UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the experiences of myself and other academic laborers in dialogue with the experiences of our families that labored within the immigrant agricultural economy. This research is particularly timely with the gutting of Diversity Equity, and Inclusion programs across industries and institutions, alongside the exploitative racialized labor that has existed before, during and after. This dissertation uses an intergenerational examination of labor to reflect on how to navigate this current moment in the higher education. Building off previous research, my multi-disciplinary dissertation engages with the history of farmwork and academic labor through the frameworks of critical race theory and labor studies from the theoretical vantage of everyday life. This is put in dialectic with the results of an ongoing neo-liberalization of the University. “Afterlives” emerges as a key concept to track the ongoing salience of the lived and affective experiences of the farmworkers for their children and grandchildren, who are learning to labor as students and educators in and for neoliberal systems of higher education. Through autoethnographic fieldwork, and over 20-hours of semi-structured interviews with fellow academic workers, I propose the “the afterlives of farmwork” as an intergenerational persistence of a relationship to farmwork. With this framing, I examine three questions: How do the children and grandchildren of farmworkers who have found themselves in the academy understand and reflect on their family’s history of labor? How does this reflection come to influence an understanding of their own labor practice within the academy? How does the academic setting work against some of the ideals and cultural practices that manifest from a history of farmwork? The fields were temporary, and our families looked to the academy as an escape for their kin. Where do we look? What is the future we are working towards here?