Milpa and strawberries: food justice, labor, and the place of Mexican immigrant farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, I examine how Mexican immigrants—primarily current and former farmworkers—attempt to create a good life in agriculture by founding their own farm businesses. Former farmworkers’ agricultural projects are more varied than generally recognized, ranging from radical rejections of the conventional system to its enthusiastic replication. Except where nonprofits intervene to provide an alternative set of practices and the resources with which to implement them, longtime farmworkers tend to replicate the systems they knew as workers. These findings complicate food justice claims by emphasizing the importance of labor as a site of positive learning, and by demonstrating that values and preferences originating in a shared set of cultural and hometown experiences—and the aspirations that derive from them—inspire a wide range of practices as structurally constrained immigrant farmers seek to navigate a challenging agricultural economy.