Volume 39, June 2015, Pages 1–10
Farming while confronting the other: The production and maintenance of boundaries in the borderlands
Highlights
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- Analyzes why well-meaning food activists maintain social boundaries.
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- Examines internalization of farmworker stereotypes, border politics and privilege.
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- Introduces the importance of the military and surveillance state to food studies.
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- Discusses food movement's ecological focus in the context of labor exploitation.
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- Calls attention to possibilities for resisting and dissolving social boundaries.
Abstract
The
alternative food movement encounters many structural conditions as it
strives toward more environmentally sustainable and socially just
agrifood systems. One of the greatest challenges the movement faces is
not turning its back on migrant farmworkers at the same time it creates
and experiments with alternative agricultural models. This article
explains why there is a gap between an expressed concern with the
inequalities faced by migrant farmworkers and the actual advocacy
practices necessary to overcome them. To help tease apart the drivers
maintaining this gap, I call attention to the social and symbolic
boundaries reproduced by a group of people farming organically in San
Diego along the United States/Mexico border. I find that in the course
of farming in the context of border politics, food activists internalize
a number of structural and ideological conditions producing a
racialized agricultural political economy, neoliberalism, and the
security state. These include the hegemony of certain stereotypes of
migrant farmworkers and inherent notions of difference, the hegemony of
militarized borders and monitored immigrant bodies, and race and class
privilege that manifests through idealizing nature and farming. At the
same time, I find that these boundary maintenance practices are open to
change, and call attention to the ambiguity expressed by well-meaning
organic farming activists as well as more resistant socioecological
imaginaries.
Keywords
- Alternative food movement;
- Boundaries;
- Critical race;
- Farmworkers;
- Immigration;
- Inequality;
- Organic farming;
- Privilege
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