws in addition to practices of legal and social neglect proved to be far more significant in shaping farmworker health outcomes than the variables of organic and conventional production. The multi-dimensional interplay between farmworkers’ lived experiences of impoverishment, social and environmental disparities, and legal exception and exclusion resulted in a number of observable co-morbidities (or layered diseases) within individual bodies and communities. Using anthropological methods of observation, interviews, engagement in the lives of farmworker participants, and participation in social movements addressing environmental and farmworker abuse, I explored the gaps between agricultural labor and environmental policies and the lived realities of farmworkers. Following the feedback of farmworkers, I examined two sets of agricultural labor and environmental polices: the workers’ compensation system and the CA Department of Pesticide Regulation’s approval of the toxic pesticide, methyl iodide. Farmworkers’ experiences with work-related co-morbidities and pesticide exposure remain under-attended to by biomedical models and the legally mandated limits of occupational medicine. These approaches to healing scrutinize individual body parts rather than addressing work-related injuries and illnesses more holistically. The life cycles of farmworkers experiencing long-term work-related injuries and illnesses are ignored. As a consequence, a class of permanently disabled workers is produced. These structural barriers to healing and safety are strongly influenced by agricultural lobbying and business power under the guises of cost saving and professional expertise regarding food production and occupational safety. California’s agricultural industry further masks health and safety gaps by running corporate social responsibility programs and contributing to charities and non-profits based in farmworker communities. I observed that even policies and business practices designed to protect the agricultural workforce contain structural limits that perpetuate cycles of injury, illness, and death. Corporately sponsored interventions are largely ineffective; they fail to address the root problems embedded within agricultural workplaces. In response to these struggles, farmworkers navigate a complex system of formal health and social services that do not always meet their needs. Farmworkers also mobilize a variety of their own coping mechanisms. Migrant remittances, for example, are not purely economic transactions. They also represent acts of "care-work," where binational families and friends support one another through a series of monetary and non-monetary exchanges. A significant amount of the remittances produced by farmworkers at my field site contributed to the medical care of loved ones in Mexico. Family members in Mexico contributed to the wellbeing of folks living and working in the U.S. by providing childcare and elder care for family members, and sending seeds, handicrafts, and Mexican products to help supplement the meager incomes of their relatives. These "reverse remittances" from Mexico also provide emotional and social support to immigrant farmworkers in the U.S. Farmworkers confront multiple assaults to their health, living with simultaneous health, social, economic and environmental problems at the individual, family, community, and binational levels. This critical medical anthropological research can help shift the biomedical focus on individual diseases. While my research explores these issues in California, the dissemination of my results will foster collaborative and comparative studies of other farmworker communities in the U.S. and transnationally. It also serves as a model to explore similar problems in other industries. The broader social implications of my research include potential contributions to farmworker health and labor organizing, and the development of legal and corporate accountability checks in agriculture: an industry that claims to produce healthy foods in addition to other social and environmental goods. I have published and plan to continue producing written and oral presentations of my research for many audiences. Most recently, I wrote a series of opinion-editorials on methyl iodide published in two California newspapers. During my fieldwork, I helped develop culturally competent bilingual presentations on methyl iodide for indigenous farmworker audiences. I presented my preliminary analyses of farmworkers’ struggles with the workers’ compensation system at an academic conference in March 2012. I want this interrogation of the workers’ compensation system to foster local, national, and international solidarity amongst workers of different colors and collars. Despite the embedded and embodied inequalities of the global labor hierarchy, workers share many vulnerabilities when it comes to their futures following a workplace illness or injury. As we envision the possibilities of universal health care in the U.S., we must attend to the embedded hazards of workplaces, occupational and biomedical practices, and the laws that are supposed to protect us.
