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Images of work, images of defiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice through community-based arts

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Abstract

This article addresses a stated need within the food justice movement scholarship to increase the attention paid to the political socialization of hired farm hands in industrial agriculture. In Canada, tackling the problem of farm worker equity has particular social and political contours related to the Canadian horticultural industry’s reliance on a state-managed migrant agricultural labour program designed to fill the sector’s labour market demands. As Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) produces relations of ‘unfree labour’, engaging migrant farm workers in social movement initiatives can be particularly challenging. Critical educational interventions designed to encourage migrant farm workers’ contribution to contemporary social movements in Canada must therefore confront the socio-cultural obstacles that constrict migrant farm workers’ opportunities to participate as full members of their communities. In this article, I argue that social justice oriented approaches to community-based arts can provide a means for increasing the social movement contributions of farm workers employed through managed labour migration schema such as Canada’s SAWP.

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Notes

  1. I provided workshop participants with pseudonyms.

  2. Worker quotes have been translated to English from the original Spanish.

Abbreviations

SAWP:

Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of the three anonymous reviewers during the preparation of this manuscript. The funding was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant No. 752-2011-2626).

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  1. School of Social Work/School of the Arts, McMaster University, Togo Salmon Hall 410, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4M4, Canada

    J. Adam Perry

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Perry, J.A. Images of work, images of defiance: engaging migrant farm worker voice through community-based arts. Agric Hum Values 36, 627–640 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-018-9861-9

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