From the November 2008 issue of the Ester Republic.

Walking across the border from San Luis, Sonora, Mexico into San Luis, Arizona, United States, returning from my last trip to La Cienega de Santa Clara, I noticed a sign that read “No Transport of Agricultural Products.” I tried to take a picture, but apparently no photos are allowed of the border crossing—breech of national security. That the border agent asked me nothing about myself other than whether or not I had any agricultural products on ‘my person’ apparently wasn’t a breech of national security, however. As he asked me this I thought back to the miles of agricultural fields that line both sides of the main road that runs south from San Luis to the Gulf of Santa Clara, at the top of the Sea of Cortez. Fields as full of onions and maize and lettuce as they are of hard workers, workers who leave their homes as early as 2 AM for the chance of work. I looked past the custom’s agent and through the glass wall behind him, into a waiting room full of men and women applying for work papers that would most likely be denied. Apparently ‘No Transport of Agricultural Products’ should be taken to mean agricultural workers too.

I smiled at the agent, told him I had nothing with me, and was waved along to US soil with nary a glance at my passport. I was returning from a week in ‘Ejido Luis Encinas Johnson,’ a community of about 70. It was my second there trip this month. For the next few months this column will serve as my dispatches home from my travels here and elsewhere in Sonora, covering issues that live far away, yet still have direct impacts on our cupboards and dinner tables. 

Not surprisingly, the troubles with our economy don’t stop at the border. In fact, the US border seems to act more like a lens than a barrier, focusing hardship on Mexican campesinos like a young child burning ants with a magnifying glass. I spent a lot of time hearing of recent difficulties finding work, the impossibility of getting papers to make that work legal, and of family members they haven’t seen for years because they made it to the US illegally and cannot return. And I was struck by their certainty that all of this is the stuff of unspoken agreements between big agriculture and the US and Mexican governments, who, they believe, want to keep the system exactly as it is.

They’re on to something. I won’t deny that US immigration policy is broken, but in this case it is just a facilitator of a larger problem—it helps keep food cheap by keeping labor cheap. In other words, it solves the problem of consumers wanting to pay little-to-nothing for foods that are a product of the most labor-intensive process in the history of mankind.

A great deal of policy and regulation is needed to keep the industrial agricultural complex going. Take the issue of food safety, another policy issue that has become salient in the US and as a result has come to bear down hard on these Mexican families. It is far easier, when we find E. coli on our tomatoes or spinach, to blame these on an inferior work ethic or hygiene standards, stereotypes that our culture has been perpetuating for decades, than it is to admit where the process is broken in the first place. We send US inspectors to Mexican farms, and dictate what clothes the workers wear, tell them not to paint their fingernails, or wear jewelry, or have facial hair, or bring their small children with them to the field. We make ourselves feel especially good about this last bit, as if we’re putting a stop to the horrors of child labor, when in fact we’re making their parents choose between work and leaving their children unattended, when they could be safely with their parents and learning something they find fun and exciting. And if a group is found in violation of one of these cardinal rules, we punish them, shutting down their operation for days or weeks at a time. We force them to leave vegetables in the field to rot, and send home their workers with no pay. This is the price of growing food for the United States of America.

Safety regulations such as these purport to fix problems perceived as somehow inherent to the food, or worse, the people. Yet the problem is not imperfect workers, imperfect foods, nor imperfect cultures. Rather, the problem is with the technologies of industrial agriculture, and the values (or lack thereof) that guide their use. These are values that emphasize maximization of returns over the healthfulness of food and the well being of people and ecosystems. Anyone who has spent time on a small farm, or gardened themselves, knows that you can only get out of food the care and quality you put into it. We know that growing and harvesting will always be hard work, but it does not have to be as hard as some make it. We know that a farm is a perfectly good place for children. And we know that we can, in fact, do something about it, by opting out, whenever possible, of foods that exploit people (even if they are cheaper), and for responsibly grown, local or fair-trade alternatives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 6:00 pm by Philip Loring and is filed under Anthropology, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.