The Other Side ofel Otro Lado: Mexican Migrant Women and Labor Flexibility in Canadian Agriculture

Abstract

Global restructuring is dramatically reshaping how women and men around the world relate to agriculture. While gender analysis has been central to research on labor‐intensive, corporate agriculture in the global South, it is rarely invoked in the literature exploring these trends in the North. Moreover, research on gender in agriculture in high‐income countries has tended to focus on women in family farms, despite extensive restructuring of the sector that has increased demands for waged laborers. This article speaks to these limitations by tracing the incorporation of Mexican women into the Canadian agricultural sector as temporary migrant workers. In exploring the lived realities of these women, it reveals workplaces characterized by highly gendered, racialized employment relations and illustrates how temporary migrant worker programs further entrench existing structures of labor segmentation in agriculture. While temporary migrant worker programs have brought greater flexibility into the Canadian agricultural labor market by enabling a particular set of employment practices that rest on gendered, racialized subjectivities, these processes are by no means uncontested by the actors they seek to command.

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