Farm Laborers in the Valley of San Quintín

In his ethnographic study of the San Quintín Valley of Baja California Sur, Made in Baja, Christian Zlolniski examines the economic, social, political, and ecological dynamics affecting the lives and livelihoods of both farmworkers and growers. He relies not only on interviews with both male and female farmworkers, growers, local government officials, and employees of Secretariat of Agriculture conducted between 2005 and 2017 but also on historical data concerning the presence of multinationals in and labor migration to the Valley. The area was pinpointed for agricultural development in the 1930s when the Mexican government extended ejido (collective ownership) rights to Mexicans deported from the United States during the Great Depression. It was not until the 1960s that the first migratory workers, primarily indigenous people from Oaxaca, were recruited into the fields mainly producing chiles and potatoes for U.S. markets. By the 1970s tomatoes were being sent from the Valley to the United States. Large-scale commercial agriculture began in the mid-1980s and was part of the globalization of horticultural products; it also developed in tandem with neoliberal legislation in Mexico that allowed ejidatarios to rent out their lands to U.S. commercial interests while cutting back on aid that had been extended them.

Zlolniski examines, among other cases, that of A.B.C. Farms, headquartered in Sinaloa–a dominant force in export agriculture and closely linked to both Del Monte Foods and the Dole Food Company. Although A.B.C. Farms closed down in 1998 because of protests by workers who burned its buildings, its history is entwined with the history of labor contracting. A.B.C. Farms relied on labor recruiters to transport Mixtec, Triquï, and Zapotec workers from Oaxaca to work first in Sinaloa and then go on to Baja California. Housed in labor camps and forced to work for the duration of their contracts, these workers essentially constituted an indentured labor force. In the 1990s, in one of the technological fixes advanced by growers, most crops were moved into greenhouses or shade houses.

Driscoll—one of the largest berry companies in the world—came to the San Quintín Valley in the early 2000s. Water scarcity in the arid lands of the Valley led the company to introduce desalinization plants, considered one of its “input costs.” It also introduced other technological changes that affected the workers. The replacement of punch cards with electronic work cards meant that workers had no way of checking whether their hours of work had been correctly counted. Contract farming with local farmers, although present since the 1980s, also increased with Driscoll’s presence. Contract farming provided at least two benefits to the transnational companies. First, the companies did not have to acquire more land, and second, the local growers were made responsible for labor recruitment and management. Some independent farmers remained, however, and had the advantage of being able to sell in markets both domestically and internationally rather than to one U.S.-based transnational.

One of Zlolniski’s main concerns is the exploitation of the labor force and its reactions. He underscores that there are layers of labor contractors and subcontractors, recruiting workers from the countryside and most recently among the migratory workers who have settled in the region. He points out that subcontracting allows growers to use the farmworkers as a flexible labor force denied the benefits such as health coverage that Mexican labor laws provide full-time workers. There is, according to Zlolniski, a segmented labor force in which full-time core workers do indeed receive workers’ benefits but the farmworkers provided by contractors do not. Not only are there contractors who work full-time and others part-time to supply labor to the growers, but there are also temporary employment agencies, utilized, for example, by Monsanto. As workers for a temporary employment agency they receive legislated benefits only for the period of employment.

The farmworkers recruited from Oaxaca and other states and settled in the Valley began to resist their exploitation in a variety of ways. Some, looking for better wages, took part in the H-2A program, which recruits temporary workers into the U.S. agricultural fields. Some established independent unions to deal with growers, rejecting the government-sponsored unions such as the Confederation of Mexican Workers, the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers, and the Regional Federation of Farmworkers, which were infamous for setting policies from above without the participation of their members and most often siding with the growers.

Farmworkers also supplemented their wages with informal economic activities, with women running small stores, preparing foodstuffs, taking in sewing, and doing part-time domestic work, while men often took part in construction. Both men and women raised food and poultry on their plots in the colonias they had helped to establish and that made these activities possible. Having a house of one’s own (often self-built with the help of extended-family members) enabled them to escape from the barracks provided by growers or to save on rent and thus avoid some of the exploitative controls while resisting pressures on the wage. The colonias also provided a base for the ongoing kinship, ethnic, and community connections that underlie many of the farmworkers’ protest movements.

Colonia residents were, however, plagued by the lack of running water. In what Zlolniski calls “watercide,” almost all available water sources were directed to the commercial agricultural fields. Sixty-two desalinization plants had been established by 2017, but instead of using seawater they mined the scarce water of the degraded aquifers. Protests over the lack of water in the colonias led to Baja California legislation meant to go into effect in 2019 to provide water for human use with a desalinization plant that would treat ocean water.

Zlolniski ends with suggestions for alleviating the social and economic oppression of the now permanent farm labor force in the Valley of San Quintín, all of them dependent on the presence of strong and independent unions. They include shifting from a piece rate wage to a daily or weekly wage, obligating employers to enroll their workers in the government health care system, shifting to less water-intensive crops, adding funds for the local Secretariat of Agriculture offices in an attempt to level the playing field between transnational agricultural corporations and local farmers, and taxing water used on commercial crops.

A weakness of this otherwise highly informative book is its concentration on the “pull” factors concerning the recruitment by labor contractors of a cheap and flexibilized labor force and not on the “push” factors that led members of that labor force to migrate to the San Quintín Valley.