Álvaro’s Casket

This chapter explains how migrant men’s longstanding exclusion from subsidized health care, such as Medicaid, allows their chronic illnesses to remain undiagnosed. Even as the Affordable Care Act made childless adult migrants eligible for Medicaid in 2014, men’s longstanding exclusion continues to discourage them from seeking care. Meanwhile, when migrant men enter the fields, hypertension and heart disease place them at higher risk of a heart attack. Thus men’s undiagnosed ailments and heat illness form a syndemic—a cluster of conditions that interact at the physiological level and exacerbate the damage caused by each alone. Meanwhile the produce industry’s concern to maintain consumer confidence through new food safety audits only exacerbates workers’ hypertension and encourages heat illness. Attention to the synergistic interaction between chronic disease and heat illness thus raises provocative questions about how to accurately count heat deaths in California’s fields while shedding new light on farmwork’s death toll.

Alta Presión:

The only survey of migrant farmworkers’ health in California that used clinical exams to collect data found this occupational group had “startlingly” high rates of hypertension and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Drawing upon the narratives of two migrant farmworking women who were both hospitalized for hypertension, this chapter explores the role of “immigration stress” and “work stress” in producing their chronic disease. While public health researchers have recently pointed to racial minorities’ physiological response to chronic discrimination as an explanation for their higher rates of hypertension, this chapter makes an analogous argument for legal minorities. It suggests that the recent trend towards heightened interior immigration enforcement subjects all noncitizens to forms of “everyday violence,” only increasing their chronic worry and “perseverative stress.” This chapter explores how the stress of being a legal minority gets under migrants’ skin, helping account for migrant farmworkers’ higher rates of chronic morbidity and mortality.

Introduction

Why do farmworkers experience heat death more frequently than other outdoor workers, and why are migrant men at particular risk? While heat death may appear a “natural” phenomenon, this book instead implicates U.S. public policies in its production. Drawing upon nearly a decade of ethnography with the same 15 migrant farmworkers, this book examines the way that U.S. labor and immigration policies place them at particular risk in the fields, even as health and social assistance policies offer them little succor when their bodies begin to decline. Yet this book is not about heat death alone; instead, it uses the phenomenon to shed light on migrant farmworkers’ higher burden of chronic illness and cardiovascular mortality at home as well. The introduction addresses the ethical and logistical challenges posed by conducting longitudinal research with vulnerable populations such as migrant farmworkers and makes the case for an advocacy anthropology.

Ghost Workers

Migrant farmworkers’ exclusion from many labor protections and forms of social assistance forces them to rely on informal and illicit subsistence strategies. One such strategy is “identity loan,” in which a migrant with legal status loans an undocumented migrant the work authorization documents that the latter needs to work. Unlike “identity theft,” then, “identity loan” is the voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange of work authorization documents. This chapter explores why document exchange flourishes in migrant communities, even as labor supervisors take advantage of such loans to reduce their labor costs. Labor supervisors often threaten to falsely position identity “loans” as “thefts,” denying “identity recipients” their right to workers’ compensation insurance when they are injured. Thus the recent trend towards governing immigration through crime—that is, federal and local officials’ reliance on criminal prosecution to deter undocumented migration— hands labor supervisors yet one more tool to create a docile labor force.

Conclusion

What public policy reforms can help prevent heat-related syndemics in California’s fields—the intertwined epidemics of heat illness and cardiovascular disease that often lead to work mortality? This chapter reviews several important reforms to our immigration, labor, health care, and food safety policies that could help ensure the safety and health of those who harvest our food. It concludes with a discussion of acts of “pragmatic solidarity” in which we can all engage—that is, how the lay public and engaged and applied anthropologists can intervene to protect the health of some of the nation’s most “exceptional” workers.

Burning Up

Taking the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon harvesting fields during a historic heat wave in Fresno County, this chapter provides a close-up examination of how the organization of labor crews forces migrant farmworkers to privilege their work about their health. It shows that subcontracting intensifies the labor demands placed on field hands by creating a hierarchy of descending pressures on labor crews. To maximize field hands’ productivity, labor supervisors strategically draw upon a code of male honor to impugn men’s virility when they become ill while harvesting. Meanwhile, migrant men on labor crews discipline each other and themselves as they buy into this code of masculinity. As they work through the early symptoms of heat illness, their silence expedites the transfer of value to their employers even as it increases their risk of heat death.

“Child Neglect:”

Besides “identity loan,” another important illicit subsistence strategy crucial to farmworkers’ survival is relying upon child labor. While many sources have documented the perils of children working in agriculture, few have examined the fact that children must assume others’ identities in order to be hired. Because child labor laws make it illegal for teens to work more than 60 hours a week, no employer will hire a teen “on the books.” Teens, then, routinely disguise themselves as adults in order to work the summer harvest to supplement their parents’ limited incomes. Yet teens’ working loaned identities propels them into a “space of nonexistence” when they are injured, preventing them from receiving the care they need. Indeed, teens’ work in the fields in fact incriminates both their employers and their parents, leading to their or their parents’ denounce-ability, untreated illness, and sometimes death.

Entering Farmwork

This chapter focuses on migrant men’s experiences of farmwork in both their sending countries and in the U.S in order to understand why foreign-born Latino men face higher rates of workplace illness and death, The majority of farmworkers in California come from peasant origins in Mexico and Central America, where they learn that hard work is the foundation of masculinity. Yet U.S. labor and immigration policies intersect with the pressures of working on labor crews to transform migrants farmworkers’ work habitus. Farmworkers’ historic exclusion from the promises of the New Deal makes work one of their only forms of economic security, forcing them to be “exceptional workers.” By delivering an indebted workforce to the fields, U.S. immigration policy only heightens migrants’ dependence on their jobs. Meanwhile, the intensified work pressures created by subcontracting teach migrant men to privilege their work over their health in order to keep their jobs.