Mexican Migrant Farmworker Women Organizing Love and Work Across Rural Canada and Mexico

This is a transnational ethnographic study focusing on Mexican women in the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), a temporary visa arrangement that annually employs an average of 40,000 Mexican and Caribbean migrant farmworkers. Migrant women defy patriarchal norms by migrating across borders to work, assuming the role of principal breadwinners in their families, and working in a masculinized labour force. I situate their intimate practices of love, sexuality, and carework in conjunction with the roles of states, the global economy and Canadian agriculture in a practice I term transnational storytelling to complicate the one-dimensional and masculinized lens of migrant labour in the literature and logics of the SAWP. I claim that migrant women not only work in Canadian agriculture but in the management of transnational family economies involving care and emotional labour. Similarly, as migrant domestic workers, Mexican migrant women form part of the global care chain organizing themselves with their non-migrating kin for household survival. This study is rooted in community-engaged scholarship of several years in my role as a community-labour organizer and co-founder of the collective, Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW). Additionally, I used qualitative research methods, primarily convivir, or accompaniment of migrant workers and their families throughout rural Mexico and Canada, to understand their lives. Fundamental to this study is the importance of activist research that assigns critical value to knowledges of not only migrant workers and their non-migrating kin but also of community organizers and community-engaged scholarship in order to collectively build social justice projects that offset transnational casualties experienced through this labour migration. I detail how community-labour organizing is emotional labour as well, involving heartbreak, disempowerment but also resistance. Principally, this study seeks to make visible Mexican women beyond their work in Canadian farms and transnationally in relation to their families in transnational labour chains. It concludes with proposals for directions in organizing and research.Ph.D