UC Santa Barbara

In the last three decades, the transnational agricultural corporations of northwestern Mexico have incorporated an idea of corporate social responsibility that is subsided by the Mexican state, legitimized by international organizations, and celebrated by regional elites. On the other hand, racialized migrant farmworkers face captivity, hostility, and exploitation in the agricultural fields. Building on anthropological political economy, Black radical traditions, and abolitionist geographies, I show an ethnographic view of this expansion of contemporary plantations and their state and state-like carceral humanitarianism, arguing how the anti-Indigenous and anti-migrant racism against farmworkers has been at the core of this violent and contested process. Between 2018 and 2023, I conducted “studying-up” activist ethnographic research – assembled with geographic and historical methods — in Hermosillo, Sonora, and the agroindustrial landscapes surrounding this city. My units of analysis were 1) agricultural fields where farmworkers temporarily labor and inhabit and 2) social programs implemented in agricultural fields by government institutions, civil society organizations, and agribusiness foundations. The results of this research are presented in three chapters. “1. Agrarian Capitalist Concentration Camps” explains how hyper-surveillance and camouflaged hostility against migrant farmworkers are essential to the daily operation of these agricultural fields managed by transnational corporations. The first chapter also discusses the agricultural fields’ apparent state order and control, arguing how they are state and state-like landscapes. “2. Social Policies of Agrarian Carceral Geographies” points out how the Mexican state has sought to depoliticize labor conditions, subsidize confinement in agricultural fields, and support the recent agribusiness exportation projects. The second chapter also analyzes the recent implementation of Sonora’s agribusiness social responsibility model and its paternalistic, counterinsurgency, commodifying humanitarianism. “3. The Racial Violence of Agribusiness Fantasies” shows the material culture of daily racism to argue how racialization against farmworkers is a soft violence mutually constituted of the nativist-northern superiority regional ideology. The third chapter also presents the emergency rooms as deadly racism epicenters to point out the open violence that agribusiness has employed, externalized, and sought to normalize. In sum, the dissertation intervenes in discussions of racial capitalism, new plantations, and state formation by analyzing their quotidian and disguised violent intersections.