Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class and Work in Californian Agriculture, Miriam J. Wells (1996)
Cornell University Press
Miriam J. Wells in this book touches upon a topic that is widely unspoken about in advanced capitalist countries' agricultural development: migrant seasonal workers. Based on 14 years of extensive ethnographic fieldwork (in the period 1976-1990), Wells states that this book is an attempt to provide an insight into daily lives of migrant workers as well as an attempt to locate their lives at the junction of social conflict and economic restructuring. The book is organized into 9 chapters, starting with class relations and organization of work. Then Wells provides us with an historical insight of the Californian strawberry industry (Chapter 2) followed by the political construction of farm labor (Chapter 3). Having built the historical context, Wells starts problematizing the issues of local organization of production and growers, wage labor and workplace control, workplace justice, the role of federal and national policies in post-WWII revitalization of the sharecropping and concludes with the legal conflicts, class struggles and political responses to economic change.
Wells’ book opens with a preface on doing ethnography within a particular agricultural industry in 3 valleys of California (Salinas, Pajaro and North Monterrey valleys), which is strawberry production. This area is particularly important as 52% of all farmworkers in the USA are employed in California with 78% of the farmwork done in the state carried out by hired farmworkers. She argues that ethnography into the nature of this industry reveals a particular complexity as “several distinct fields of activity [were] divided along lines of ethnicity, position in the occupational structure and locality of dominant involvement”(pg. xvi). Following in-depth methodological remarks she makes in the preface, Wells provides us with appendices on methodology at the end of 4th and 5th chapters.
As the essence of her argument, Wells argue that class relations are structurally influenced but not structurally determined as they are “hammered out in the interactions between social classes in concrete historical contexts”. Thus what she proposes is that in order to explain the causes and processes of contemporary economic restructuring one must consider 3 influences beyond the structure of capitalism, which she lists as those of politics, industry and the locality. According to her, 3 political forces were mostly instrumental in composing the labor regimes in such contexts: changes in immigration policy, expansion of protective labor legislation into agriculture and the rise of agricultural unionization.
Wells provides us with some interesting arguments regarding the role of immigration, creation of vulnerability and civil rights. She mentions that “ironically the success of civil rights movement […] in increasing the entitlements of US citizens also enhanced the relative vulnerability of noncitizens and increased their utility to employers”(pg. 63). She also related this to the state of “chronically surplus labor market” that forms after the end of Bracero Program (1942-1965), which was a government sponsored program to bring Mexican workers to employ in US agriculture in post-WWII period. She observes that end of this period allowed growers to continue accumulation through using the political vulnerability of undocumented workers to uncut wage demands and prevent consolidation of power. Then she goes on to explain the 3 sites in detail according to 4 main points which are: a) economic organization and class composition, b) employment strategies, c) production relations and d) labor resistance (which seems to be most influenced by James C. Scott’s seminal book, Weapons of the Weak (1985)).
Despite all the achievements, Wells at times goes too much into historical details and micro-ethnography and provides us with a rather short account of how these translate into class struggle. Equally timing of the publication of the book seems to be about a long time after the fieldwork, which keeps us curious about the progression of the labor system in 1990s. Yet this book is an interesting read for those interested in how labor-intensive agriculture is structured in an advanced capitalist state, depending on continuous influx of precarious migrants. Main point of the book though remains to be valid: “In contemporary capitalist agriculture, political forces join – and sometimes outweigh - economic forces in shaping the relations between social classes at work”.
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