Nomadic Harvesting in the Okanagan Valley: Mexican Workers in the Canadian Food Agribusiness

Abstract

This analysis explores the working and domestic conditions of young Mexicans who lack employment documents in the Canadian food agribusiness. It is a constructivist study oriented to phenomenology whose presentation of results, under an auto-ethnographic method, exposes the researcher’s own understanding as an agricultural worker. The field work was carried out in 2016 and was located in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia. This seeks to expose a labor insertion that has been poorly documented: as clandestine, as itinerant; which, furthermore, is masked behind the context of the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). The findings reveal the formation of migratory routes and ties of solidarity in the face of adversity but, above all, they highlight the precariousness of occupations and the cheap reproduction of human life in an ethnically heterogeneous mercantile circuit characterized by transience, risk and uncertainty.