Racialization and Bordering in Mexican-US Plantations. A Historical Ethnography of Campos Agrícolas
Abstract: From mid-twentieth-century cotton production to the ongoing expansion of fair-trade veggies, the campos agrícolas (literally “agricultural fields”) in northwestern Mexico have been structured by state and corporate violence seeking to control migrant workers and desertic landscapes. Based on five years of ethnographic research in Sonora, in this talk, I discuss how confinement and racism have been central pillars to implementing the so-called social responsibility agribusiness model and how they are valuable to “order migration” in North America.
Bio: Gerardo Rodriguez-Solis is a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with the Environmental Science, Policy and Management Department at UC Berkeley and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCSB. He has published in the Journal of Development Studies, Revista Latinoamericana de Antropología del Trabajo, Revista del Noroeste de México, and Carta Económica Regional. Gerardo is working on his manuscript, "Racial Capitalism in Mexican-US Agricultural Carceral Geographies."
Light refreshments will be served.
