Premium
C alifornian Strawberries: M exican Immigrant Women Sharecroppers, Labor, and Discipline
Author(s) -
Sanchez Teresa Figueroa
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
anthropology of work review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.151
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1548-1417
pISSN - 0883-024X
DOI - 10.1111/awr.12003
Subject(s) - sharecropping , immigration , ethnography , agrarian society , sociology , labour economics , gender studies , political science , economics , demographic economics , agriculture , geography , law , archaeology , anthropology
Mexican immigrant women, children and teenagers, and transnational female workers in the strawberry sharecropping industry in C alifornia present a problem in social sciences. Although sharecropping studies examine the family within the political economy of agrarian commercial production, the bulk of the research avoids the question of gender and intrafamilial relations inside the family. Based on long‐term ethnographic research, this paper examines the M exican immigrant strawberry sharecropping household in S anta M aria, C alifornia. It finds that sharecropping families do not only organize female workers to supply the needed labor in the strawberry farm, but that they also engender a female labor force by teaching discipline, fostering a work ethic, and producing a docile body to meet the stoop labor needs of strawberry markets. Through a gender focus, this paper adds to our understanding of M exican female and children workers in rural labor regimes.