Migration, Worker Empowerment, and the Development of State Agricultural Labor Regimes: An Historical Comparative Case Study of California and North Carolina (1880-2022).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In this dissertation, I compare the historical development of state agricultural labor policies and practices in California, a traditional migrant destination, and North Carolina, a new migrant destination. I identify the factors which shaped the emergence of a more protective environment in California and a more precarious environment in North Carolina. I then identify how these contrasting state contexts affect the health and well-being of Latino migrant farmworkers in each state today. Drawing on archival data, field observations, and 37 interviews with farmworkers in California (n=22) and North Carolina (n=15), I develop a labor regime model to explain how the different state sociopolitical cultures developed, and how they impinge on the health and well-being of migrant farmworkers and their families. I demonstrate how the development of agricultural labor regimes is intimately tied to systems of agricultural production, migration patterns, and their implications for worker empowerment. Foreign-born and domestic migrants have been recruited to work on California’s industrial farms since the late nineteenth century. These migrant farmworkers have engaged in cross-ethnic collective resistance against employer abuse for 130 years. Their efforts have been instrumental in constructing the more protective agricultural labor regime we observe in California today. In North Carolina, the harsh conditions associated with the disjointed system of tenant farming, sharecropping, and plantation production in North Carolina served as a deterrent for potential migrants and pushed many Black agricultural workers out. This isolation from outsiders, combined with the mass exodus of Black agricultural workers – whose solidarity and strong labor consciousness made them the most likely to organize and collectively resist – constrained the potential for worker empowerment until the 1990s. This resulted in the consolidation of employers’ hegemony over the North Carolina’s political apparatus and the precarious labor regime we observe in the state today. I demonstrate how these state agricultural labor regimes have implications for the health and well-being of migrant farmworkers and their families. These findings enhance our understanding of how migrants’ labor market incorporation is embedded in the sociopolitical histories of the places where migrants live and work.