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Structural Vulnerability And Hierarchies Of Ethnicity And Citizenship On The Farm., Seth M. Holmes Phd, Md

Seth M. Holmes PhD, MD

Every year, the United States employs nearly two million seasonal farm laborers, approximately half of whom are migrants (Rothenberg 1998). This article utilizes one year of participant observation on a berry farm in Washington State to analyze hierarchies of ethnicity and citizenship, structural vulnerability, and health disparities in agriculture in the United States. The farm labor structure is organized along a segregated continuum from US citizen Anglo-American to US citizen Latino, undocumented mestizo Mexican to undocumented indigenous Mexican. The ethnography shows how this structure symbolically reinforces conflations of race with perceptions of civilized and modern subjects. These hierarchies produce what …